Pentecost and Public Life

Last updated on: May 14, 2018 at 5:38 pm By Peter Leithart

What has Pentecost to do with public life? As Paul would say, much in every way.

The Bible does not permit us to confine the work of the Spirit to the inner man or to private experience. Through Isaiah (44:3), the Lord promised to pour out water on the land of Israel and his Spirit upon Israel’s seed. When the Spirit is poured out like water, he turns desolate places to fruitfulness, transforms the dry land into a grove, transfigures the withered leaf into a green (Isa. 32:15; Ezek. 39:29; Joel 2:29; Zech. 12:10; Acts 2:17¯18, 33; 10:45). Restoration of nature symbolizes cultural flourishing. When the Spirit is poured out on Israel, the Lord promises, the nation will be renewed.

At the first Christian Pentecost, the apostles filled with the Spirit proclaimed the gospel in multiple languages, and by the end of the day a community of believers had been established, drawn from “every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). The miracle of languages that took place at Pentecost reversed the curse on languages at Babel; the divided nations are reunited by the Spirit. For the Bible, international peace is a Pentecostal reality.

What does a Spirit-filled society look like? We should ask what it sounds like. For the first thing Paul says is that the Spirit makes us noisy. “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit,” he says (Eph. 5:18). Though he condemns drunkenness, Paul implies that the result of being filled with the Spirit is quite similar to the result of being filled with spirits. “They are filled with new wine,” said the skeptics about the babbling disciples at Pentecost (Acts 2:13). It was a plausible mistake.

For Paul, the Spirit doesn’t make us placid and mild, quiet and retiring. When we’re filled with the Spirit, we cannot not speak, and our speech breaks out in boisterous psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Being filled with the Spirit means being filled with music, in our mouths and in our hearts. A marriage filled with the Spirit is full of noise, harmonious and melodious noise, joyful noise. C.S. Lewis wrote that a Christian society would be a joyful society, rollicking, lighthearted, exuberant. Paul agreed.

By harmonizing diverse human beings, the Spirit also beautifies. It’s only through the Spirit that humanity can manifest the glory and beauty of the God who is Beauty and Glory. Jonathan Edwards wrote: “It was made especially the Holy Spirit’s work to bring the world to its beauty and perfection out of chaos; for the beauty of the world is a communication of God’s beauty. The Holy Spirit is the harmony and excellence and beauty of the deity . . . . Therefore, ‘twas His work to communicate beauty and harmony to the world, and so we read that it was He that moved upon the face of the waters.”

The Holy Spirit is the creative Alpha Spirit of the first day, the one who begins to form the stuff of the creation into beauty. He is the re-creative Omega Spirit of the Sabbath who brings everything to completion. In between, he is the re-creative Spirit who renews the earth and gives life to the world. Christians confess that the Spirit is the “Lord and Giver of Life.” As Alexander Schmemann pointed out decades ago, “life” does not mean a “religious life” erected on a foundation of secular life. Life means life in the fullest, most extensive sense¯physical, cultural, social, aesthetic. And of this the Spirit is the Lord and Giver.

First published at Firstthings.com.

Pentecostal Enlightenment

Last updated on: May 15, 2018 at 12:25 am By Peter Leithart

It’s the season of the Spirit, a time to muse on the politics of Pentecost.

When Israel’s prophets predict the future coming of the Spirit, their next thought is almost always about the renewal of creation. According to Joel, the Spirit’s coming will turn Israel into Big Rock Candy Mountain”wine tricklin’ down the mountains, a restoration of a land of milk and honey (Joel 3:18“21). When the Spirit comes, Isaiah writes, “the wilderness becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field a forest” (Isa. 32). Ezekiel assures Israel that Yahweh’s Spirit in the heart of Israel will transform the desolate land into Eden (Ezek. 36). The Spirit who fabricates the first creation (Gen. 1:2) will return to bring “times of refreshing,” in the apostle Peter’s enchanting phrase (Acts 3).

This rebirth in the Spirit includes the renewal of the human race. It’s a commonplace that Pentecost unties the knots of Babel. At Babel, Yahweh places a divisive curse on human language; by the Pentecostal miracle of tongues, everyone hears the good news in his own language. At Babel, nations are divided; at Pentecost, peoples reunite in common confession and baptism. The account of Babel is preceded by the table of nations in Genesis 10, and Luke includes a miniature table of nations in Acts 2.

Though opposed to Babel, Pentecost simultaneously realizes Babel’s frustrated aspirations. Babel is an effort to arrest the scattering of humanity; Pentecost gathers. Babel aims to preserve the unity of human language and faith; Pentecost reunites. Babel’s builders want to link heaven and earth, precisely what the Spirit accomplishes. The Spirit’s arrival makes the Church an open “gate of God,” which is what the word “Babel” means.

For the New Testament, the renewal and reunion of humanity is an act of God. In a stunning phrase, the apostle Paul says that the Spirit baptizes all into one body, so that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. As the German-American historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy observed, every human group, and each generation, breathes its own “spirit.”

In traditional societies, belief in communal spirits is quite overt, but the phenomenon exists even in societies that no longer believe in spirits. Americans are animated differently than the English or the Germans; the soul of a Korean bears a different stamp than the soul of a Chilean. Given this deep diversity, the communion of ethnicities, generations, and classes in the Church isn’t the product of human ingenuity, compassion, or virtue. We can’t just get along. A unified human race is the product of the recreating work of the creating Spirit.

Read more at Firstthings.com.

Anarchy and the Second Word

Last updated on: May 12, 2018 at 1:32 am By Peter Leithart

In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli exposes the ruse of Roman law. Numa, the true founder of Rome, “mistrusted his own authority, lest it should prove insufficient to enable him to introduce new and unaccustomed ordinances in Rome.” And so he claimed that the law came from the gods.

All law, Machiavelli argues, arises from a similar mystification. In One and Only Law, a study of Walter Benjamin, James Martel explains that Machiavelli’s unmasking of the origins of law raises questions about legitimacy: “Must we rely on such phantasms in order to have law at all? Can we ever come to trust our own right or ability to make law without such disguises? Would such law ever be authoritative?” (2).

Benjamin agrees with Machiavelli. Law is rooted in myth. And he follows Machiavelli in unmasking the trick. But he doesn’t think that this leaves us without the possibility of law. For Benjamin, “we are bound by law; God’s divine law applies to us even as we have no way of knowing what it is, nor do we have any access to the truth or justice that it speaks for.” In short, we are left to “legislate in the dark, even as we remain responsible for what we do” (2).

Machiavelli’s story shows the way. While unmasking the fraud of Numa’s legislation, he also shows that it’s possible for law to be effective in the absence of a “Big Other” to back it up (3).

Benjamin doesn’t advocate for a law rooted in lies. He instead contends that this is what most regimes actually are. They are “archist” polities in which “the majority of subjects are not involved in their own self-determination, in which authority is produced via dictate or by representation as opposed to direct participation.” Such systems are doomed by Machiavelli’s unmasking: “No such archist polity could exist or perpetuate itself with the full knowledge that its laws are based on nothing but the local and contingent decisions of a single person or a group of people” (3).

That leaves us with an “anarchist” option, which Benjamin endorses. This doesn’t mean a free-for-all, but a polity that renounces the “phantasmagoria” of archist regimes because it is rooted in a single law, the Second Word, the prohibition of images.

For Benjamin, the Second Word “forbids fetishism or false representation, not only of God but of any other thing on, in, or under the earth.” It thus throws down the gauntlet to the phantasmagoria: “we can safely obey the Second Commandment without (much) fear of fetishism insofar as this law is itself oriented against fetishism in all forms. By obeying this commandment, we cease to obey the laws that normally render us complicit with the phantasmagoria.” The “anarchy” that results is what Benjamin calls communism, “a set of legal and political practices that resists the recourse to myth and fetishism,” a system that “accepts that it has no access to truth, to divine or natural law. Instead, it is based on local, specific, and contingent practices” (4).

Benjamin thus advocates law that is self-aware of its own contingency, law aware that it is foundering in the dark.

Abortion and the Horde

Last updated on: May 10, 2018 at 5:08 pm By Peter Leithart

In a discussion of the Ten Words (Systematic Theology, II) argues that the “second table” applies to all polities. I have doubts about the “second table” notion, and also about the plausibility of separating the last six words from the first four. Still, Jenson has some penetrating things to say about the “second table” as “natural law.”

Applied to those who are not part of the narrative of exodus, “the commandments state minimum conditions: no society can subsist in which the generations turn against each other; in which vendetta has not been replaced by public organs of judgment and punishment; in which the forms by which sexuality is socialized, whatever these may be, are flouted; in which property, however defined, is not defended; in which false testimony is allowed to pervert judgment; or in which greed is an accepted motive of action. Indeed, even the commandments of the first table have a kind of negative and so general application: no society can long subsist that violates its own religion” (87).

It’s especially in the last sentence that the whole enterprise breaks down. How can the first table imply that a society should be loyal to a God other than the God of exodus?

Jenson goes on to illustrate by calling attention to the import of abortion: “A society in which an unborn child can legally be killed on the sole decision of the pregnant person cannot be “a people” even by the least rigorous of Augustine’s definitions; it can only be a horde” (87-8).

Why is that? Because “Thou shalt not kill” marks “the decisive break between precivil and civilized society: the replacement of vendetta by courts and their officers. The decision that someone rightly must die is no longer to be made by interested parties and is instead to be made by maximally disinterested communal organs.” Thus, “if unborn children are members of the human community, then allowing abortions to be performed on decision of the most interested party is a relapse to pure barbarism” (88). It hands the authority to kill to an interested party.

The key question, of course, is whether unborn children qualify as members of the human community. The Supreme Court founded Roe on an act of agnosticism: “there is no plausible way to draw a line across the development of the unborn child before which it is not a human person and after which it is. But what follows is quite obviously the opposite of the law the justices laid down. Unless interfered with, the child will at some time be a human person; and if at any given point in its development we cannot know that she or he is not yet that, what we do not at that point possess is any justification for treating the child as other than a member of the community, embraced in society’s protection from private decisions to kill” (88).

Idolatry After Idols

Last updated on: May 9, 2018 at 3:22 pm By Peter Leithart

During the Second Temple period, the Talmud says, “the temptation for idolatry was slaughtered” (quoted in Haberthal and Margalit, Idolatry, 2).

Then the fight returned, with Maimonides. Now, though, idolatry was a contrast-concept to a new conception of God. Halberthal and Margalit summarize: “The central effort of philosophical religion is the attempt to attain a proper metaphysical conception of God. This conception not only is a necessary condition for the worship of God but also constitutes the high point of religious life. Philosophical religion, which attempts to purify the divinity from anthropomorphism, considers the crux of the problem of idolatry to be the problem of error. Idolatry is perceived first and foremost as an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshiper, thereby internalizing the sin” (2).

Philosophical religion turned the war against the idols again “folk religion,” as the battle became a “struggle against imagination, superstition, and the masses’ projection of their own world onto that of God” (3).

Eventually, though, the attack was turned against monotheism itself. During the 18th and 19th centuries, “the entire project of religion is now placed under suspicion of being idolatry, or false worship, since if there can be a kind of worship that is false here can be no guarantee that there is a kind of worship that is not false.”

Thus the Enlightenment directed philosophical theology’s critique of folk religion and anthropomorphism against philosophical theology itself (3).

Patterned by Idols

Last updated on: May 7, 2018 at 3:52 pm By Peter Leithart

A little over a year ago, I wrote the following in a post reflecting on the Hebrew term tabnit, used in Exodus and Chronicles to describe the heavenly “pattern” of the sanctuary:

“Deuteronomy 4:16-18 uses the word five times, not of a ‘model’ or ‘plan’ but of likenesses made according to a plan or model. Yahweh prohibits Israel from making and venerating a tabnit of male or female, animals, birds, creeping things, or fish (note the Genesis 1 classification of creatures). Here the living creature – the woman or the calf or the snake – is the model, and the graven-thing is the likeness of the model. The word tabnit is used for the copy rather than the original (cf. the similar use in Psalm 106:20; Isaiah 44:13; Ezekiel 8:10).”

Looking back at Deuteronomy and the other passages I cited, I’m not sure I got it right.

The Hebrew in Deuteronomy 4:16-18 appears repetitive. After reminding Israel that they saw no form or likeness (temunah) on Sinai, Moses warns them not to “act corruptly” by making a graven image (pesel) of any likeness (temunah). A pesel of a temunah is presumably a carved-image made to resemble the form of God, a form that was not seen.

But temunah is in the construct (temunat) and is followed by the phrase kal-samel. The pesel in view is the form/likeness of any semel, a word typically translated as “idol” (2 Chronicles 33:7, 15; Ezekiel 8:3, 5) but in the NASB of Deuteronomy 4 translated as “figure.” Thus: Do not make a graven-image of a form/likeness of any figure.

That’s already a mouthful and we haven’t gotten to tabnit yet. That comes in the phrases that follow. Moses forbids Israel to make a pesel of any temunah of a semel, and spells that out with five phrases that all begin with tabnit: no tabnit of male or female, earth-animal, sky-flier, ground-creeper, or fish (note that the list reverses the order of Genesis 1).

Two questions: How is tabnit related to the other terms? And, how is tabnit related grammatically to the previous phrases?

To take the second question first: The tabnit phrases seem to be epexegetical of “any figure” that precedes it. That is, Moses warns them against making any carved image of any likeness of a figure, whether that is human, animal, bird, crawler, or fish. It’s an expansion of the Second Word’s prohibition of peselim of things in heaven, earth, or the waters.

That grammatical point is one reason, perhaps, that the NASB translated use “likeness” for tabnit. On that translation, my earlier comment is accurate: tabnit here refers not to model but to a copy.

But the grammatical point isn’t decisive. We can try out translating tabnit in the same way it’s used in the tabernacle and temple texts: Do not make a pesel of any form of a figure, a pattern of male or female, animal, bird, etc.

On that reading, the logic might be: You saw no tabnit on the mountain, no original form according to which you might make a pesel. Don’t act corruptly and make a tabnit-model for yourself; since you didn’t see God, don’t presume to make your own archetype.

That’s not as elegant as I’d like, but it opens up a fresh perspective on idolatry. Idols aren’t merely temunot – likenesses; they are intended to be, and function as tabnitim.

An idol-maker may intend to represent a god by carving the pesel. What he actually produces is something more dynamic, and so more dangerous; his pesel forms a model according to which viewers are made and re-made. Idols are patterns for their worshipers.

There is a heavenly pattern, disclosed to prophets like Moses, David, Ezekiel, John. We rightly build according to those patterns that are brought down from the mountain – Sinai, Zion, new Jerusalem.

To make our own patterns, and to build according to what we have imagined in our heads, is deadly – deadly not because our graven-patterns don’t work, but because they work all too well, forming people and societies into their image. As the Psalmist says, “Everyone who worships them shall become like them.”

Rosenzweig on Anthropomorphism

Last updated on: May 4, 2018 at 4:03 am By Peter Leithart

Franz Rosenzweig didn’t buy Maimonides philosophical critique of the Bible’s anthropomorphism. In 1928, he wrote a short essay on the topic and, in the summary of Leora Batnitzky (Idolatry and Representation) he “argues that the tendency to rationalize away biblical anthropomorphisms . . . is both dishonest and a misunderstanding of the Bible” (21).

He charges that “the very term ‘anthropomorphism’ is laden with rationalist prejudice. Properly speaking, Rosenzweig argues, there is no ‘anthropomorphism’ in the Bible. Rather, ‘the anthropomorphisms of the Bible are throughout assertions about meetings between God and man.’ Once we understand that the Bible’s descriptions of God are about meetings that take place in time, rather than about essences that are eternal, we can understand that the Bible does not ‘assert something either about God or about man, but only about an event between the two.’ Rosenzweig argues that the philosophical problems created by ‘biblical anthropomorphisms’ are a result of a category error. The Bible is not concerned with what God is, but rather with how God acts, in time, in God’s relation to the human being” (21).

Biblical anthropomorphism is in fact testimony to the freedom of God: “What differentiates biblical monotheism is the recognition that God is infinitely free to reveal himself to the human being in any way, and at any time, that God chooses. Images can authentically represent God but no image can contain God, for the former represents God’s freedom to reveal God’s self while the latter denies precisely this. Rosenzweig concludes that the experience of fatherhood can authentically represent God’s relation to the human being, but no father is God” (22).

Thus, “not only that the Bible’s multiple images of God are not a threat to monotheism, but that they are monotheism’s most important safeguard. The Bible’s many images of God express particular encounters between the human and the divine. The variety of images of God in the Bible is constitutive of monotheism itself. These diverse and different images of God attest to God’s infinite freedom to reveal himself and the human’s infinite ability to respond to God: biblical anthropomorphisms ‘are the single protection against the backsliding into polytheism, which indeed is nothing but consolidation of a genuine present revelation of the real God to a lasting image of God precisely by this means: resisting the ever-new will of God’s revelation'” (23).

Dialectic of Physics

Last updated on: May 4, 2018 at 3:50 am By Peter Leithart

Jason Josephson-Storm (Myth of Disenchantment) offers this potted history of modern physics:

“Even as Descartes liberated an autonomous realm for the thinking subject, his mechanism denied action at a distance and rejected the concept of the void. But this form of corpuscular mechanism was disrupted by Newton’s emphasis on occult forces like gravity, which produced action at a distance and also in some versions required constant divine or angelic intervention. Later natural philosophers worked to eliminate these, but as soon as Pierre-Simon Laplace and company purged the angels, the discovery of electricity as a seeming bridge between matter, mind, and nature reproduced a lively cosmos. Indeed, it was this research on electricity and magnetism, in both physics and biology, that gave a boost to mesmerists and spiritualists” (313).

Moving ahead: “When James Clerk Maxwell described electromagnetism mathematically, the rise of radioactivity and invisible rays cast us into the dawn of a vibratory atomic age. Again, pioneers of this science of the invisible like Edmund Fournier d’Albe argued that X-rays show not only the composition of the soul but also the reality of paranormal phenomena like ghosts. Just as quantum mechanics began to formalize the movement of fundamental particles, the Copenhagen interpretation marked out a limit on human knowledge and a position for subjectivity that we have still failed to overcome” (313).

Not to mention the recent turn of physicists to mysticism and eastern religions.

In short, “we repeatedly see in the realm of physics a dialectical alternation between disenchantment and enchantment” (313). Social scientists, unfortunately, have not paid close attention, often presenting a simplistic story of disenchantment in defiance of “what physicists actually believed” (314).

People Without History

Last updated on: May 4, 2018 at 3:47 am By Peter Leithart

“The habit of treating named entities such as Iroquois, Greece, Persia, or the United States as fixed entities opposed to one another by stable internal architecture and external boundaries interferes with our ability to understand their mutual encounter and confrontation,” writes Eric Wolf in Europe and the People Without History (7).

This habit “has made it difficult to understand all such encounters and confrontations. Arranging imaginary building blocks into pyramids called East and West, or First, Second, and Third Worlds, merely compounds that difficulty” (7).

The foundation for this approach was laid in the mid-19th century “when inquiry into the nature and varieties of humankind split into separate (and unequal) specialties and disciplines.” It was a “fateful” split: “It led not only forward into the intensive and specialized study of particular aspects of human existence, but turned the ideological reasons for that split into an intellectual justification for the specialties themselves” (7).

Sociology is a classic case. Disorder and revolution “raised the question of how social order could be restored and maintained, indeed, how social order was possible at all. Sociology hoped to answer the “social question'” (7-8).

To address the social question, sociologists formed the object of their study by severing “social” from “political economy”: “These early sociologists did this by severing the field of social relations from political economy. They pointed to observable and as yet poorly studied ties which bind people to people as individuals, as groups and associations, or as members of institutions. They then took this field of social relations to be the subject matter of their intensive concern. They and their successors expanded this concern into a number of theoretical postulates, using these to mark off sociology from political science and economics” (8).

The postulates of early sociology “predispose one to think of social relations not merely as autonomous but as causal in their own right, apart from their economic, political, or ideological context. Since social relations are conceived as relations between individuals, interaction between individuals becomes the prime cause of social life. Since social disorder has been related to the quantity and quality of social relations, attention is diverted from consideration of economics, politics, or ideology as possible sources of social disorder, into a search for the causes of disorder in family and community, and hence toward the engineering of a proper family and community life” (9).

Further, analysis of “society in general” can be applied to specific societies, which are considered in abstraction not only from economic and political structures and activities but in abstraction from other societies: “Since social relations have been severed from their economic, political, or ideological context, it is easy to conceive of the nation-state as a structure of social ties informed by moral consensus rather than as a nexus of economic, political, and ideological relationships connected to other nexuses. Contentless social relations, rather than economic, political, or ideological forces, thus become the prime movers of sociological theory. Since these social relations take place within the charmed circle of the single nation-state, the significant actors in history are seen as nation-states, each driven by its internal social relations. Each society is then a thing, moving in response to an inner clockwork” (9).

Pretense of Masculinity

Last updated on: May 4, 2018 at 3:46 am By Peter Leithart

“Human life is radical, constituent insecurity,” writes Julian Marias (Metaphysical Anthropology). “It consists in having to do something, in a frequently hostile, always problematical, and largely latent circumstance, and in not knowing what to hold to. This is man’s condition: his insecurity, his neediness, his ignorance, his indecision, his helplessness” (154).

Yet the specific quality of the male is strength: “If he does not have it he feels a ‘lack,’ feels inferior to his condition.” His strength might be physical, but can also consist in “cunning, intelligence, prestige, experience, authority, aplomb, capacity of expression, aptitude for revealing – or feigning – those faculties, by word and facial expression” (155-6).

Marias stresses the paradox: “Man is ignorant . . .weak . . . threatened.” Yet “man’s pretension – the male’s – consists in the exact opposite: knowledge, strength, power, security” (156).

Does this make masculine strength a deception? Marias answers “Yes and no.” If a man “considers his pretension good” and “feigns being what he claims to be, his reality is a fiction, an imposture, a falsehood; the person becomes a mask” (156).

But the pretension might also be “a project, an effort, an attempt,” and in that case “there is no deception.” Rather, “pre-tension is a forward tension, in which the ‘arriving’ person is advancing toward the future, is becoming. . . . The male is not strong, wise, powerful, secure; he is something more seriously and more humanly interesting and delicate: he has to be so.” The issue isn’t ability: Whether he can be or no, “he needs to be so, and the possibility or impossibility are unimportant in the face of human need” (156).

Masculinity is a matter of becoming, which requires honest recognition of fundamental weakness, ignorance, insecurity.