Alan Jacobs

The judgment of God is the end of history, not the beginning of a new, a second, epoch. The difference between that which lies beyond the judgment and that which lies on this side of it is not relative but absolute: the two are separated absolutely. God speaks: and He is recognized as the Judge. By His speech and by His judgment a transformation is effected so radical that time and eternity, here and there, the righteousness of men and the righteousness of God, are indissolubly linked together. The end is also the goal; the Redeemer is also the Creator; he that judgeth is also he that restoreth all things. The disclosure of non-sense is the revelation of sense. What is new is also the deepest truth of what was old. The most radical ending of history, the negation under which all flesh stands, the absolute judgment, which is the meaning of God for the world of men and time and things, is also the crimson thread which runs through the whole course of the world in its inevitability.

— Kark Barth beginning to exposit Romans 3, in his The Epistle to the Romans. I am reading this book for the first time in at least a quarter-century, and in the intervening decades a great deal has happened in New Testament scholarship. I have only read a tiny fraction of that scholarship, but enough that the positions Barth takes throughout this famous commentary now seem utterly archaic, on the other side of some kind of intellectual and exegetical divide. I keep thinking how existential Barth is, how abstract his arguments seem in comparison to — to take only the best-known example relevant to the passage I’ve just quoted — N. T. Wright’s work on the New Creation and how that New Creation is complexly rooted in visions and arguments articulated in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Deuteronomy 29, Ezekiel 34-37, Jeremiah 31, Daniel 9).

And yet how radical Barth seems in comparison to many more recent exegetes — and their followers. Three cheers for our new emphasis on history and the material world and all, but you can sometimes get the sense that if we’re just a little greener or rather more communal-minded God will be greatly pleased with us. Reading Barth makes me wonder whether, in the eyes of our green communitarians, the Second Coming is only required for some touch-up work on the worthy labors we’ve already performed….

Untrue and unfair, I know. Still, there’s something wonderfully bracing about Barth’s relentless insistence on the otherness of God, the force with which he reminds us that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Paul’s statement that to God “our righteousness is as filthy rags” seems to strike Barth as far too kind: in his vision the most glancing encounter with God would vaporize those rags and the unfortunate one who happened to be wearing them. And then there’s the equally relentless dialectical method, the refusal (seen clearly above) to let no statement stand without its counter-statement immediately appearing, fiercely juxtaposed.

Since eventually everything old is eventually new again, I wonder if it is yet time for our history-minded, embodiment-minded, worldly-minded exegetes and disciples to find value in Barth — to accept his radical Krisis hermeneutic as something that we might profitably encounter not just in our statements of general theology but in our very encounters with Scripture … and with one another.

(More reflections on Barth may be coming, as I read my way through this holiday season.)

The practices of the ancient Church were forged in eras of the porous self and were responsive to its fears and vulnerabilities. Can they be nearly as meaningful to us, surrounded by our protective buffers, as they were to our ancestors? Does their evident power suggest to us that we have paid too high a price for our buffers, that we may need to be more exposed? The self that can pursue the via illuminativa — that can be illuminated by God — may open itself to the demonic as well as the divine. The disciplines and practices of our Christian ancestors are not toys or tools; they are the hope of life to those who are perishing. This is what Alasdair ­MacIntyre had in mind when he said that, here among the ruins of our old civilization, what we may be waiting for is a new St. Benedict: someone who can articulate a whole way of life and call us to it.

The turn to the Christian past is indeed welcome, but it may demand more of us than we are prepared to give. In contemplating the witness and practices of our ancestors, we may discover that we’d rather remain within our buffers — if we can. But can we? Current electronic technologies, from blogs to texting to online banking to customer-specific Google ads, may be drawing us into a new age of porousness, with new exposures, new vulnerabilities. And in such a new age the hard-earned wisdom of our distant ancestors in the faith may be not just a set of interesting ideas and recommendations but an indispensable source of hope. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

— Do-It-Yourself Tradition by Alan Jacobs. From 2009, when the Benedict Option was scarcely a gleam in Rod Dreher’s eye.

… I’ve written a couple of angry things in defense of Wheaton, since I left, but I think my having left made it possible for me to get away with the anger. It’s harder to make that work from the inside.

Moreover, what’s really needed here is not anything that could be construed as a defense of particular administrative actions — and even if you deny that you’re doing that, in the residual heat of last week’s news that’s how such a piece will be perceived — but rather an explanation of why places like Wheaton deserve to exist within the widely varied landscape of American higher education. And by “deserve to exist,” I mean on an equal footing with other institutions. You say that Wheaton isn’t going anywhere, and that’s probably true, but a great many other Christian colleges may well, in the coming decade or two, have to close their doors because they lack the financial resources and reputational stature to respond effectively to legal challenges, denial of federal student-loan funding, and de-accreditation. At the very least, religious schools will be threatened with constant demands that they bow to Caesar; even if they can get legal verdicts in their favor that will only be after great expense; and I find it impossible to imagine a future in which religious institutions won’t always be dealing with discrimination suits.

If we who teach at religiously-based institutions have any chance of maintaining the status quo, we’ll need to articulate that more general account of what schools like Wheaton do and why even those who have no religious belief, or even sympathy with religious belief, should value that work.

… When I think about the larger context of all this, I am always reminded of something Lewis says in a preface to Mere Christianity: that he got the strongest support and commendation for his project from Christians of all types who loved and were faithful to their own tradition. The deeper the Methodist got into Methodism, and the deeper the Catholic got into Catholicism, and the deeper the Orthodox got into Orthodoxy, the closer they got to one another. It was the people who stood at or near the periphery of their own tradition who were most suspicious about historic, orthodox, “mere” Christianity.

So I don’t think any particular tradition, whether Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox, will survive the coming attacks unless it goes deep into its own resources; and I think if it does go deep into its own resources, it will thrive, in character and substance if not in sheer numbers. But this will not happen at the level of any tradition as a whole; it will happen at the level of the parish, the local community. Right now, I don’t see such “going deep” to be any more likely in one tradition than another. And I don’t think it will ever be the norm.

The Christian communities that thrive will

• be radically Christ-centered always;
• refuse to be therapeutic, but rather emphasize the worship we owe to the God who made and redeemed us;
• connect imaginatively and substantively with Christians throughout the past and around the world;
• be open to all, but reserve leadership to those who are willing to commit to radical obedience;
• turn the other cheek and go cheerfully on when attacked by the world; and
• recognize these practices in other communities, even those outside their tradition.

… that the Chicago Tribune’s editorial on the current Wheaton College kerfuffle is considerably more charitable and fair-minded than the bloviations of some prominent “liberal” Christians. 

The process whereby ‘faith and works’ become a stock gag in the commercial theatre is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation. The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under those conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant — I had almost said the Pauline — assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention both of government and the mob. When once this had happened, Europe’s chance to come through unscathed was lost. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks and the round-abouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police force who frequently changed sides.

— C. S. Lewis, from Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century. See also: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"

I have no opinions on controversies in the evangelical Christian world — including those concerning the college where I was employed for many years — about which I have access to extremely limited, and therefore obviously insufficient, evidence. This stance appears to distinguish me from almost everyone.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1484”] Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds over Utah[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“600”] Money bags, collected by Ben Schott’s grandfather[/caption]