Postmodern Times

Last updated on: June 21, 2018 at 9:56 pm By Peter Leithart

In his contribution to The Future of Hope, John Milbank offers a description of postmodernity and suggests ways for the church to respond. Postmodernism may be a thing of the past; we’re supposed to be in post-postmodernity nowadays. Still, much of what Milbank describes is still with us, and some of it is more intensely with us than when Milbank wrote.

In the “postmodern times in which we live, there is no longer any easy distinction to be made between nature and culture, private interior and public exterior, hierarchical summit and material depth; nor between idea and thing, message and means, production and exchange, product and delivery, the state and the market, humans and animals, humans and machines, image and reality; nor between beginning, middle, and end. Everything is made to run into everything else; everything gets blended, undone, and then re-blended. . . . There are no longer any clear centers of control, and this means that new weight is given to plurality and the proliferation of difference. None of these differences ever assumes the status of a distinct essence, however; rather, they are temporary events, destined to vanish and be displaced.”

Modernity sought mastery of nature, but postmodern sensibility denies nature entirely: “people no longer seem to find any need to identify a human essence – no longer is human auto-creation operating within essential parameters.” As a result, “We are our own anarchic laboratory. We can manipulate ourselves into a million shapes. Perhaps the only figure of essence which remains here is the idea that humans are productive. But we are as much the result of productive processes as agents in command of production.”

Distinctions that seemed self-evident to previous ages are blurred: There “no longer are there firm characteristics of childhood, middle age, or old age; no longer are there clear differences (other than the biological ones) between men and women; and no longer is there much heterosexuality as opposed to a single, univocal (and therefore transcendentally ‘homosexual’) proliferation of multiple desires.”

Political discourse hasn’t caught up with the trajectory of culture. As the line between public and private dissolves, “most of our modern ‘liberal’ political discourses start to appear completely meaningless, for they are all predicated on a mutual agreement to protect the right to do what one likes with one’s own, so long as this does not interfere with the rights of the other. How can this criterion any longer apply to the real interlocking ‘rhizome’ of material spaces, or to the fluid highway of virtual space?”

Global capitalism erodes the power of nation-states: “more than ever the market requires the international state-ordering of virtual reality, international legal checks on financial speculations, and international policing of popular, ethnic, and religious dissent.”

Underlying all this blurring of boundaries is the supposition of immanence. In this postmodernism is an extension of the modern secular: “modernity and postmodernity are relentlessly secular, meaning that (1) they evaluate and explain without reference to transcendence; (2) they see finite reality as self-explanatory and self-governing; and (3) they see this finite reality which is the saeculum – the time before the eschaton for Christian theology – as being all that there is.”

It’s tempting to pronounce an anathema against postmodernism and all its works and all its ways. But that misses the genealogy of the postmodern: “postmodernity, like modernity, as a kind of distorted outcome of energies first unleashed by the church itself. If that is the case, then our attitude is bound to be a complex one: not outright refusal, nor outright acceptance, but more an attempt at radical redirection of what we find.”

In Milbank’s view, “Christianity is the religion of the obliteration of boundaries. Secular commentators like Hardt and Negri assume, in all too modern and essential a fashion, that there is some sort of ‘natural’ human desire that demands de-territorialization without end.” But it isn’t. It’s a product of Christianity.

More specifically, “Christianity did, indeed, explode all limits: between nations, between races, between the sexes, between the household and the city, between ritual purity and impurity, between work and leisure, between days of the week, between sign and reality (in the sacraments), between the end of time and living in time, and even between culture and nature, since Jesus advised us to follow the mute example of the lilies of the field.”

All this is the case because ” Christianity violates the boundary between created and creator, immanence and transcendence, humanity and God.”

Milbank suggests that we can sort through the Christian response to postmodernity by thinking about the relation of Old and New, Judaism and Christianity, gospel and law. He invites us to ask, “Is postmodernity the misreading of the gospel beyond the Law? Does it overstress passing beyond boundaries at the expense of the virtue of boundaries?” Does postmodernity carry the gospel’s boundary-bursting agenda into an extreme abolition of all taboos?

More positively, if the answer to this question is Yes, then the Christian solution to postmodernity seems to be an effort at “healing of the rift between the seemingly opposed Christian and Jewish principles,” a clearer recognition that the Christian/Pauline move beyond law in fact fulfills Torah. This would require a recognition of the “co-belonging” of grace and law, in place of a (characteristically Lutheran?) dialectic of law and grace.

A few more specific examples of how Milbank suggests we negotiate the relation of postmodernity and Christianity.

We are “tempted to fall back on an insistence that God has made the human species and all others to be as they should be, and that either nature, or God’s positive law, has given clear and firm guidance for the conduct of human relations. The trouble, though, with this approach is that an open-ended transformation of the natural world has always been regarded by Christian theology as proper to our humanum, and even as intrinsic to the redemption of humanity and the cosmos, looking toward the eschaton.” Since “we have drastically altered both nature and our bodies . . . questions of right and wrong in such matters have never been decidable merely in terms of what has been pre-given by divine design.” Rather than assess by a backward reach to origins, we need to address “questions of right and wrong in those instances more ultimately require a discernment of teleology.”

In response to the postmodern view of absolute, univocal human creativity and fluidity, Christians have to resist the temptation to think of creativity equivocally. Rather, human creativity can be worked out analogically, as in Nicholas of Cusa, for whom “human creative power and natural power are never equal to God, and yet in its very creative exercise, such power participates in the divine Logos or Ars, and thus registers ‘conjecturally’ a sense of how things should develop toward their proper goals.”

We can apply this mode of reasoning to the issue of reproductive technologies. The issue is not whether “it violates the pre-given process of reproduction.” Instead, “we have to ask complex questions about what such procedures will do to human identity – and whether the different identities which may thereby emerge are richer or weaker identities, more viable or more unstable and threatened.”

I don’t agree with Milbank at every point, especially in his discussions of sexual ethics. But the overall pattern he describes is the right one, and the suggestion that issue of law and gospel are at the heart of the matter is a stimulation to further study. It rightly places biblical theology at the heart of our cultural crisis.

Catholicism and the State

Last updated on: June 21, 2018 at 6:10 pm By Peter Leithart

Joseph G. Trabbic argues at Public Discourse that the Catholic church has never abandoned the notion of a confessional, Catholic state, and that this remains the norm for Catholic political life. In principle, he claims, the church teaches that states should recognize Christianity and the church, though there may be pragmatic reasons not to pursue such a church-state arrangement.

Benedict XVI, Trabbic argues, didn’t deviate from the traditional affirmation of a Confessional state. Francis does, but Trabbic says that his position is the deviation from prior teaching. Francis uses the phrase “healthy secularity,” but not in the same sense that it was used by Pius XII, the first Pope to use the phrase.

Trabbic writes, “According to Pius, ‘the legitimate healthy secularity of the state’ (la legittima sana laicità dello Stato) is ‘one of the principles of Catholic doctrine.’ For Pius, it means keeping the Church and the state ‘distinct but also—always in line with the right principles—united.’ He insists, moreover, that the ‘constant effort’ to maintain such a relationship is ‘a part of the tradition of the Church.'”

John Courtney Murray and others tried to find an endorsement of church-state separation in the work of Leo XIII, but Trabbic thinks they misread Leo. Writing to American bishops, Leo concluded that, despite the great blessings that Catholicism enjoys under the American system. “it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.” On the contrary, the church “would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”

Vatican II didn’t overturn the earlier commitment to the ideal of a confessional state. After Vatican II, Paul VI declared in Dignitatis humanae, §1 that ‘[The Council] leaves intact the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.'”

This doesn’t mean that Catholics should always press to establish Catholicism. It’s not good for church or state for Catholics to impose a religious establishment on a recalcitrant population. Trabbic concludes that “The principal point of a Catholic state, I take it, is for the Gospel to inform deeply not only the culture but the legislation too. However, we always need to work on the culture first.”

Decades ago, RJ Rushdoony was challenging the notion of a neutral state. Every state, he argued, is religious, and its God is its source of law. It’s intriguing to see the rest of the world catching up.

BenOp Nation?

Last updated on: June 21, 2018 at 6:10 pm By Peter Leithart

At First Things, Jozef Andrew Kosc describes the continuation of Catholic Christendom in Poland.

Poland is “an unabashedly Catholic society is fully integrated into a modern European polity and economy. This society represents an integral and democratic Catholicism, one that has resisted the anti-culture of postmodernism and neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Americans might describe it as a national Benedict Option—though the Poles would reject Rod Dreher’s term, since most have little conception of the aggressive secular liberalism that exists across the rest of the West. For them, cultural Catholicism is a normal way of life.”

On the streets of Wroclaw he sees nuns and priests, and observes: “How different this felt from the cathedral towns of France and Germany, where once-great abbeys now stand empty, waiting to be dismantled for lack of vocations. How distinct from the streets of London, where clergy have for years been advised against wearing habits for fear of assault and harassment.”

It’s a standing rejection of the neoliberal project “to construct what Robert Cardinal Sarah has referred to as a ‘post-national and one-dimensional world where the only things that matter are consumption and production.’” Kocs thinks that this is the reason the Western media is so bent on attacking Poland.

Poland proves that post-liberalism is possible: “What post-Trump Americans and post-Brexit Brits long for already exists in Poland: social cohesion and civic virtue, rooted in a Christian meta-narrative. In other words, a post-liberal politics of virtue.” It is “a modern state firmly grounded in the principles of liberal democracy, but one that has begun to move beyond the policy limitations of classical liberalism.”

With Ireland’s referendum to permit abortion, Poland is now the primary location of social conservatism in Europe, especially in its “unceasing majoritarian affirmation of the sanctity of life from natural conception to natural death, and the constitutional primacy it affords religious freedom.”

One of the main charges against Poland from the Western media is that its illiberalism leaves it a hotbed for bigotry. Jewish watchdog groups, however, report that incidents of anti-Semitism dropped between 2016-17 in both Poland and Hungary. According to Cnaan Liphshiz, “Jews in Hungary generally do not fear physical attacks on the street like their coreligionists in France, Belgium, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe.”

In part, this is due to the lower rate of Muslim immigration into Eastern Europe. Many anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe are perpetrated by Muslims.

Not everyone is convinced about the significance of this trend, of course. Rafal Pankowski argues that the decline “results largely from the changes in registering them by institutions in the recent period.” While “there are not many physical attacks on Jews in Poland — and there are not many Jews in Poland anyway — but the level of anti-Semitic hate speech has increased radically in the first months of this year.”

In sum: Poland is an experiment in post-liberal polity, a Catholic nation where minority Jews are safer than in Western Europe. My Polish friends won’t be surprised: If Poland provides a model for a post-liberal, modern Christendom, it will not be the first time Poland has saved Western civilization.

Pixar and the Street

Last updated on: June 21, 2018 at 6:10 pm By Peter Leithart

My son Christian interviewed Incredibles 2 editor Stephen Schaeffer. It gives a detailed look at the nitty details of making an animated feature. For me, the most interesting parts were about the design of the Pixar studio building:

“The Pixar building was designed by Steve Jobs, who wanted to build a workspace that would promote ‘accidental’ encounters between coworkers (according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs). The hope was that these unplanned meetings would result in an explosion of creativity. Turns out, Jobs was onto something. . . .One design feature at the studio is the enormous atrium where artists, animators, editors, and computer programmers mingle and swap ideas. ‘Having that kind of exchange every day is invaluable,’ Stephen [Schaffer] says. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just been having coffee with one of my fellow editors and at the end of our conversation, I run back to my room to try out this thing that he told me to try, a shortcut on my keyboard or whatever.’”

Call it corporate New Urbanism, with Jobs standing in for Jane Jacobs, the wisdom of the street.

Bearing the Name

Last updated on: June 14, 2018 at 8:01 pm By Peter Leithart

The Third Word (Exodus 20:7) prohibits Israel and the church from bearing (nasa’) the Name of Yahweh lightly. What might it mean to “bear” the name? The verb is used some thirty times in Exodus, with a remarkable range of meanings.

Exodus 6:8: Yahweh nasa’ to give the land to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. “Bear” means “swear,” and that seems to be part of the significance in the Third Word. As Patrick Miller points out (Ten Commandments, 65), Deuteronomy 6:13 summarizes the first three commandments, and renders the Third Word positively as “by His name you shall swear.”

Exodus 10:13, 17, 19: The verb is used three times during the plague of locusts. Twice it has a physical sense: First the east wind carries locusts to Egypt (v. 13) and then the west wind bears them away (v. 19). In between, Pharaoh asks Moses to nasa’ his sin and remove death from his land. The verb still has a quasi-physical connotation: Pharaoh wants Moses to “bear away” sin and death. There’s a symmetry, of course, in the different uses. So long as Pharaoh sins, the wind will bear plagues into Egypt; if his sin is borne away, so too will be the locusts.

Exodus 12:34: Again nasa’ has a physical sense. The people “carry away” the dough of the Passover bread before it is leavened. As they prepare to leave, the bear dough on their shoulders.

Exodus 18:22: Jethro advises Moses to appoint judges to assist him in ruling the people. They will help bear the burden of leadership.

Exodus 19:4: When Israel reaches Sinai, Yahweh reminds them that He bore them (nasa’) on eagle’s wings out of Egypt, a reference among other things to the pillar of cloud and fire, full of winged cherubim, who led them through the wilderness. This is the nearest use of the verb to the Third Word, and should be paired with it. There is a symmetrical exchange: Yahweh bore Israel from Egypt, so Israel should bear His name well. Being borne places a weight of obligation on Israel, which they have to bear. The borne become bearers. Because Yahweh carried Israel, Israel now carries Yahweh’s reputation/name before the world.

Exodus 23:1: nasa’ is used with reference to false reports. The texts isn’t simply concerned with uttering false reports. The verb suggests its concern is with carrying them about, spreading false reports.

Exodus 23:21: As in Exodus 10, nasa’ is used with reference to sin or guilt. Yahweh warns Israel not to rebel against the Angel – in whom is Yahweh’s name – because he will not “bear” you. This might, as many translations suggest, mean “pardon”; the Angel will not carry away your sin. Or it might refer to the Angel’s unwillingness to put up with Israel’s sin; the Angel will not continue to carry/lead Israel if they resist him. They will become unbearable.

Exodus 25:14, 27-28; 27:7; 30:4: The uses of the verb are most heavily concentrated in the tabernacle texts, where it has a physical sense of “carry.” Poles are made to carry the ark, the table, the altars, and Levites are assigned the duties. See also 37:5, 13, 14, 27; 38:7.

Exodus 28:29-30: Levites carry furniture. Aaron bears the names of Israel before Yahweh. This is literally true. The names of the tribes are inscribed on stones that are placed on his shoulders. When he enters before Yahweh, he memorializes the tribes. The names are also inscribed on the gemstones on the breastpiece, though Exodus uses an odd circumlocution to describe it: Aaron bears the “judgment (mishpat) of the sons of Israel over his heart before Yahweh continually.” What is over Aaron’s heart isn’t the tribal names of Israel but their judgment (statute?). Here there is a notable symmetry with the Third Word: Israel carries Yahweh’s name, but Yahweh’s priest bears their names (and judgment).

Exodus 28:38: The function of Aaron’s golden crown is also described with the verb nasa’. He bears the iniquity of the holy things. More generally, Aaron and his sons wear vestments so that they will not bear guilt and die when they enter the sanctuary. Aaron is a sin-bearer, but his vestments also displace the guilt he bears so that he can come into Yahweh’s presence safely. Like the tabernacle, the priestly garments register the uncleanness and sin of Israel.

Exodus 32:32; 34:7: Moses intercedes for Israel after the golden calf, asking Yahweh to nasa’ the sin of Israel. It has the connotation of “carry away” or “remove,” but with the possible overtone of “bear the burden of.” Moses is asking Yahweh to take Israel’s sins on Himself. Yahweh does forgive, since that is essential to the name He proclaims before Moses. He is a God who bears iniquity (34:7). That is the name Israel bears, the name of a God of mercy and justice.

Exodus 35:21, 26; 36:2: Several of the late uses of the verb take “heart” as a subject. Those whose hearts are “lifted” bring contributions. The hearts of women with chochmah (skill, wisdom, like that of Bezalel and Oholiab) are lifted up to spin goat’s hair. Everyone with chochmah is inspired to perform the work.

Structure of Ezekiel 1-24

Last updated on: June 14, 2018 at 8:01 pm By Peter Leithart

Thomas Renz (Rhetorical Function of the Book of Ezekiel) argues that “The first twenty-four chapters of the book present a loosely structured movement in cycles with ever greater involvement of the readers.”

Each cycle is “marked by a narrative portion which includes either a date (1:1-3) or a notice about elders approaching the prophet (14:1) or both (8:1; 20:1). No notice about elders who approach the prophet and, apart from 24:1 . . . no date formula occurs anywhere else in this first part of the book.” Thus, “the two elements have deliberately been reserved to indicate the major breaks in the narrative and to mark the beginning of separate cycles which contain similar material (announcement of the fall of Jerusalem), but with different emphases” (61).

In the first cycle, Ezekiel presents his case against Judah: “Judah’s and Jerusalem’s sin will lead to its downfall. It comes to a climax and is concluded in chap. 7 which speaks most forcefully about ‘the end’ that comes to Judah.” The second cycle (chapters 8-13) address objections to the prophet’s message. Some claim that God couldn’t abandon His people; Ezekiel answers in chapters 8-11 that Yahweh “has already chosen the exiles to continue the history of Israel.” Others claim that judgment is off in the distant future, and that it will not fall on Jerusalem, but Ezekiel’s description of the whitewashed walls of Jerusalem refutes both. The second cycle comes to an end “with the assertion that the distinction between death and life is one for Yahweh to make.” In the third cycle (chapters 14-19), Ezekiel “outlines more precisely what the response of the exiles should be to this disaster. This section finds its climax in chap. 19 in a (prophetic adaptation of a) dirge over Israel’s leader” (62).

There’s a progression through these cycles: “the first cycle proclaims the end, the second affirms the certainty of the end, and the third heightens the involvement of the readers. The last section, chaps. 20-24, summarises the first three cycles and brings the narrative close to Jerusalem’s fall itself” (61-2). Renz sees the four cycles as falling into a pattern of 2 + 2. The first two cycles follow a similar pattern: visions, sign-acts, prophecies, death/end. The second two cycles progress differently, but are parallel to one another: confrontation with elders, metaphors, judgment, death.

One of Renz’s overall points is that Ezekiel is rhetorically structured to involve the reader more and more in the prophecy. Chapter 17, the parable of the eagles, the cedar, and the vine, illustrates the point.

The chapter presents a mashal, an allegorical riddle, to Israel. That “genre” itself accomplishes the rhetorical goal: “Being more enigmatic than the previous parables, this parable involves its readers even more than the previous ones, as the challenge of bringing together figurative and real reference is greater, even though the application of the parable is given in some detail in w. 16ff, where the root mashal is again taken up (cf. 14:13; 15:8) to underline that the disaster has its root in unfaithfulness” (78).

Renz suggests that there are two levels to the parable: “on the political level, Zedekiah’s disloyalty to king Nebuchadnezzar must lead to a punitive action from the Babylonian overlord, on the theological level, Zedekiah’s disloyalty to Yahweh calls forth a response from Yahweh” (78). That complexity again requires more involvement from the hearer or reader, as he seeks to disentangle the levels of meaning.

The conclusion of the parable also intensifies the reader’s involvement, since it points to the new beginning that Yahweh is preparing for Israel: “While Yahweh will act in a continuity of purpose (the actions described are similar to those Yahweh did in the past), the future does not continue from what has taken place in the past. In the image of the metaphor: The vine has withered and will not be revived, Yahweh will take another shoot from the cedar. The imagery is not interpreted in this case and thus leaves the readers to fill the gap. . . . the parable does not describe the future in terms of a restoration of the vine stock, but in terms of the exaltation of the cedar shoot. This emphatically underlines that the promise was not seen as applying to the dynasty of Zedekiah, but to the family of the one deported in 597 BC. The exiles are to expect a new act of Yahweh focusing on the exilic community, not some sort of continuation from the past (cf. v. 24b)” (78-9).

The exiles (especially the second generation that Renz thinks is being addressed) are engaged personally not only as readers and interpreters, but as subjects of fulfillment. As with Jesus’ parables, if they read well, they recognize that the mashal is speaking of them.

Blasphemy in the Camp

Last updated on: June 13, 2018 at 7:03 pm By Peter Leithart

Recent commentators on Leviticus have emphasized the “mixed” character of the blasphemer in chapter 24. He’s the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father. While acknowledging the importance of that feature of the story, Leigh Trevaskis thinks that the emphasis should be placed on the location of the incident.

The camp is the “land” of Israel in the wilderness, a holy place where Yahweh dwells among His well-organized people. The Egyptian-Israelite commits blasphemy in the camp, among the Israelites. Because of his blasphemy, he is driven outside the camp and stoned to death.

The story turns on the need to keep the land of Israel, where the “name” dwells, free of profanations of the name. And the story also foreshadows the threat of exile emphasized at the end of Leviticus 26. If Israel (a mixed multitude at the time of the exodus) blasphemes Yahweh’s name by her conduct in the land, she too will be driven out of the land. Sojourner and Israelite are both under the threat that the land will spew them out if they commit abominations.

Drawing on the work of Bryan Bibb, Trevaskis notes parallels between this incident and the day of atonement ritual: The blasphemer is sent outside the camp like the scapegoat, after people lean hands on him. Trevaskis finds multiple references to the day of atonement in the surrounding chapters, both direct (25:9) and indirect (23:29-30 warns that anyone who fails to keep the rites of the day of atonement will be “cut off” and “destroyed,” like the blasphemer). This supports my earlier suggestion about the double narrative structure of Leviticus.

(Trevaskis is unnecessarily skeptical about the connections between Leviticus 10 and 24, the two narrative sections of Leviticus. His own analysis supports the linkages, which run through Leviticus 16, the day of atonement passage: Leviticus 16 begins with an allusion to the events of Leviticus 10, and points ahead to the expulsion of the blasphemer in chapter 24. The narratives of Leviticus are knit together as wings around the day of atonement.)

When we pile all this up – like the meat and grain piled on the hands of Aaron – we get this picture: The blasphemer represents Israel expelled from the land; but, with the day of atonement resonances echoing round about, we should conclude that the expulsion of Israel is ultimately redeeming, that they somehow bear sin and uncleanness into the wilderness of Babylon.

As Paul taught, Israel’s exile, Israel-cut-off, is the strange hope of the Gentiles.

(Leigh M. Trevaskis, “The Purpose of Leviticus 24 within its Literary Context,” Vetus Testamentum 59 [2009] 295-312.)

Person v. Mode of Being

Last updated on: June 13, 2018 at 7:01 pm By Peter Leithart

Barth and Rahner both rejected using “person” to describe the Father, Son, and Spirit, opting instead of a translation of the Cappadocian phrase tropoi hyparxeos, three “modes of being” or “manners of subsistence.”

William Hasker (Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God, 93-94)wonders what payoff they hope to gain, “over and above avoiding the suspicion of tritheism.”

Answering that question, Hasker points out that Rahner and Barth use the phrase in a sense quite different from that of the Cappadocians. For the Cappadocians, “the ‘manner of being’ is an attribute of each Person, an attribute which distinguishes that Person from the other two. For instance, the Son’s manner of being is that of being begotten, and the Spirit’s manner of being is that of proceeding. For these theologians, the tropos hyparxeos is not a designation of what each of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is, but is rather the distinguishing attribute in virtue of which each is distinct from the other two.”

By contrast, with Barth and Rahner, “it is God who is the subject of all three tropoi hyparxeos; accordingly, for them the expression has to carry a burden—that of explaining the sense in which each is a hypostasis—that it was never designed by the Cappadocians to bear. Accordingly, the use of the expression by Barth and Rahner gains no authority or sanction from the ancients from whom the terminology is derived.”

Rahner doesn’t really explain the benefits of the change: “Although he is insistent on grounding the doctrine of the Trinity in salvation history, he actually has rather little to say about specific biblical texts. He concludes the book with the assertion that ‘the real doctrine of the Trinity is presented in Christology and in pneumatology’ . . . , inviting us to look at treatises on those topics for further enlightenment.”

When Barth addresses the question, he doesn’t stick with his earlier strict delimination of Triune personhood: “the grounds on which the doctrine of the Trinity is based seem to have shifted. No longer are we dealing with a general pattern of Revelation, Revealer, and Revealedness; instead, the whole discussion revolves around the one man, Jesus Christ, in his relationship with the heavenly Father.”

Attending to the economy, further, Barth notes that the Father is the One “whom Jesus obeyed, to whom he prayed, and whom he declared to us as our Father” (Hasker’s summary). Barth writes that Jesus, “as him who reveals the Father and reconciles us with the Father, is the Son of God” and “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God Himself, as God his Father is God Himself.”

Hasker observes, “It is hard to avoid the impression that in saying these things Barth has violated his earlier insistence that the trinitarian distinctions are not directly present in the distinctions in revelation, but are only analogically indicated by them. The argument presented in these chapters hinges on the assumption that the trinitarian Fatherhood and Sonship are directly present in the relationship between Jesus and his Father in heaven.”

Once that concession is made, it’s even harder to see what Barth gains by substituting “mode of being” for “person.” If the Father-Son relation is “directly present” in the relation between Jesus and His Father, “then the personal relationship between Jesus and the Father is a relationship between God the Father and God the Son. And this, of course, is the key exegetical point on which a Social (or proSocial) doctrine of the Trinity is based.”

Machiavellian “Realism”

Last updated on: June 12, 2018 at 8:06 pm By Peter Leithart

Pierre Manent offers a needed corrective to glib modern talk about Machiavelli’s “realism” (An Intellectual History of Liberalism). He acknowledges that “in political ‘reality’ there are murders, conspiracies, coups d’etat.” But that’s not the whole story: “there are also periods and regimes without murders, or conspiracies, or coups d’etat. The absence, so to speak, of these wicked actions is also a ‘reality'” (13).

When we speak of the “realism” of Machiavelli, we have “accepted his point of view: ‘evil’ is politically more significance, more substantial, more ‘real’ than ‘good,'” (13). Which is precisely the opposite of classical politics, which is also about a collective organization around and oriented to the good.

Machiavelli “persuades us to fix our attention exclusively, or almost exclusively, on pathologies.” He is the first “master of suspicion.” Listening to passages like this in Machiavelli, we lose our innocence: “Fidelity in love is a force like religious belief, like the enthusiasm for liberty. Now we have no force left. We no longer know how to love, or to believe or to desire. Everybody doubts the truth of what he says, smiles at the vehemence of what he asserts, and hastens the end of what he is felling” (quoted 14).

Mastery of suspicion is also mastery of irony. As Manent says “One of the most deeply rooted traits of the modern soul is doubt of the good, the smile of superiority and mockery, the passion for losing one’s innocence” (14).

How does Machiavelli himself elude suspicion? Why should we think that he, alone, has the “actual truth” of the situation? How does he manage to place himself outside political interest? What’s the ground of this supposedly “scientific” distance between Machiavelli and the object of study?

Manent thinks Machiavelli’s stance depends on the Christianity he rejects. The church claimed to be “radically exterior and superior to politics.” Machiavelli’s standpoint “was furnished to him by his enemy, the Church.” For Machiavelli, this wasn’t merely an epistemological maneuver; it was a way “to fight the enemy on his own ground” (17). He adopted the church’s position “so as to attack the very foundations of the Church’s autonomy and of its right to intervene in the city-state” (18). He places himself in the position of the “unarmed prophet,” with the mission of disarming Jesus, “the greatest of the unarmed prophets” (18).

Machiavelli’s “realism” is part of a religious reform effort: “Machiavelli is more an antireligious religious reformer than a philosopher” (18).

Epiphany to Pentecost

Last updated on: May 14, 2018 at 5:39 pm By Peter Leithart

God appeared frequently to saints of the Old Testament. He came as a smoking oven and flaming torch to Abram (Genesis 15:17), and later as three men before Abraham’s tent by the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18). He showed Himself to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:2), and to Israel in a fiery cloud (Exodus 16:10). When He appeared to Korah, the earth opened and swallowed the rebels, and He appeared to Manoah’s wife with the good news about a son (Judges 13:3) and to Samuel with grim news for the house of Eli (1 Samuel 3:21). Time would fail me if I enumerated all of Yahweh’s appearances to kings, prophets, judges, women.

All those appearances pale in comparison with the appearance of God in and as Jesus. Those who saw Jesus saw the Father, and after His resurrection Jesus appeared to many witnesses and promised to appear again. The Old Testament epiphanies are fleeting: Yahweh is here, then He’s not, like the flicker of a flame. Jesus stuck around. He didn’t pop in and then ascend in the smoke of a sacrifice, like the Angel of Yahweh did to Manoah. He could slip through a crowd when necessary, but He was there, tangible, visible, audible, localized in a boat on the sea of Galilee or in the temple courts or out in the wilderness praying to His Father. His disciples got to spend three years learning the timbre of His voice, watching the expressions of His face, feeling the energy of His passions”the voice, face, passions of the Son of God.

But then . . . He left again. The Son pitched his tent in flesh, lived, died, rose, and then packed up the tent and disappeared almost as quickly as He had come. How is this different from the epiphanies of old? What makes this an event worth celebrating as the Epiphany of God? Light shines in darkness, but then the light goes out, goes elsewhere, and what then? Does darkness descend?

We have to match Epiphany with Pentecost to solve this puzzle. Jesus came and left, but He did not leave the world in darkness. He appeared and disappeared, but He didn’t leave the world without an epiphany of God. He left, but He did not leave us orphans. He came back to us, in the Spirit. The light of Jesus returned forty days after it left, when the lightsome Spirit descended on the disciples. The epiphany of God in the Son is definitive, even if temporary, because it is quickly followed by the appearance of God the Spirit.

It’s not a very satisfying answer. The Spirit here is as invisible as Jesus is in heaven. At least at Pentecost, the Spirit made the apostles human torches, but we don’t even have that to go by. We are left searching for anapparent God. The Spirit is light and the Spirit has come, but what good is invisible light? The Spirit has come, but where can we find God in the solidity of flesh?

John, the apostle of incarnation, provides the answer. In his first letter, he makes this astounding claim: “as He is, so also are we in this world” (4:17). He sent His Spirit, but that Spirit shows Himself in flesh too, our flesh. By shining in the darkness, and by fueling us with the oil of His Spirit, Jesus lit us up so that we can be lights in the world, lamps on a lampstand.

What John says is evident all through the New Testament, once we begin looking for it. Nearly everything Scripture says about Jesus is said about His disciples who have become like Him by the work of His Spirit. He is Son, we are sons. He is King, we are kings and priests in Him. He is the chief cornerstone of a new temple, we are all living stones. He is a dwelling place of God, but the Spirit inhabits us too. He is in the Father and the Father in Him, but by the Spirit they dwell in us and we in them. He is Christed by the Spirit, but we are christened by the very same Spirit. He died and rose, we die and rise in Him. In sum: “As He is, so also are we in this world.”

Jesus came and went away. He appeared and disappeared. But the Epiphany of the Son is not ephemeral but permanent in Pentecost. It is thick and sturdy as flesh, as tangible as the flesh of Chinese Christians gathering in secret for worship, as substantial as Nigerian Christians suffering with joy at the hands of Muslim persecutors, as dazzlingly visible as nuns caring for disabled children in an Indian slum.

First published at Firstthings.com.