Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 2

the Newman problem

Any serious reader of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and of the many controversies appertaining thereunto, will repeatedly face a certain kind of problem. I will explain by reference to one example, though I could choose dozens of others.

In late 1845, when Newman had recently swum the Tiber, “the editor of a magazine who had in former days accused me, to my indignation, of tending towards Rome, wrote to me to ask, which of the two was now right, he or I?” Newman replied at length, and, among other things, said this:

I have felt all along that Bp. Bull’s theology was the only theology on which the English Church could stand. I have felt, that opposition to the Church of Rome was part of that theology; and that he who could not protest against the Church of Rome was no true divine in the English Church. I have never said, nor attempted to say, that any one in office in the English Church, whether Bishop or incumbent, could be otherwise than in hostility to the Church of Rome.

And yet — I thought as I read those words — earlier in the Apologia he says that

I had a great and growing dislike, after the summer of 1839, to speak against the Roman Church herself or her formal doctrines. I was very averse to speak against doctrines, which might possibly turn out to be true, though at the time I had no reason for thinking they were, or against the Church, which had preserved them. I began to have misgivings, that, strong as my own feelings had been against her, yet in some things which I had said, I had taken the statements of Anglican divines for granted without weighing them for myself. I said to a friend in 1840, in a letter, which I shall use presently, “I am troubled by doubts whether as it is, I have not, in what I have published, spoken too strongly against Rome, though I think I did it in a kind of faith, being determined to put myself into the English system, and say all that our divines said, whether I had fully weighed it or not.” I was sore about the great Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made me say strong things, which facts did not justify. Yet I did still hold in substance all that I had said against the Church of Rome in my Prophetical Office. I felt the force of the usual Protestant objections against her; I believed that we had the apostolical succession in the Anglican Church, and the grace of the sacraments; I was not sure that the difficulty of its isolation might not be overcome, though I was far from sure that it could. I did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth; and I was not sure that it would not revive into full apostolic purity and strength, and grow into union with Rome herself (Rome explaining her doctrines and guarding against their abuse), that is, if we were but patient and hopeful.

When I look at the overall tone of this passage, it seems obvious to me that these are not the words of someone “in hostility to the Church of Rome.” How could you be said to be hostile to an institution that you “dislike” speaking against, whose doctrines you felt “might possibly turn out to be true,” and about which you “did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth”? None of that sounds the least hostile.

But then I have to ask: what does Newman mean by “hostility”? I could imagine him saying that anyone not submitting to the authority of Rome is ipso facto hostile to that Church — and in that sense even one holding the views he held when he wrote Tract 90 would still be “in hostility to the Church of Rome.” Now, of course, that would be to use the term in a highly idiosyncratic way — in a way likely to confuse others. But this is what Newman does all the time.

Many of his disputes with his contemporaries take this form:

Opponent: You lied when you said X.

Newman: I did not lie. How dare you accuse me so?

Opponent: You certainly did lie, for elsewhere you say Z, and Z contradicts X.

Newman: Z is fully compatible with X.

Opponent: How so?

Newman: By Z I mean to affirm φ.

Opponent: But Z does not entail φ, it entails δ!

Newman: I define it so as to entail φ.

Opponent: You know perfectly well that everyone thinks that Z entails δ!

Newman: I am greatly surprised by what you say. It had never occurred to me that anyone would ever infer δ from Z.

Opponent: You deliberately misled your readers!

Newman: You have merely reiterated your former accusation in a new form. As an English gentlemen I resent this attack upon my honour.

(In his disputation with Charles Kingsley Newman often appeals to his honour as an English gentleman.) So I could easily imagine Newman saying “I never imagined that anyone would think ‘hostility to Rome’ to mean anything other than ‘disinclination to submit to Roman authority, even when full of admiration for almost everything that Rome stands for.’”

But even if we allow Newman to appeal to the authority of his own private, unstated definitions of key terms, he is still in difficulty — or rather, we his readers are. We still have questions. How can he at one and the same time think that the distinctively Roman doctrines “might possibly turn out to be true” and that he has no reason for thinking them true? Here his answer would presumably be that he has no evidence one way or the other, because he had never actually studied the matter but instead had trusted “the great Anglican divines.” Fair enough — though should not Newman be “sore” at himself for trusting without evidence, instead of resenting the people whose opinions he had trusted?

(Later in the book he says that his reliance on the Anglican divines “of course was a fault” — but he strictly constrains the scope of the fault as he sees it: “This [trust in the divines] did not imply any broad misstatements on my part, arising from reliance on their authority, but it implied carelessness in matters of detail.” That’s as far as he will go in self-criticism. But was it a “matter of detail” that they condemned in harsh and strict terms the very Church that Newman would later enter?) 

Setting such issues aside, there’s a further question to be asked: If he had realized that his judgments on Rome were derived at second-hand from others and therefore had no real value, why does he say, “Yet I did still hold in substance all that I had said against the Church of Rome in my Prophetical Office”? He still holds in substance the views that he just said he had no evidence for holding? This seems impossible, for in 1833 he had written, for instance, “Rome is heretical now … Their communion is infected with heresy; we are bound to flee it as a pestilence,” whereas he says that in 1839 “I did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth.” (The earlier statements were the subject of his post-conversion retractions.) These positions are quite obviously irreconcilable with one another, so how Newman could say that they were “in substance” consistent I cannot imagine. 

I say that; though I suspect that if I were to challenge Newman on this point he would reply, “Ah, but when I said those things in 1933 I was not speaking in my Prophetical Office,” and then would go on to define in exhaustive detail how he distinguishes between things said in his Prophetical Office and things said in other offices, and further to explain that any inconsistencies in statements made in the different offices are not blameworthy in any sense.

This is just how Newman thinks. What almost everyone else believes to be cheese-paring, logic-chopping, evasive circumlocution he sees as perfectly normal and indeed commendable. The avalanche of accusations he gets not only from avowed enemies but also from many friends he responds to with blank incomprehension:

I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority.

Now I will say here frankly, that this sort of charge is a matter which I cannot properly meet, because I cannot duly realise it. I have never had any suspicion of my own honesty; and, when men say that I was dishonest, I cannot grasp the accusation as a distinct conception, such as it is possible to encounter.

And I don’t believe he was intentionally dishonest, at least, not more often than anyone else — though I cannot think of another writer whose absence of self-knowledge is quite so complete. That he never suspected his own honesty is something he avers in his own favor, but it’s a damning admission. All of us should sometimes ask whether we are what we habitually tell ourselves we are. Whatever the logical virtues (if any) of his natural method of thought, it had the effect of disguising from himself and from others the complex truth of his own ever-shifting responses to his Anglican inheritance and the Roman church towards which he was ever more strongly drawn. And it had the further effect of preventing him from acknowledging the influence he had over so many others. 

But of course, all this concerns retrospection: accounting for something one said in the past. It is odd that Newman gets so pettifogging about these matters when, almost immediately after the passages I have been quoting, he freely confesses, in one of the more moving passages in the Apologia, how long he struggled to make logical sense of his position: 

What then was I to say, when acute minds urged this or that application of [the principle of Antiquity] against the Via Media? it was impossible that, in such circumstances, any answer could be given which was not unsatisfactory, or any behaviour adopted which was not mysterious. Again, sometimes in what I wrote I went just as far as I saw, and could as little say more, as I could see what is below the horizon; and therefore, when asked as to the consequences of what I had said, had no answer to give. Again, sometimes when I was asked, whether certain conclusions did not follow from a certain principle, I might not be able to tell at the moment, especially if the matter were complicated; and for this reason, if for no other, because there is great difference between a conclusion in the abstract and a conclusion in the concrete, and because a conclusion may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle. Or it might so happen that I got simply confused, by the very clearness of the logic which was administered to me, and thus gave my sanction to conclusions which really were not mine; and when the report of those conclusions came round to me through others, I had to unsay them. And then again, perhaps I did not like to see men scared or scandalised by unfeeling logical inferences, which would not have touched them to the day of their death, had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, “Non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;” — I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; … Great acts take time. At least this is what I felt in my own case; and therefore to come to me with methods of logic, had in it the nature of a provocation, and, though I do not think I ever showed it, made me somewhat indifferent how I met them, and perhaps led me, as a means of relieving my impatience, to be mysterious or irrelevant, or to give in because I could not reply. And a greater trouble still than these logical mazes, was the introduction of logic into every subject whatever, so far, that is, as it was done. Before I was at Oriel, I recollect an acquaintance saying to me that “the Oriel Common Room stank of Logic.” One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion, is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms. Now, in saying all this, I am saying nothing against the deep piety and earnestness which were characteristics of this second phase of the Movement, in which I have taken so prominent a part. What I have been observing is, that this phase had a tendency to bewilder and to upset me, and, that instead of saying so, as I ought to have done, in a sort of easiness, for what I know, I gave answers at random, which have led to my appearing close or inconsistent. 

As far as I can tell, this is as close as he comes to taking responsibility for the confusion he so often sowed in others. 

paranoia strikes deep

Ars Technica:

In an April 28, 2025, appearance on Dr. Phil Primetime, an audience member asked Kennedy what he would do about “stratospheric aerosol injections,” which she claimed are “continuously peppered on us every day.” Kennedy responded: “It’s done, we think by DARPA [a research agency in the Department of Defense] and a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. … I am going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who is going to think only about that — find out who is doing it and holding them accountable.”

In 2023, Kennedy spoke with chemtrail activist Dane Wigington on a podcast and credited actor Woody Harrelson for making him believe in chemtrails after watching contrails from a plane transform into clouds.

“I’ve looked up many times since then and seen that happening, and I don’t have a good explanation for it,” Kennedy said. 

Me on a Thomas Pynchon novel, 2013: 

Pynchon seems from early in his career to have intuited what Michel Foucault writes about in books like Discipline and Punish: a “power-knowledge regime” which cannot be located in a person or institution, but whose control of our world is imperceptibly dispersed — an evil inversion of the ancient mystical definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. A secret cabal of Freemasons or Communists or Republicans would be comforting by comparison, as a character in Bleeding Edge, an aging Sixties-style radical, notes: “Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.” Or, as Doc [Sportello, in Inherent Vice] reflects further on the existence of those “rigid, unsmiling” men at the periphery of every festivity,

“If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen. Was it possible, that at every gathering — concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever — those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?”

From within this paranoid (or observantly realist) logic, there is an obvious answer to the question, “Was 9/11 an inside job?” — Of course it was. The invisible power-knowledge regime brought about the destruction of the Twin Towers when that suited its interests — just as it had earlier erected them for equally inscrutable reasons — and those who think that President Bush and his henchmen engineered 9/11 are not looking far enough inside: in this vision the Bushies were at most servants or emissaries of larger, ever-nameless forces. 

I keep telling you people that Pynchon explains everything, but you don’t listen. 

pinches of Pynchon

The NYT asked a number of people to share their favorite moments from Thomas Pynchon’s fiction. Yikes. I have so many. The problem is that not one of the greatest passages in his glorious body of work makes complete sense to out of its rich and densely-woven context.

I’m gonna break the rules and choose two. Both concern rubbish — a topic in which I am greatly interested. 

The first is from my favorite Pynchon novel, Mason & Dixon: 

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream — in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen, — serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, — Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, — winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. 

The second is from Bleeding Edge: 

Sid kills the running lights and the motor, and they settle in behind Island of Meadows, at the intersection of Fresh and Arthur Kills, toxicity central, the dark focus of Big Apple waste disposal, everything the city has rejected so it can keep on pretending to be itself, and here unexpectedly at the heart of it is this 100 acres of untouched marshland, directly underneath the North Atlantic flyway, sequestered by law from development and dumping, marsh birds sleeping in safety. Which, given the real-estate imperatives running this town, is really, if you want to know, fucking depressing, because how long can it last? How long can any of these innocent critters depend on finding safety around here? It’s exactly the sort of patch that makes a developer’s heart sing — typically, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land.”

Every Fairway bag full of potato peels, coffee grounds, uneaten Chinese food, used tissues and tampons and paper napkins and disposable diapers, fruit gone bad, yogurt past its sell-by date that Maxine has ever thrown away is up in there someplace, multiplied by everybody in the city she knows, multiplied by everybody she doesn’t know, since 1948, before she was even born, and what she thought was lost and out of her life has only entered a collective history, which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything — suddenly denied the comfort of absolute zero.

This little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it. 

look who’s reasoning

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Jean: You have a right to have an ideal. Oh, I guess we all have one.

Charles: What does yours look like?

Jean: He’s a little short guy with lots of money.

Charles: Why short?

Jean: What does it matter if he’s rich? It’s so he’ll look up to me. So I’ll be his ideal.

Charles: That’s a funny kind of reason.

Jean: Well, look who’s reasoning.

— Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve

Randy Stein and Abraham Rutchick:

Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.

Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods. […] 

Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. [Just ignore the bad grammar of that sentence.] It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go. 

I’ve looked at the paper, and it seems pretty sketchy to me: a matter of asking people vague questions and then speculating about what their answers probably mean. 

What Stein and Rutchick are overlooking, it seems to me, is what a great many of MAGA folk will tell you straight out: that if loony lefties say that X and Y are “actual facts,” that Z is a “known falsehood” “that can easily be disproved,” it ain’t necessarily so. If President Trump says that crime in Washington D.C. is the worst it’s ever been and the socialist Democrats are at fault, and then some socialist at CNN — they’re all socialists at CNN — says that some “experts” have produced “scientific” research proving him wrong … well, MAGA knows who’s more trustworthy. They say: Look who’s reasoning. 

They’re not thinking, “Yes, we know that you have the Scientific Facts on your side, but our tribal loyalties are more important to us than facts!” They’re thinking, “You claim that you have facts, but we think it’s far more likely that you have cooked the books to generate an outcome that confirms your political preferences. Hasn’t that happened often enough in the past? Haven’t you and your kind been caught in the act?” 

People across the political spectrum do this all the time. Not long ago there was an online kerfuffle stemming from a post by John Ganz called “Against Polling.” When some people declared that Ganz was anti-science, anti-data, anti-fact, he replied, 

Is it so unreasonable to ask, why is it that the data brigade and the positivists are constantly urging a move rightwards, why they happen to be the same faction that wants to mend fences with the business world and Silicon Valley, and why they have the ear (and wallets) of the donors? Why should I grant their pretensions of embodying reason and factuality itself? That’s the very definition of ideology: a tendency that claims not to be a tendency, to be in fact, the absence of tendency and pure neutrality. There’s no such thing. The polling shit is part of an ideology that hides values in value-neutral language. 

You can find similar examples every day: someone says These are the facts and someone else says Those are not the facts, they’re factoids conjured up by people in the grip of motivated reasoning. The latter group are not simply by virtue of their disagreement anti-fact weirdos whose behavior needs some deep explanation. Even when they’re MAGA, they’re often just saying: Look who’s reasoning. 

The Stein and Rutchick argument tells people on the left exactly what they want to hear: that they haven’t failed in the task of persuasion, that the blame lies wholly with those anti-data tribalists in MAGAland. A comforting message, but not, I think, the correct one. Far more people are persuadable on particular questions — like whether the crime rate in D.C. is the worst it has even been, which, for the record, it definitely isn’t — than most partisans think. But persuasion has to be done retail, not wholesale, and you can’t sell everyone instantly on everything in your store. 

Another way to put this point: Most people can be persuaded on many (probably not all) points, but not by a tweet or a link — not online at all. It’s hard work that requires patience. By contrast, dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as irrational doesn’t take any work or patience at all. 

one condition

Dear Colleague, 

I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear Colleague” letters — e.g. — to strongarm universities into supporting their and your preferred political outcomes, and (b) that a chief purpose of your current protests is to ensure that people with my social, religious, and aesthetic views remain unemployable in your universities. 

Sincerely, 

Your Colleague 

Socrates again?

Mark Liberman:

For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in  how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article’s sub-head is “It is not the road to serfdom that awaits — but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt”.

Although I mostly agree with the article’s content, I find the reference to ancient Egypt ironic, given how Socrates frames his argument against reading and writing in education. 

And then comes the inevitable quotation from the Phaedrus. References to this passage annoy me about as much, and as often, as claims that in the Areopagitica Milton defends freedom of the press. Points to be kept in mind: 

Socrates says in dialogue after dialogue that the only way truly to know something is through the process of dialectical disputation, the famous “Socratic method.” The problem with poetry, as he illustrates in the Republic, is that it’s anepistemic: it’s knowledge-free, it’s just empty storytelling. But he introduces his anecdote about Thoth and Thamus by saying “I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know.” So he explicitly says that he doesn’t know whether the story bears truth; and in any case as a story it cannot bear truth into the soul of the inquirer. 

Thus his later comment, which Liberman also quotes:

… writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. 

So Socrates’ argument is not really a critique of writing or books as such: it is an epistemic critique of anything — written, spoken, painted, whatever — that is not dialectics. 

And finally: How do we know that Socrates had this view? Because Plato wrote it down and put it in a book. Maybe Plato would side with Niall Ferguson on this question. 

Ella’s Songbooks

Last month, when I was suffering from a vertigo and unable to read for more than a few seconds at a time, my constant companion was the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald, and especially her four great Songbooks: Gershwin, Ellington, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart. Collectively they constitute, I believe, one of the great achievements of 20th-century American art.

Ella recorded other “songbook” albums, including an Irving Berlin one, but these four are the masterpieces. And I might note that the Ellington songbook is different than the others, in two respects. First, here Ella sings with the composer and his orchestra; and second, the lyrics are undistinguished. Ella gets to show off her vocal chops, including scat singing — a style of which she is the undisputed champion — and that’s wonderful. But she doesn’t get to show us how she interprets great lyrics.

The other three Great Songbooks have her singing the words of some of the best lyricists of their (or any) time: Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter. The first two wrote lyrics to the music of others, while Porter wrote words for his own music. When the producer Norman Granz played Ella’s recordings of his songs, Porter said, “My, what marvelous diction that girl has” — a comment that has been taken as dismissive, but I don’t think it was. Porter would have heard his songs sung by many singers with lovely voices, but he had probably never heard a singer so intelligently attentive to his lyrics, of which he was very proud, and able to communicate their meaning clearly, vividly, and most musically. That would have captured his attention.

Ella indeed had marvelous diction, along with perfect pitch, a tone of exceptional purity from the top of her range to the bottom, and — something not often enough noted — great breath control. You never hear her breathe, no matter how long the line lasts or how fast the notes come. (This is a rare achievement. When Joni Mitchell, a great singer if there ever was one, sings “Twisted” — a vocalese gem that I don’t believe Ella ever recorded, though it was perfect for her — she nails every note but struggles to catch her breath. The only pop singer I can think of who has great breath control is k. d. lang, but she’s almost as freakishly talented as Ella.)

If you want to get started with this music, try these two songs: Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and the Gershwins’ “But Not For Me.” The latter is simply perfection: gorgeous and heartbreaking in the highest degree. I often think of what Ira Gershwin said: He knew that he and his brother had written some good songs, but he never knew just how good they were until he heard Ella sing them.

should Christians be anarchists?

I wrote in my anarchist notebook:

Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians should be anarchists. 

I hadn’t remembered writing that, but came across the post this morning, just after posting on Phil Christman’s book. Do I think that Christians should be anarchists in the way that Phil thinks we should be leftists? Am I ready to grasp that nettle? 

Maybe not yet, though I will say that the essential practices of anarchism — negotiation and collaboration among equals — are ones utterly neglected and desperately needed in a society in which the one and only strategy seems to be Get Management To Take My Side. And Christians are a part of that society and tend to follow that strategy. 

It’s often said that the early Christians as described in the book of Acts are communists because they “hold all things in common” (2:44-45, 4:32-37). But there is a difference between (a) communism as a voluntary practice by members of a community within a much larger polity and (b) communism as the official political economy of a nation-state, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The former is much closer to anarchism. We are not told that the Apostles ordered people to sell their possessions and lay the money at the Apostles’ feet, but rather that people chose to do so. We are told that the early Christians distributed food to the poor, but not that the Apostles ordered them to do so. The emphasis rather is on the fact that they were “of one heart and soul” (καρδία καὶ ψυχή μία). 

It is commonly believed by Christians in the high-church traditions, like mine, that the threefold order of ministry (bishop, priest, deacon) mandates a hierarchical structure of decision-making, but I am not sure that’s true. Things did indeed develop along those lines, but that’s because — this is an old theme of mine — church leaders saw the administrative structure of the Roman state as something to imitate rather than something to defy. A diocese was originally a Roman administrative unit; nothing in the New Testament even hints that an episkopos is anything like the Roman prefect (praefectus praetorio) or a priest like his representative (vicarius). The office developed along Roman/political lines, but it needn’t have developed that way.

And indeed, in some traditions — for instance, American Anglicanism — it’s possible to discern the lineaments of a somewhat different model: when the rector is charged with the spiritual care of the parish and the vestry are charged with the material care of the parish, there’s something of the division of labor and spheres of autonomy that we see in the better-run anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist communities. There are always tensions at the point when the spheres touch, but that’s what negotiation and voluntary collaboration are for: to resolve, or at least ease, tensions. 

In these contexts I often find myself thinking of a passage from Lesslie Newbigin’s great book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989): 

[Roland] Allen, who served in China in the early years of this century, carried on a sustained polemic against the missionary methods of his time and contrasted them with those of St. Paul. St. Paul, he argued, never stayed in one place for more than a few months, or at most a couple of years. He did not establish what we call a “mission station,” and he certainly did not build himself a mission bungalow. On the contrary, as soon as there was an established congregation of Christian believers, he chose from among them elders, laid his hands on them, entrusted to them the care of the church, and left. By contrast, the nineteenth century missionary considered it necessary to stay, not merely for a lifetime, but for the lifetime of several generations of missionaries. Why? Because he did not think his work was done until the local church had developed a leadership which had mastered and internalized the culture of Europe, its theological doctrines, its administrative machinery, its architecture, its music, until there was a complete replica of the “home church” equipped with everything from archdeacons to harmoniums. The young church was to be a carbon copy of the old church in England, Scotland, or Germany. In rejecting this, and in answering the question, What must have been done if the gospel is to be truly communicated? Allen answered: there must be a congregation furnished with the Bible, the sacraments, and the apostolic ministry. When these conditions are fulfilled, the missionary has done her job. The young church is then free to learn, as it goes and grows, how to embody the gospel in its own culture. [pp. 146-47] 

It seems to me that this argument has implications not just for missionary activity but for every church. The model that Allen favors seems to me a way to reconcile the principle of authority with the practices of anarchism. Is it possible to have both the threefold order of ministry and a congregational life that’s based on the one-heart-one-soul way of life?

I want to mull that question over for a while and return to it later. I feel confident that Christians should incorporate more of the foundational anarchistic practices into their common life, but does that mean that Christians should be anarchists? Hmmmm. 

should Christians be leftists?

Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day. But in any case, Francis has blurbed Phil’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists, and Adam has written at some length about the book, so I suppose I have no choice but to weigh in. Be true to your school.

But I haven’t been able to corral my thoughts into a coherent essay, and my next week is going to be crazy busy, so I think I will present my thoughts in all their clunking incoherence as a series of numbered points.

1.

I would be more positively disposed to Phil’s book if it had a different title, for instance:

Though Until Quite Recently Christians Could Not Have Been Leftists Because the Nation-State Model Under Which the Category “Left” Makes Sense Did Not Exist, and With the Further Qualification That Political Questions Are Largely Empirical in Nature and Therefore If I Could Be Convinced That Some Other Political Economy Did a Better Job of Fulfilling or Helping to Fulfill the Mandates of the Sermon on the Mount I Would Adopt That Political Orientation, I Believe Christians Should Be Leftists

2.

It’s noteworthy that in this interview Phil talks about how much of his money to give away in exactly the same way that my fundagelical Republican friends and family members do. “Should we be generous to the poor until it hurts us?” is a question which, for Christians, has a clear answer; “Should generosity to the poor be mediated through governmental institutions or come primarily from individual contributions and charitable NGOs?” is a question with no equally clear answer. Phil says that the teachings of Jesus demand “massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes)” — but which will it be, alms or taxes? Again, what works best is largely if not wholly an empirical question, which I think means that the decision whether to be on the Right or Left is not principial but rather pragmatic. And that lowers the stakes in the debate.

Also, I think the question above is hard to answer because it’s hard to answer this question: What’s worse, (a) a society in which the poor are in absolute terms poorer but are closer in income to the rich, or (b) a society in which poverty-as-such is greatly reduced but the rich are ever-more-filthy rich? That is: What’s the key problem here, poverty-as-such or inequality? And I don’t think the Sermon on the Mount (or the Bible as a whole) tells us.

Phil writes, “God wants all of us to acknowledge that love by lifting up those at the bottom of our social arrangements. The Bible is clearer about that then it is about most of the theological and ethical issues we fight about. And the only durable way to do this is to lift up that bottom.” Well, amen to that. But what if the best way to lift up that bottom also lifts the top? That’s basically the argument Deirdre McCloskey makes in her massive Bourgeois Trilogy, about which I’ve written a bit here and here — really important work pointing to certain indubitable facts about the astonishingly swift and great rise in wealth that has occurred throughout the world during the reign of capitalism. In my experience, most leftists just pretend that none of this even happened, but the more acute ones agree that it has happened but also that capitalism has done all the good work it can do and now needs to give way to the next stage of economic development. That, however, requires subtle and detailed argumentation, and it’s a lot easier to shout “CAPITALISM IMMISERATES” even when that’s obviously not true. Unless …

Unless you are referring not to material misery — which capitalism has dramatically reduced — but rather to the social and psychological pain of inequality. Then the question becomes: Is material improvement coupled with increased inequality and therefore decreased social solidarity a deal we’re willing to make?

Or, to return to specifically Christian terms: What does Jesus primarily want, (a) deliverance of the poor from their poverty or (b) social solidarity among us all, even if that means a reduction in collective wealth? Some people, of course, will say that we don’t have to choose, that we can all together ascend the golden escalator to universal wealth. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

3.

If I had been making Phil’s case, I might have said something like this:

To my conservative/libertarian brothers and sisters, greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ! Obiously, we all believe that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are binding upon us, and also that the teachings of the Hebrew Prophets are equally binding upon us (because the whole of the Bible is the Word of God). That means that we are obligated to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, the despised, the outcast, the stranger. But the Bible does not tell us how we are to do that necessary work. You don’t think it should be done through the government, which, though I do not agree, I understand. But that means that you really need to raise your game. If we are not going to redistribute resources — that is, share our blessings — through governmental action, then we need as individuals and families and churches to give until it hurts. We need to increase our support of charitable organizations that do this work. We need to make sure our churches preach this Biblical message. We need to encourage our fellow Christians to give more generously — to see lifting up the poor not as a nice thing, not as an acceptable option, but an absolute Gospel mandate. Some of us (some individual Christians, some families, some churches) obey this mandate, but not all of us, not nearly enough of us, else we would not see so many people among us who can’t afford to buy healthy food for their families, can’t afford safe and clean housing, can’t afford decent health care. There are enough of us to make a far bigger difference than we make, and our goal should be that the whole world says that they know us by our love. We don’t have to do it through governmental intervention, but we have to do it, and if you can’t see any way to make that happen on the scale that it needs to happen … well, then maybe we should revisit the question of whether the government might, after all, be the best instrument to pursue this common good.

And indeed you can find an argument that touches on some of these themes in an essay I wrote in 2005.

4.

My biggest Amen goes to this paragraph from Phil’s book:

Jesus takes sides in particular situations — the victim of violence over the perpetrator; the sufferer over the oppressor. But I also think Jesus is playing for all the marbles. As he judges the oppressor’s actions, he also sees every second of the life that took the oppressor to that moment, the poor moral formation the oppressor received from his parents (and that they in turn received), the ideological lies that that oppressor started to learn before he was old enough to notice or think about them, the person that that oppressor might have been had he been born in more auspicious circumstances. Jesus sees the thing that Jesus himself, as the second person of the Trinity and God’s creative Word, formed in the womb. And he wants to redeem that too. He wants all of it. He wants all of us.

revival, retrospection, assessment

At Evangelical Colleges, A Revival of Repentance – The New York Times (1995):

Students at evangelical colleges are embracing a revival calling them to repent. “We haven’t seen a student revival since the Jesus movement days of the late 60’s and early 70’s,” said the Rev. John Avant, pastor of a Baptist church in Brownwood, Tex., where the movement started. […] 

Some … say it is premature to gauge the significance of the movement in relation to other revivals in American religious history. “I would say that the thing to do is to call back in 40 years,” said Mark Noll, a historian at Wheaton. 

It’s only been thirty years, so the jury’s still out. But I doubt that many of you reading this have ever heard of this revival. 

That doesn’t mean that it has had no impact. These things are exceptionally difficult, probably impossible, to discern. In 1964, in his introduction to an anthology called The Protestant Mystics, W. H. Auden described a kind of experience that he called “the Vision of Agape.” In that context he included a brief narrative account of an experience “for the authenticity of which I can vouch.” Here is that testimony, somewhat abridged:

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly — because, thanks to the power, I was doing it — what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself…. My personal feelings towards them were unchanged — they were still colleagues, not intimate friends — but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it….

The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do. And among the various factors which several years later brought me back to the Christian faith in which I had been brought up, the memory of this experience and asking myself what it could mean was one of the most crucial, though, at the time it occurred, I thought I had done with Christianity for good.

This whole account is fascinating, but I want to call attention to this: the experience had a major influence on the direction of Auden’s life only some years after it occurred. Indeed, at the time it occurred he didn’t understand it: his calling it a “vision of Agape” is a retrospective interpretation, one quite different from how he thought of his experience in the poem he wrote shortly after it happened. He seems to have thought it a curious event, but not an especially important one. Between the event and his reinterpretation of it, the experience went underground: imagine a branch falling into a river that plunges below the land’s surface and emerges much farther downstream, bearing some of the cargo it acquired much earlier. (I saw such a river once.)   

Presentists — which is to say, 99.7% of Americans — think that whatever is happening right now is the best or worst thing ever, certainly the most dramatically extreme and totally important thing ever. (Just as they also think that “desperate times require desperate measures” and Right Now is always a desperate time.) So a great many Americans believe that a major revival is happening right now — North Americans, perhaps I should say, because one of the most interesting reflections on this development is by the Canadian writer and scholar Marilyn Simon.

Simon asks a good question and makes a good point: “And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know.” But what I would say is: We may never know. Indeed, we will almost certainly never know.

In 2035, if people follow Mark Noll’s advice and think back to the 1995 Christian-college revival, how will they assess its influence? Even the people who were there may not know how it shaped them. Think of how writers can commit inadvertent plagiarism, a phrase having dropped into the mind and remained in the current long after its origin is forgotten. Maybe people involved in that revival can’t recall the words they heard there but have internalized them all the same, or have certain feelings when singing a hymn or reading the Bible that (without their realizing it) have the source in that long-ago experience. 

To be human is, it seems to me, to care about the origins and sources of things, but we know very little, it also seems to me, about what most deeply shapes us. At the end of Middlemarch, George Eliot says of her heroine Dorothea that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.” Of how many people and experiences is this true? Many, I suspect. The truly defining events of our lives will may remain unknown to us — and that, I suspect, is true on a social as well as a personal level. 

I’m not sure what lessons are to be drawn from all this, except one: It’s best not to make decisions about what to do, or even what to think about, based on an immediate perception of what’s really important, really influential. So hear the words of the Preacher: “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”