End of Judah

Last updated on: October 4, 2018 at 10:00 pm By Peter Leithart

Some observations on the final chapter of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36). In the previous chapter, the Chronicler records the death of Josiah, which is effectively the end of the Davidic monarchy. Chapter 36 records the rapid disintegration of the kingdom, the brief reigns of his sons, the subjection of Judah first to Egypt and then to Babylon, finally the decree of Cyrus.

1) The reign of Jehoiakim (36:5-8), Neco’s puppet, is recounted in a chiastic paragraph:

A. He was 25 when he became king, and reigned 11 years.

B. He did evil.

C. Nebuchadnezzar took him to Babel.

C’. Nebuchadnezzar took temple implements to Babel.

B’. His abominations and the things found are recorded.

A’. Jehoiachin takes over.

We know nothing of Jehoiakim’s reign from this, except that he “did evil” and committed abominations. The phrase “things found” (v. 8) indicates a judicial procedure. In Revelation 18, the fall of the harlot city uncovers the blood of the saints that is “found in her.” The fall of Jerusalem is a discovery process that uncovers evidence against the king.

Note that Nebuchadnezzar takes the king and the temple vessels to Babylon. There’s no mention at this point of an exile of people. What goes to Babylon is Yahweh’s house.

2) Zedekiah stiffens his neck and hardens his heart against Jeremiah (36:13), a resistance manifested in his rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar. The Chronicler used the phrase “stiffen neck” in 2 Chronicles 30:3, where it is contrasted with entering the sanctuary to serve God. Worship in and prayer toward the temple are expressions of humility; refusal to serve Yahweh in the temple is a sign of a stiff neck. Of course, the wilderness generation “stiffened their neck”and died in the wilderness.

In Chronicles a “hardened heart” can be a positive thing, denoting courage and strength (1 Chronicles 22:13; 28:20; 2 Chronicles 32:7). To harden one’s heart toward the Lord, though, is to treat Him as an enemy, to prepare to go to war with Him. “Hard heart” is an Egyptian cardiac condition, the condition of Pharaoh during the plagues and before the exodus.

3) William Johnstone (1 & 2 Chronicles, 2.260-1) notes that the Chronicler treats Josiah’s successors as a unit, thus creating “a single, uniform ‘exilic’ generation.” By the Chronicler’s reckoning, this is the 50th generation from Adam: “There are ten generations from Adam, the father of humankind, to Noah, the second father of humankind; there are ten further generations to Abraham, ‘the father of a multitude of nations’ [1 Chron. 1.1- 4, 24-27]. Israel’s history has been presented in terms of fifteen generations from Abraham to Solomon [1 Chron. 1.34; 2.1, 4-5, 9-12, 15; 3.5], the realization in monarchic terms of the ideal of Israel’s existence, and a further fifteen from Rehoboam to Josiah [2 Chron. 10.1-35.24], the end of the monarchy. . . . Given that Abraham figures twice in these calculations, there are thus 49 generations from Adam to Josiah.”

Thus, “Cyrus’s edict thus represents the proclamation of jubilee in the fiftieth generation. C accounts for the exile in terms of ma’al (2 Chron. 36.14) and of the rest which the land requires because of the sabbaths that it has been denied during Israel’s occupancy of the land (2 Chron. 36.21), in the manner of Lev. 26.40,43. Likewise, after the manner of Lev. 25.8-11, he interprets the Return from exile in terms of the proclamation of jubilee in the fiftieth year.”

Our Sexual Class War

Last updated on: October 3, 2018 at 8:52 pm By Peter Leithart

R. R. Reno offers an incisive analysis of the “rage politics” surrounding the Kavanaugh confirmation. He suggests that it’s class rage, focused on sex. That’s not a surprise, since the sexual revolution is by far the most enduring legacy of the social revolution at the middle of the last century.

The rage against Kavanaugh is, he speculates, a class rage, proportionate to socio-economic status: “It is an elite rage of law professors and management consultants. It’s the rage of the powerful, which is always more dangerous than the rage of the downtrodden. It finds articulate, well-placed leaders who can draw upon fully theorized narratives of oppression. They position themselves to speak for all who resent exclusion or exploitation, actual or perceived. They draw upon an intersectionality of rage.”

It’s also a mirror of the rage politics that fueled Trump’s political ascent. For that reason, stoking up rage is a risky strategy for the Democratic party: “the rage on display during the Kavanaugh hearings will not be easy to contain. It is fueling Leftist populism, which is on the rise. It highlights the Left’s own destabilizing politics of rage and destruction.”

And it’s a rage that focuses resentment of those who have been left out, excluded, oppressed: “Over the last two generations, social status has come to be defined more and more narrowly in terms of elite education, professional status, and wealth. These are zones of intense competition. Something similar has happened in the once heavily regulated arena of male-female relations. These days, the male-female dance is riven by fears of exploitation, betrayal—and, now, retribution. In this context, Ford speaks for the many, for those who feel they’ve been cheated, sidelined, used, ignored, insulted, excluded, and otherwise mistreated by the few who, like Kavanaugh, seem to sail through life unscathed.”

In a different key, Michael Hanby warns about the dangers of pastoral bridge-building to the LGBT community. Compassionate as it aims to be, this effort “obscures what is most fundamentally at stake for the human future in the question of sexual ‘identity’: the truth of the humanum and the human archetypes by which we order our lives.” In short, “We seem to have lost our capacity to think and speak about ‘LGBT identity’ without capitulating to it.”

It’s fiendishly easy to be capitulate, without quite knowing it. Hanby, for instance, analyzes the concept of a “heterosexual orientation.” To treat this “as one of two species of the genus sexuality, is already ‘gay,’ since both ‘species’ presuppose that sexual desire and identity are only arbitrarily related to a meaningless biological substrate. . . . if ‘gender,’ like ‘orientation,’ is merely a function of a self-appropriated identity distinct from one’s sexually differentiated body (now relegated to the realm of ‘mere biology’), then in fact there is no longer any such thing as man or woman as heretofore understood. We are all transgender now, even if gender and sexual identity accidentally coincide in the great majority of instances.”

Hanby cites John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s opposition to this trend, and is astonished that their warnings should be forgotten so quickly. The Catholic Church, he says, doesn’t see what is at stake. They have forgotten Benedict’s prophetic words late in his Papacy: “Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. . . . The defense of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.”

Countdown

Last updated on: October 2, 2018 at 7:14 pm By Peter Leithart

The Chronicler’s account of Josiah’s reign is glowingly positive. He seeks Yahweh, purges idolatry from Jerusalem, Judah, and the temple, listens to the word of the Lord, leads a covenant renewal, and throw an unprecedented Passover celebration.

But there’s a subtle counter-melody running along behind the surface song of triumph. It tells the story of Josiah’s reign as a recapitulation of the history of Israel – in reverse.

Consider:

1) Josiah purges the land of idolatry (2 Chronicles 34:1-7). It’s a repetition of the conquest, when Joshua smashed altars and dismantled shrines throughout the land. Josiah is a Moses pulverizing Asherim as Moses pulverized the golden calf (cf. Exodus 32).

2) In his 18th year, Josiah attends to repairs of the house (34:8-13). He is imitating earlier kings, but also following the lead of Moses, who built the original sanctuary at the foot of Sinai.

3) In that same year, Hilkiah comes out of the temple with a book of Torah (34:14-28). One is reminded of Moses ascending into the cloud at Sinai (the cloud that also filled the temple), and emerging with the tablets of the Law and the book of the covenant.

4) Warned by Huldah about Judah’s coming doom, Josiah leads Israel in covenant renewal (34:19-33). Israel pledges to walk in Yahweh’s commandments and statutes, as they did at the foot of Sinai after Moses brought the law down from the mountain (Exodus 24:7).

#2-4 recapitulate the events of Sinai, but roughly backwards. Instead of the Mosaic sequence (law delivered and covenant commitment, following by the building of the tabernacle), we find a counter-Mosaic sequence (house repaired, then law delivered and covenant commitment).

5) Still in the 18th year, Josiah organizes a Passover in Jerusalem (35:1-19). Passover, of course, commemorates Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. In Exodus, it occurs before Israel comes to Sinai; in 2 Chronicles 34-35, Judah celebrates Passover after the Sinai-like events of the previous chapter.

6) Passover was the climax of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, but Josiah’s Passover leads to a new enslavement to Egypt, as Josiah dies in battle with Pharaoh Neco (35:20-27; see my discuss here), and Judah becomes, for a time, a client state of Egypt (36:1-4).

In short, instead of this sequence: Egyptian slavery–>Passover–>Sinai covenant–>conquest, Josiah’s reign is organized as conquest–>covenant renewal–>Passover–>Egyptian slavery.

When Josiah dies, Judah is not only back where they were at the beginning of the kingdom (note parallels between Josiah’s death and Saul’s, 1 Chronicles 10). They’ve turned back the clock all the way to the beginning, all the way past exodus and Passover, back to Egypt.

This is the climax of a recurring theme in 1 Chronicles, in which Judah’s unfaithfulness throws time into reverse (see here). Josiah’s reign looks like an upswing, but the basso continuo is the opposite, a countdown to exile.

Adam as Israel

Last updated on: September 27, 2018 at 8:08 pm By Peter Leithart

I expressed some disagreements and some commendations for Seth Postell’s Adam as Israel a few days ago. Here I sum up some more of Postell’s insights.

1) He takes the description of the serpent in 3:1 as a positive description: He is “more prudent” (Heb. ‘arom) than all the beasts. that contrasts to the eventual judgment on the serpent, “more cursed than all the creatures of the field” (3:14). Postell observes, “God did not make a ‘crafty’ creature; he made a wise creature” (123). If so, then the fall of Genesis 3 isn’t merely the fall of man but the fall of the serpent. That is exactly right.

2) He offers this lengthy quotation Christophe Nihan’s From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch, about the chiastic symmetry of the Pentateuch: “On the level of content, it was to be noted that there are several parallels between the books of Genesis and Deuteronomy on the one hand and of Exodus and Numbers on the other; obviously, these four books were intended by the Torah’s editors to form a twofold frame around Leviticus. Genesis and Deuteronomy are both closed by a blessing of the 12 tribes (Gen 49//Deut 33) followed by the death of the main character who pronounced the blessing (Jacob and Moses respectively) and a notice of his burial (Gen 50; Deut 34). Besides, the parallel between Jacob and Moses is further highlighted by a series of devices. Exodus and Numbers similarly exemplify several parallels, particularly in the section on the wilderness wanderings and the rebellions of the Israelites, which stands at the center of both compositions. Further, although the wilderness sojourn in Numbers is considerably more developed, virtually all the elements of the wilderness wandering of Exodus have a parallel in Numbers 20-21. The two sections also share some unique language, such as the motifs of the community’s ‘murmurs’ against Moses and Yahweh . . . , the accusations addressed to Moses of letting the community die in the desert . . . , the nostalgia for Egypt expressed by the Israelites. . . . There are also obvious parallels between the so-called ‘legal’ sections of the two books” (quoted 143-4).

Postell shores up this point by noting parallels between the story of fall and exile from Eden and the prophecy of exile in the final chapters of Deuteronomy, which form a “pessimistic” inclusio around the Pentateuch (136-8). He also spells out the parallels between Jacob and Moses, and their structural role in the organization of the Pentateuch (145-7). In Postell’s view, Jacob and Moses embody the future-oriented faith of Israel: Both men must look beyond the exile, knowing full well that God’s purposes for his people will come to fruition in ‘the last days,'” a hope focused on the coming of a conquering king from Judah (Genesis 49:8-12; Deuteronomy 33:7), a king who will fulfill the promise at the beginning of the Pentateuch (Genesis 3:15).

3) In his final chapter, Postell explores how Genesis 1-3 introduces not only the themes of the Pentateuch, but the aims of the Tanakh as a whole. In one part of his analysis, he notes the links between the “seams” of the canon – the opening of Joshua (Former Prophets) and of the Psalms (which open the Writings). Psalms 1-2 speak of a wise man who studies Torah day and night, a king who conquers the raging nations. These Psalms are glosses on Joshua 1:8, where Joshua is commanded to keep the Torah before him as he goes out to conquer the Canaanites (152-3). We can thus line up the Seed promise of Genesis 3 that opens the Pentateuch with Joshua and the opening Psalms.

4) Another aspect of Postell’s analysis of the canon is an examination of the shape of Chronicles, the final book of the Hebrew canon. He quotes Hendrik Koorevaar at length: “The books that precede Chronicles start with Genesis and end with Ezra-Nehemiah. By also starting with Adam and ending with Cyrus’s edict, the Chronicler picks up introductorily the beginning of the first book of the canon (Genesis) and concludes with the beginning of the last book of the canon (Ezra-Nehemiah). Thereby it is expressed that he overviews the entire preceding Old Testament, and is thinking from that perspective. . . . Israel is rooted to the world in the beginning of the book, into humanity, in Adam with his mandate to rule over the whole world. At the end of the book, Israel is finally weaved into all the kingdoms of the earth, over which YHWH has given Cyrus dominion. . . . The history of Israel is fixed between the non-Israelite and universal ruler, Adam, and the non-Israelite and world ruler, Cyrus. Such a frame makes it clear that Chronicles did not pursue the goal of understanding Israel with its Davidic king and its temple as the final goal; rather both are understood as the center. Israel as the people of Yahweh, with David and the Temple, has a function of universal significance, all of humanity is its horizon” (quoted 160-1).

That’s essentially the premise of my work on Chronicles, due to be published sometime in 2019.

Commodification and Community

Last updated on: September 25, 2018 at 2:02 am By Peter Leithart

Commodification is a three step dance, according to John McKnight and Peter Block (Abundant Community). It begins by identifying a human condition; it redescribes the condition as a problem that can be fixed; and then it sells the fix (39).

The fix gets reduced to elements and then “curricularized” so that any schmo can do it, and through curricularization comes professionalization.

This process ends up “mystifying” the solution, sequestering it off into private space where the pros can handle it.

McKnight and Block write, “When we have troubles, we take them to the professional. The professional therapist or counselor husbands the personal and cloaks it in confidentiality in the name of care. The personal no longer resides in community but in the professional’s office. This makes private and mysterious what is most personal” (39-40).

In a healthy community, secrets are shared: “Secrets are the raw materials for a good community” (40). You confide personal problems to an uncle or aunt, seek help for an unruly child from old family friends, look to neighbors to get you through a patch of unemployment.

Once personal problems are privatized, communities weaken: “Privacy is the enemy of community because it takes our personal secrets from our neighbors and each other” (40).

The very process of shunting off secrets to professionals erodes a community’s confidence in its ability to help: “If people come to me and they want to talk about a problem, I listen with total sympathy. When they are done, what I think and almost say is, ‘God, that is awful.’ Because I have come to believe I don’t know what to do about it” (40).

Someone suffers a tragedy; they head to the therapist. What does the therapist do? “All the professional does in the face of tragedy is listen with compassion. If you listened to your daughter, or brother-in-law, or neighbor speak of a secret sorrow and said, ‘That is tragic,’ it would be enough. That is all you can do with tragedy.” Commodification and professionalization make us think that there’s got to be more: “we think it is the pro who says it best” (40).

What the authors call “abundant community,” which includes functioning families, knows how to handle deviance, sorrow, addictions, and so on. Professionalization is self-fulfilling: A community convinced of its incompetence will transfer the tasks to schools or psychiatrists, and ask “professionals to do what we as family and community are now unable to do” (41).

This is powerful stuff, but too rosy. Secrets shared in a community can percolate as gossip and undermine community cohesion.

Plus, the authors bundle all sorts of communities into one category of “community” or “abundant community.” But there is a difference between a community held together by place or blood, and one held together by the Spirit of Jesus. Not that the church is an ideal community by any means, but it has sources of cohesion, resources of repair and forgiveness, that are not generally available.

Adam and Israel

Last updated on: September 24, 2018 at 11:24 pm By Peter Leithart

I don’t agree with Seth Postell’s fundamental thesis in Adam as Israel. He states the thesis as follows: “when understood as the introduction to the Torah and the Tanakh as a whole, Genesis 1-3 intentionally foreshadows Israel’s failure to keep the Sinai Covenant as well as their exile from the Promised Land in order to point the reader to a future work of God in the ‘last days'” (3).

Adam, like Israel later, fails to “conquer” the serpent, and so is expelled from his land. That foreshadows Israel’s future exile that, by the end of the Pentateuch, becomes a certainty. This inclusio of pessimism doesn’t encourage Israel to keep covenant; rather, “it forthrightly admits that Israel did not (and will not) keep it, and therefore prepares the reader to wait expectantly in exile for a new work of God in the last days” (4).

Postell neatly supports this by noting that re’shiyt (beginning) and ‘achriyt (the after-things) both appear in the poetic passages that provide structural pillars for the Pentateuch (Genesis 49; Numbers 24; Deuteronomy 31-33; 83, fn 29). Postell is also undoubtedly correct that the contours of the story of Genesis 1-3 repeat later in the Pentateuch.

What’s to disagree with? For starters, Postell assumes that the first readers of Genesis and the Pentateuch are in exile. I think the first readers were much earlier; the first readers of the books of Moses lived in the time of Moses or shortly thereafter. That point about dating isn’t trivial; it has to do with the question of the Bible’s master story. For Postell, Israel’s story contextualizes Genesis 1-3; I suggest on the contrary that Genesis 1-3 contextualizes Israel’s history.

An example of Postell’s back-to-front reading (97, fn 87): He cites Jeremiah 4 in connection with the “formless and empty” of Genesis 1:2. He sees this as “Jeremiah’s interpretation of the creation account,” an interpretation that “identifies the land in Gen 1 as the garden in Gen 2.” Since the “absence of light in [Jer 4:23] is not the absence of the sun, but the darkness of a hopeless condition,” this means that “Gen 1:3 is also not describing the absence of the sun, but the state of a gloomy proto-exilic land.”

I think the thrust of Jeremiah 4 is different. He is describing the exilic condition of the land by allusions to Genesis 1. That is, exile is a species of decreation, a return to the formless void and darkness of the original earth. He’s not interpreting Genesis 1; he’s interpreting his own times through the categories and images of Genesis 1.

I disagree too with some of Postell’s specific arguments, such as his claim that the Garden of Eden is typologically, if not actually, identified with the land of promise (92). That identification rests on a failure, I think, to recognize the distinctions made in the early chapters of Genesis.

For instance, Postell (rightly, I think) believes that Genesis 1:1 describes a distinct initial act of creation and Genesis 1:2 as the consequence of that initial act (84-5). But he thinks this view has some problems. if, as Postell believes, “heaven and earth” in 1:1 is a merism for a finished creation, then it seems to contradict 1:2, where one part of the cosmos is unfinished, formless and void.

Postell cites the late John Sailhamer’s view that ‘eretz (earth/land) in 1:2 “does not refer to the entire universe (world), but to a specific place in the world, namely the land that is later promised to Abraham and his descendants” (87). Sailhamer argues, among other things, that the reference to “land” in 1:2 prepares for the description of the Garden in Genesis 2. Further, he claims that the “land” is contrasted to the east/Babylon throughout Genesis 1-11; so also in 1:2, it alludes to the Promised land that is the polar opposite of Babylon.

This interpretation, though, rests on a conflation of zones that Genesis 1-2 intends to distinguish. “Heaven and earth” need not be a merism, and the fact that 1:2 says that the earth is formless and empty argues against the meristic reading. Rather, 1:1 indicates that God created two distinct zones, heaven and earth; beginning with 1:2, the focus is on what God does with the earth. From 1:3 on, God forms and fills the area that 1:2 identifies as earth.

Further, the Garden isn’t the same as the land. The Garden exists within the land of Eden. Postell goes further than Sailhamer in the erroneous identification of the land and the Garden, claiming that 2:10-14 lay out “a detailed explanation of the boundaries of the Garden of Eden” (89).

No. These verses describe the destination of the rivers that flow from the land through the Garden and then out to other lands. The river waters the garden, and “from there it divided and became four rivers” (Genesis 2:10). The links between Genesis 2:10-14 and later descriptions of the boundaries of the promised land are true and important; but they aren’t the boundaries of the Garden. The Garden is the original sanctuary, not the original of the land. (Postell is aware of the parallels of Garden and sanctuary (112-3), but doesn’t work this insight through consistently.)

So far my disagreements. There are also some excellent things in Postell’s book.

He offers a careful comparison of Genesis 2-3 with Genesis 15-16: “in both passages the central figure undergoes a deep and divinely induced slumber. . . . both passages provide homogenous geographic information regarding the boundaries of a divinely provided land [see my reservations above] . . . while Genesis 2 does not mention a covenant as does Genesis 15, it is clearly covenantal in nature” (91). Abram’s decision to have a son with Hagar is a fall scene – Sarai speaks as Even did; Abram listens to his wife, as Adam did; Sarai gives the forbidden fruit to her husband, as Eve “gave some to her husband” (93).

Postell also notes that Genesis 15 fits into a repetitive pattern that stretches throughout the Pentateuch. The related passages are Exodus 2-4, Exodus 18-24, and Numbers 10-21. He elaborates, “In each passage there is an appearance of a Gentile priest who blesses an individual and serves ‘bread’ . . . Following the appearance of a Gentile priest there is a theophany in fire . . . . In each of these passages, ‘to believe’ plays a primary role” (91, fn 67).

Given the links between Genesis 2-3 and Genesis 15-16, we can see each of these passages through the lens of Eden. And we can no doubt extend the parallels – for instance, by noting parallels between Exodus 25-31 and the formation of the garden, followed by the fall at the golden calf and threat of permanent exile in the wilderness.

Great Awokening

Last updated on: September 22, 2018 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Bo and Ben Winegard analyze today’s “Great Awokening” as a religious movement. They deploy the categories of sacredness and purity, priestly privilege, sin, atonement, and absolution to explain “Wokeness” as a religious movement and a status system.

They admit to that “many of their moral concerns are entirely legitimate,” but admit to skepticism about some claims about contemporary American culture. It doesn’t matter to the analysis, though. They insist that “Even if its claims were entirely true, one could still fruitfully approach it from a status systems’ perspective.” The problem is that the legitimate moral concerns will be overwhelmed by the status system.

In sum., Wokeness is “a status system that functions predominantly to distinguish white elites from the white masses (whom we will call hoi polloi).” It provides “rich signalling vocabulary for traits and possessions such as education, intelligence, openness, leisure, wealth, and cosmopolitanism, all of which educated elites value.”

Preachers in the Great Awokening “obtain status because they (a) signal the possession of desired traits and (b) promulgate a powerful narrative that legitimizes the status disparity between white elites and hoi polloi.” Wokeness is a Pelagian faith. The Woke “are morally righteous and therefore deserve status, whereas hoi polloi are morally backward and deserve obloquy and derision.”

The authors summarize the Woke faith in five propositions:

1)All demographic groups are roughly biologically the same (which we have termed cosmic egalitarianism elsewhere).

2) Bigotry is pervasive.

3) Almost all disparities among demographic groups are caused by bigotry.

4) If we all work really hard, we can create a more just, multicultural society.

5) Diversity is almost always a good thing.

Number 2 is key, a universal explanation: If you think that disparities might have causes other than bigotry, you’re a bigot; if you think that there might be downsides to certain kinds of diversity, you’re a bigot; if you think that some humans are biologically male and others biologically female, or study brain differences between the sexes, you’re a bigot. Just think of the general reaction to Jordan Peterson, and you get the picture.

These tenets are linked to a “sacred narrative” about the victimization of certain groups: “Members of these groups are to be considered the innocent victims of an oppressive and iniquitous patriarchy. Whites, on the other hand, are born burdened with the original sin of privilege, and are therefore presumptively complicit in the system unless they declare fidelity to Wokeness.” This lends a “Manichean” dimension to Woke religion.

Belonging is signaled by language: “Those who preach its gospel often use bizarre concepts imported from postmodern theorists, infamous for their impenetrable prose. Terms such as ‘hegemonic,’ ‘intersectional,’ ‘phallocentric,’ and ‘queerphobe’ are regularly deployed, intimidating the uninitiated and impressing those who wish, in the future, to signal their erudition to fawning fans.” This jargon confers status because it doesn’t come easily. One has to learn the lingo, and those who do earn status.

Understanding Wokeness as a status system explains some of the oddities of the movement. Challenges to the tenets of Wokeness aren’t taken as invitations to debate, but as occasions for denunciation and dismissal. Some Woke tactics seem to work against the ostensible goal of awokening others. Why denounce instead of trying to persuade? Why send status signals instead of working quietly to improve the lives of victims of injustice?

One reason i that “those who are Woke don’t really want to inhabit an entirely Woke world without the bigoted masses.” Manicheans thrive on opposition. Without the dark side, there’s no opportunity for light. The Woke “want to occupy a world of good and evil, of the just and the wicked, of the high status and the low status, of the elite and hoi polloi.”

Treating Woke vocabulary as a quasi-sacrament of identity and inclusion also helps explain the trajectory of accusations: “the more ridiculous the accusation, the better the signal.” Wokeness is marked by “concept creep, in which those vying for status among the Woke compete to call out vanishingly trivial offenses and imagined slights as intolerable manifestations of racism, sexism, and patriarchal oppression.”

This trajectory is explicable as a refinement of the status system. The more trivial the infraction, the more refined and sensitive the accuser. The more outlandish the claim, the more the claimant shows his status as hyper-Woke: “Anybody can believe something that is true. It takes no effort, no talent, and no real commitment. But to believe something that is transparently ridiculous, such as that men and women are biologically the same, and to assert such a belief with force and conviction requires singular devotion to a coalition and to its sacred narrative.”

Preachers of Wokeness, pundits and academics, function as a priesthood, “who guard its doctrines from dissent, who praise the faithful, and who call for the righteous punishment of heretics and sinners.” They also provide absolution for both the hoi polloi, who feel guilty for being morally inferior to elites, and the elites, who may doubt their qualifications for being among the righteous.

Preachers absolve both “by a powerful legitimizing narrative, a narrative that explains why those on the top deserve their status while those on the bottom deserve their rather less charmed lives and, in fact, should be pleased simply to defer to their superiors.” Elites are assured they are more righteous; the hoi polloi are assured that they are right where they belong, given their benighted views.

The Great Awokening has a gospel of sorts, a meritocratic good news that invites sinners to “obtain status by achieving moral purity, by repenting their sins, castigating their former beliefs, and renouncing their own interests.”

The Social, Wholes, and Structuralism

Last updated on: September 18, 2018 at 11:20 pm By Peter Leithart

In a chapter in The Social in Question, Bruno Latour summarizes the work of 19^th-century sociology Gabriel Tarde. Latour is particularly interested in the anti-structuralist import of Tarde’s social metaphysics and anthropology.

Tarde writes, for instance, “In general, there is more logic in a sentence than in a talk, in a talk than in a sequence or group of talks; there is more logic in a special ritual than in a whole credo; in an article of law than in a whole code of laws, in a specific scientific theory than in the whole body of a science; there is more logic in each piece of work executed by an artisan than in the totality of his behaviour.”

Applied to language, this undoes the fundamental structuralist duality of parole and langue. Tarde makes this point by observing that “People who speak, all with different accents, intonations, pitches, voices, gestures: here is the social element, the true chaos of discordant heterogeineities. But on the long run, from this confusing Babel, a few general habits will be outlined which can be formulated in grammatical laws.”

There is, Latour points out, no “structure beyond or beneath speech acts.” Rather, “Tarde imagines a kind of sociolinguistics, of pragmatics absolutely opposite, in which the structure is only one of the simplified, routinized, repetitive element of one of the locutors who has managed to include his or her local tradition into the general idiom.”

Tarde doesn’t demean standardization, but the effect of standardization is simply to enable speakers to generate new complexities. Tarde again: “In turn, those [grammatical laws] since they allow many more locutors to speak together, will help them to find a specific turn of phrase: yet another kind of discordances. And those laws will succeed all the more so in diversifying the minds that they will have been better fixed and more uniform.”

As Latour exclaims, “Macro features are so provisional and have so little ability to rule over the occurrences that they only manage to serve as an occasion for more differences to be generated! Instead of a structure of language acting through our speech acts, the more structural elements float around in the shape of grammars, dictionary, exemplars, the more they will allow speech acts to differ from one another!”

Further, for Tarde, the standardized level isn’t bigger or broader than the specific locutions: “there are no levels,” Latour says. Rather, the standardization is a simplified version of one element of the group. In Tarde’s words, “Let’s insist on this crucial truth: we are led to it when we remark that, in each of those vast regular mechanisms —the social, the vital, the stellar, the molecular— all the internal revolts that succeed in breaking them are provoked by an analogous condition: their components, soldiers of those various regiments, provisional incarnations of their laws, pertain to them by one side only, but through the other sides, they escape from the world they constitute. This world would not exist without them; but they would subsist without it. The attributes each element owes to its incorporation in its regiment do not form its entire nature; it has other leanings, other instincts coming from previous enrolments; and some which are coming from its own store, from its own proper substance, to fight against the collective power, of which it is a part, but which is only an artificial being, made only of sides and facades of beings.”

Latour glosses this with another exclamation: “Extraordinary picture of a social order constantly threatened by immediate decomposition because no component is fully part of it. Every monad overspills the artificial being of any ‘superior’ order, having lent for allowing its existence only a tiny part, a facade of itself! You can enrol some sides of the monads, but you can never dominate them. Revolt, resistance, break down, conspiracy, alternative is everywhere. . . . The social is not the whole, but a part, and a fragile one at that!”

Pluralism, Fundamentalism, Abortion

Last updated on: September 9, 2018 at 1:26 am By Peter Leithart

Some typically sharp observations from a 1995 essay by Robert Jenson (Either/Or).

First, on pluralism and the ideology of pluralism.

What’s new in the modern age isn’t the reality of competing faiths: “The presence of contrary faiths and practices within a society often causes formidable problems, as America now experiences with unwonted intensity but as has always been the case. With due respect to some pop theologians, none of this is newly discovered: Isaiah or St. Paul knew more about the theory and practice of a religiously and ideologically plural world than do all of the seminary and religion faculties of California” (25).

Even the ideology of pluralism isn’t new, but arises in the imperial age of late antiquity. As an ideology, pluralism is “a rule for deciding what ideas or practices, besides pluralism itself, are to be approved. Tolerable ideas and practices are those that lead us unreservedly to applaud the fact of pluralism, and good ones are those that actively promote the proliferation of pluralism both factual and ideological.”

The ironic effect of this rule is that it silences many people: “The more pluralist the ideology that rules, the less are certain convictions admitted to the public arena.” This is widely recognized. Jenson is more interested in probing what sorts of speech is excluded as offensive: “So far as my observation reaches, the silenced are almost always those who if they spoke would say something characteristically Jewish or Christian or Islamic. Try, for example, arguing that unrestricted permission to abort the unborn is a social and political evil at a party in Manhattan or a college town in Minnesota. Your arguments will not be rebutted; heads will merely be turned as from one who has audibly broken wind. If, on the other hand, you argue what is in fact the conventional opinion, you will be praised for courage and compassion” (26).

Then, on fundamentalism.

Jenson points out that the term has a recognizable meaning when used of early 20th-century American Protestants. Applied to Jews, the term has to stretch beyond normal bonds; when applied to Islam, he says, the real meaning of the term comes into focus:

“whatever would an Islamic fundamentalist be — in the commentaries and news releases the very worst and most prevalent kind? Islam has a rigorously simple message: ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.’ How are fundamentals and nonfundamentals to be distinguished here? Talk of Islamic fundamentalism finally betrays what the speakers are doing. The phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ turns out, on inspection of its use, to denote Muslims who discountenance the existence of a society or state independent of God’s will, who find God’s will stated in Quran and Sharia, and who therefore think that the state should conform society to Quran and Sharia. But this is the definition simply of a Muslim; ‘Islam’ means universal individual and collective submission to God’s will” (28).

“Fundamentalist Muslims” are just “followers of the Prophet who have not been captured by the cultural imperialism of the modern West, or are trying to recover from such captivity, and who therefore do not approve a wall between church and state, absolute individual autonomy, and other Western Enlightenment principles.” If pluralism were truly pluralistic, “were not pluralist ideology what it hiddenly is, pluralists would love them for their differences from us” (28).

“Fundamentalism” is a tool of the ideology of pluralism, a label attached to those deemed irrational and socially disruptive, who are deemed to be violate the rules of pluralist engagement.

Jenson highlights the astounding theological claim made by pro-choice advocates, and now enshrined in Supreme Court jurisprudence:

“Pro-life attempts to call their opponents pro-abortionists, as if being pro-abortion were worse than being pro-choice, are misguided. The decision whether or not to abort is indeed a choice uniquely important for the pregnant woman; and merely therefore it must, according to the devisers and defenders of present law, be in her individual sole discretion. That is the whole and singular argument and position, and no other considerations are allowed to count against its force. What is in fact at stake for those who demand a right to abort at will is the understanding and practice of individual choice itself as the ultimate value of life, superseding even justice and even justice in a lethal matter, if it comes to that.”

This reaches almost self-parody in Planned Parenhood v. Casey, in Kennedy’s famous mystical statement that liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Jenson finds the language strangely familiar: Believers will “recognize this supposed liberty to define existence, meaning, the universe, and human life as the freedom these theologies ascribe uniquely to their God. It is in fact a freedom of which no one ever dreamed apart from the influence of these theologies. According to the Abrahamic religions, there is indeed one whose personhood is defined by such liberty — and only one” (32).

In short, “Jews and Christians and Muslims stipulate the difference between God and what is not God by recognizing a particular mode of freedom in God and denying it to all else; the National Organization for Women and its allies claim explicitly and precisely that freedom for themselves, and the court has now written that claim into our law. What is asserted by ‘pro-choice’ ideologists and the court is straightforwardly a theology, one of an explicitly anti-biblical sort” (32).

Finally, Jenson says that behind the so-called culture war is the real war, which is about modernity’s rejection of the God of Abraham: “the swirl of cultural storms has a cyclonic center: the memory of cultural authority exercised by the biblical God, the God of Abraham. We are at war about culture just insofar as culture is the body of religion. It has finally come to this: After centuries of love-hate between biblical religion and the Western civilization it has enabled and regularly perturbs, we are increasingly pressed to be either for the Lord or against him” (24).

The issue in our cultural battles is a theological one: Do we or do we not acknowledge that there is a God who has His own thoughts, makes His own plans and choices, independently of us, a God who is not a projection, neither a dream nor a nightmare, but a living, jealous God with whom we must reckon.

Searching for Richard III

Last updated on: September 9, 2018 at 12:48 am By Peter Leithart

Some notes from an upcoming lecture on Richard III, drawn from Thomas Costain’s popualr history, Last Plantagenet, with additional details from Peter Saccio, Shakespeare’s English Kings.

Shakespeare’s first tetralogy covers an especially tumultuous period in England’s history. Henry VI’s reign was split into two parts. His armies were defeated at Towton by Edward of York, son of Richard, in the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Henry didn’t even show up to the battle; it was Palm Sunday and he spent the day in prayer.

Edward became Edward IV. The first part of his reign was unsettled, largely because of the machinations of the Earl of Warwick, known as the “Kingmaker.” Edward got married secretly to Elizabeth Woodville, disrupting Warwick’s plans for a marriage to a French princess. Warwick had helped Edward gain the throne, but he turned against him and began siding with Margaret, Henry VI”s energetic, unforgiving, vengeful wife.

Margaret’s son, Edward the Prince of Wales, joined with Margaret to restore Henry VI to the throne, assisted by Warwick. Edward the Prince had married Anne Neville, Warwick’s daughter, so Warwick’s support for Edward was also advancing the ambitions of his own house.

Edward was suppressing an uprising in the north when Warwick invaded from France; it was a distraction set up to get him out of the way. Edward saw that he had little hope of defending his throne and he fled to Holland. Henry VI, who had been in the Tower, was restored to the throne.

It lasted only five months. Edward returned to England, joined by his brother Richard (Richard III) and by Clarence, who had for a while defected to Warwick. During the battle of Barnet, Warwick was killed and Henry VI was returned to the Tower.

Margaret was convinced to keep fighting, and the Lancastrian forces met Edward at Tewkesbury. Prince Edward was killed and Margaret captured. Richard did not kill Edward, as Shakespeare says. Henry VI died shortly after Edward got to London, whether by natural causes or by assassination is unknown. Margaret was sent back to France, where she remained for the rest of her life (Shakespeare brings her back to England for his play).

During Edward’s reign, his brother Clarence was a nuisance, and eventually executed. Perhaps he was executed by being drowned in a vat of malmsey, as Shakespeare describes, but Richard wasn’t responsible for his death. Edward himself was the chief witness against his brother at his trial.

When Edward died, one of his sons should have taken the throne. There were two, Edward and Richard, and the former was crowned Edward V. He was still a boy, and so Richard, who had spent the reign of Edward IV governing in the north, became Lord Protector. But shortly after Edward and then his sons were declared to be bastards, and therefore unfit to take the throne. Richard of York became Richard III. The boys were sent to the Tower and disappeared forever. Their death is one of the great mysteries of English history.

Shakespeare depicts Richard’s ascent to the throne as the product of naked ambition and superhuman cunning. That doesn’t fit what we know about Richard, who was content to serve his brother throughout his reign. Some have suggested that he acted out of patriotic duty, knowing that the reign of a minor would likely spark another civil war. Others have suggested that he had gotten a taste of rule, and resented being passed over. Whether he was responsible for the deaths of the princes is still debated, though it seems most likely that he had some hand in the business.