{"id":17877,"date":"2016-02-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2700"},"modified":"2016-02-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T00:00:00","slug":"protestants-and-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/02\/protestants-and-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Protestants and Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A number of people have raised objections of different sorts to my posts on Protestants and writing. In the nature of the case, I\u2019m not going to resolve these issues with a blog post or two, and it would be passing tedious to answer every criticism of every critic. The objections are mainly of the sort I\u2019ve already addressed a bit here<\/a>, but let me respond all too briefly to two thoughtful counters.<\/p>\n

Derek Rishmawy recognizes<\/a> that my target is narrower than my title. My brief is brought against (primarily) North American Evangelicals of the past century. He concedes my complaint about the weakness of Evangelical poetry and fiction, but is doubtful that sacramental theology is the culprit. He rounds up a set of alternative suspects \u2013 a diminished, other-worldly eschatology; conversionism; the Fundamentalist disengagement from culture; prudery; literalism in biblical interpretation; anti-intellectualism.<\/p>\n

These are all factors in forming the ethos of Evangelical churches, and to my mind they form a constellation of habits, sensibilities, modes of thought and feeling that may be called \u201cEvangelical gnosticism.\u201d Sacramental theology and practice crystallize these tendencies, and bring them into the heart of the church, into Christian worship. (My article was imbalanced in highlighting sacramental theology<\/i>. An exclusive focus on theology threatens to collapse into a version of the intellectualism I\u2019m attacking. Sacramental practice <\/i>and the imaginary that it expresses and fosters are the issues.)<\/p>\n

Steven Wedgeworth thinks<\/a> that my broad-brush story-telling is \u201cfiction\u201d \u2013 as in, untrue. He faults me for letting assumptions and assertions do a lot of my work for me, which is true enough: What I proposed is a thesis, a hunch and an intuition. My essay was an intervention, a provocation, intended to rouse, written on the premise that non-fiction genres other than academic treatises have their uses. Steven wants \u201cconcrete data\u201d; so do I, but every quest for concrete data begins with a glimpse of a master story, a dream of destination, albeit one that must remain supple enough to dance with the data, promiscuous enough to change partners if that proves necessary. <\/p>\n

Steven says my essay is a piece of nostalgia, a \u201cRoad Not Taken\u201d story, in line with Brad Gregory, MacIntyre and Weaver. I do regard many aspects of the contemporary world negatively; as, truth be told, does Steven, who admits \u201cthere is a real crisis in the modern world of arts, letters, and religion,\u201d an opinion evident in his list of Protestant writers, which ends in the nineteenth century. But to regard my essay as nostalgic misses my point \u2013 also MacIntyre\u2019s, I think. There is perhaps a moment of nostalgia, but the aim is relativization<\/i>. It\u2019s the maneuver of the nouvelle theologie<\/i>, which recovered a patristic and early medieval past to mount critiques of counter-Reformation neo-Thomism and juridical conceptions of the church; it\u2019s the move of medievalist postmoderns, who reach back to pre-modernity not to dwell in the past but to relativize the seemingly impregnable modern present. \u201cOnce there was no secular,\u201d says John Milbank, in order to demonstrate that \u201csecularity\u201d is a contingent historical formation, and therefore not woven into the fabric of things, and therefore challengeable<\/i>. All these use the past to relativize the present in the interests of fresh directions for the future. I don\u2019t know, though, whether Steven will find relativization more congenial than nostalgia.<\/p>\n

Steven is right that \u201cZwingli\u201d is more symbol than Reformer in my essay. I don\u2019t think that he\u2019s a \u201cmere symbol\u201d (as Steven cleverly suggests) but I\u2019ll leave the historical Zwingli to the side. There is an anti-liturgical, anti-ritual bias in Protestantism that arguably has roots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that is the outlook that, I argue (intuit, hypothesize), has had a deadening effect on the Christian imagination. I agree with Steven that modernity has made its stunning contributions, one of which is to explore the role that ritual, and anti-ritual, play in the formation of the imagination.<\/p>\n

One last response: Steven devotes several paragraphs to the issue of literary \u201cgreatness,\u201d not at all the topic of my essay. I\u2019d be giddy to see a steady supply of competent<\/i> poets, novelists, and artists coming out of the American Evangelical churches. They don\u2019t need to be great or famous; they need only be craftsmen and craftswomen, striving for excellence, their work honored by the church.<\/p>\n

Jesus the New Creator is present to us by His Spirit in Word and Sacrament. That is admittedly an article of faith rather than the result of scholarly research, and it\u2019s what led to the conclusion of my original essay: \u201cThe renewal of literature, like the renewal of the world, begins in worship. The renewal of literature, like the renewal of the world, begins from the pulpit, to be sure. But the pulpit will renew literature only when it is nestled where it should be nestled, between the font and the table.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A number of people have raised objections of different sorts to my posts on Protestants and writing. In the nature of the case, I\u2019m not going to resolve these issues with a blog post or two, and it would be passing tedious to answer every criticism of every critic. The objections are mainly of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[423,1226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-protestantism","category-writing"],"yoast_head":"\nProtestants and Writing<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A number of people have raised objections of different sorts to my posts on Protestants and writing. 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