The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon

John Oman (on Friedrich Schleiermacher's view of religion):

The conscious individual is a product and representation of the Infinite, in constant interaction with the Infinite. The Universe is like a great work of art, having leading ideas running through the whole, wrought out with infinite variety of detail in every part. Mankind for example is an individuality exhibiting the Universe. It contains the general character of the Universe and the particular form also in which it is embodied…

Man’s spirit in this respect is like his body. The body is part of the material world. It is a product of the same laws that made any organism. An animal organism is a characteristic presentation of organic life, and a human organism of animal organization. Yet they all consist of one material, organized ever more elaborately by one set of laws. In the same way, the same spiritual matter and the same spiritual laws have organized the individual mind.

The conscious individual, as a product and representation of the Universe in ceaseless interaction with it, may have three aims. All the elements of his experience, being products of a Universe which is a whole, have connections and relations. He may therefore endeavor to refer the different parts of his experience to one another by discovering their causal and other connections. This is the aim of science. Again, he may take himself as an independent manifestation of the Universe, and, starting from the common elements of reason, proceed to carry out the purpose of the Universe by applying them in accordance with his own nature and circumstances. This is the aim of morals. Finally, he may begin at the other end with the distinct phenomena of life, and travel backwards towards the Universe. This is the aim of religion.

As every perception is an interaction of the whole Universe with our whole being, the religious man who has once had a feeling and an intuition of the Universe can reach the Universe from every experience. And if the sense were not hindered, it would naturally reach this intuition, just as every man, were there not obstructions, would naturally have scientific and moral interests. Whether by external or internal observation, if carried far enough, we should finally reach the Universe. But men are hindered by mechanical burdens, and above all by the present worldly-wise calculating type of education. Even art, which should be inspired by religion, and is fitted in turn to adorn it, satisfies men with a narrower object than the Universe. By reflection we best awake to this larger sense. We find that our souls are an epitome of all mankind. Whatever any man has thought or felt comes to us as our thought and feeling. Nay, all that can be thought is only possible to be thought because in some sense it is ourselves already…ourselves and all that we know only exhibit one Universe.

This waking of the sense for the Universe is the larger life…religion therefore is sense and taste for the Infinite, and is neither metaphysics nor morals, but as essentially a part of human nature as either knowledge or action. Because this has been obscured or forgotten, religion has fallen into evil repute.

The Horror! The Horror!

"This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world...this is the worst thing I've ever witnessed." {Radio announcer Herbert Morrison, describing the Hindenburg explosion on May 6, 1937}

48-14? Really? 382 rushing yards allowed to the Montana State Bobcats? A fourth straight loss in the "Brawl of the Wild"?

In the wake of yesterday's disastrous showing by the University of Montana Grizzlies, this blog's regularly scheduled "Sunday Sermon" is cancelled. Instead, I will spend the day meditating on the perennial topic, "Why do bad things happen to good football teams?"

As a long-time fan of the Buffalo Bills, and having watched the Bills lose four consecutive Super Bowls, I should have some insight into the nature of gridiron calamity: yet the Grizzlies' performance yesterday in Bozeman  felt to me like a new low. Et tu, Bobby Hauck?

It was an afternoon of shock and WTF? Even before halftime, the words "Oh, the humanity!" seemed to hang in the air over sold-out Bobcat Stadium. If you look up the word "debacle" in the dictionary, you'll find a description of this latest Grizzly beat-down at the hands of their cross-state rivals. If you google "Four Horsemen of the Grizzlies' Apocalypse," you'll find a picture of Bobcat coach Jeff Choate along with any three Bobcat players chosen at random.

To what circle of FCS football Hell will this loss consign the Griz? Only time and today's announcement of playoff seedings will tell. In the meantime, and in lieu of flowers, please send Griz coach Bobby Hauck and his staff a clue; they clearly didn't have one yesterday.

 

 

 

 

 

Random Observations

The most important event in human history begins tomorrow at noon in Bozeman, when the University of Montana Grizzlies play the Montana State Bobcats. The Bobcats have beaten the Grizzlies three years in a row, which is nearly unprecedented and completely unacceptable. That streak stops now—go, Griz!

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From the impeachment hearings:

Donald Trump’s “I want nothing. I want nothing. No quid pro quo” is simply an updated version of Richard Nixon’s caught-on-tape “We could get the money…but it would be wrong.” We should not forget that crooks, especially congenital crooks like Trump and Nixon, often speak crookedly.

Jim Jordan’s cross-examination of David Holmes consisted of Jordan’s rapid-fire (and at full volume) recitation of a list of thirteen separate incidents that had been mentioned in earlier testimony, almost all of which were damaging to Donald Trump. Was that really such a good idea?

If hearsay evidence is unreliable, why should we believe Gordon Sondland’s claim that Trump told him “I want nothing. I want nothing…”?

Can it be coincidence that Fiona Hill speaks with a British accent, as does the notorious “Dodgy Dossier” inventor, Christopher Steele? That alone should discredit Ms. Hill’s testimony.

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Update on my Pauline research:

It proceeds apace. I am now considering the connection between Paul’s theology and the doctrine of “theosis,” as articulated by Athanasius of Alexandria: “God became man so that man might become a god.” I am also linking Paul (and what I call his “Gospel of Deification”) to modern theologians Nikolai Berdyaev and Teilhard de Chardin, and to the late novelist Philip K. Dick.

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Book Report:

At long last, Eugene Mc Carraher’s THE ENCHANTMENTS OF MAMMON has been released; at 700+ pages, it’s a genuine doorstop of a book, which may explain why it took Mc Carraher this long to write it. The book purports to explain How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity; it arrives highly praised by the likes of Jackson Lears, Casey Nelson Blake, and Brad Gregory, and highly anticipated by the likes of me. Here is one passage, chosen at random, that illustrates Mc Carraher’s perspective, his passion, and his eloquence:

“The grotesque ontology of scarcity and money, the tawdry humanism of acquisitiveness and conflict, the reduction of rationality to the mercenary principles of pecuniary reason—this ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics must be resisted and supplanted. Economics must be challenged, not only as a sanction for injustice but also as a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history.”

THE ENCHANTMENTS OF MAMMON is my choice for “book of the year,” and I haven’t even read it yet.

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Finally: on Friday, November 22, 1963, the world changed—three rifle shots fired from a sixth-floor window of the Dallas School Book Depository shattered whatever illusions Baby Boomers might have had about the nature of the world. The Sixties were set in motion that day—or, as Gerald Ford might have put it, “our long national nightmare” had begun. Please wake me when it's over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRanxGWKF8M

Sunday Sermon

Teilhard de Chardin (from CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION): 

This feeling of the importance of the Whole has its roots in the furthest and most secret depths of our being. As a matter of intellectual necessity—as an affective need—and, maybe, by the direct impact made on us by the universe, we are constantly and essentially brought back to a consideration of the world, apprehended in its totality. 

On earth we are essentially separate, incomplete...we are seeking desperately for our completion; and we cannot find it by wedding ourselves to any element of the world taken in isolation...fundamentally, we have but one passion: to become one with the world which envelops us without ever being able to distinguish its face or its heart. Would man worship woman if he did not believe that he saw the universe mirrored in her eyes? 

When we read the evidence of certain Christian or pagan mystics, or even simply what many perfectly ordinary people may tell us in confidence, we cannot but quite seriously question whether there may not be a sort of cosmic consciousness in our soul, more diffuse than our personal consciousness, more intermittent, but perfectly well-defined—a sort of feeling of the presence of all beings at the same time, so that they are not perceived as multiple and separate but as forming part of one and the same unit, at least in the future. Whether this consciousness of the universal is a reality, or whether it is the materialization of a wish, of an expectation—that is a question for the psychologists to answer, if they can. The least one may say is that many people have believed they have experienced “cosmic consciousness...” 

In its vaguest, but most innate and persistent form, we see the feeling of the Whole as the fertilizer of poetic genius. Whether their theme be the great cosmogonic myths, great wars, great passions, or the grandeur of nature, poets have never been truly poets except insofar as they have responded to some flash of the absolute, of the universal making itself apparent to them in one or the other of [its] manifestations...we may say, I believe, that there is no profound poetry, no true lyricism, no sublimity in words, in art or in music, that does not rest upon evocation of the Whole, presentiment of, nostalgia for, the Whole.  

Philosophers, too, have tried to record the exact characteristics of, and to systematize, what poets of all ages have experienced and celebrated when this universal vibration reverberated in their souls—either because the philosophers also had this world-feeling, or simply because they wanted to understand what the poets meant...this may be remarkable, but it is in no way surprising. Poet, philosopher, mystic—it is hardly possible to be one without being the others. 

In the great stream of past mankind, poets, philosophers, and mystics—the long procession of those who have been initiated into the vision and cult of the Whole—have left behind them a central wake which we can follow unmistakably from our own days right back to the most distant horizons of history...  Whether expressed in poetic impulse or in philosophical constructions, pantheism in the wide sense in which I am now discussing it, as referring, that is, to a concern for the Whole, is seen to be religious, fundamentally religious. From beneath the most secular experience of love (provided it be deep), from beneath the most coldly reasoned construction of the universe (provided it seek to embrace the whole of the real), there always shines through some divine emotion, and over it passes a breath of worship. 

Sunday Sermon

Blaise Pascal (from PENSEES):

Let man then contemplate Nature in her full and lofty majesty, and turn his eyes away from the mean objects which surround him. Let him look at that dazzling light hung aloft as an eternal lamp to lighten the universe; let him behold the earth, a mere dot compared with the vast circuit which that orb describes, and stand amazed to find that the vast circuit itself is but a very fine point compared with the orbit traced by the stars as they roll their course on high.

But if our vision halts there, let imagination pass beyond it; it will fail to form a conception long before Nature fails to supply material. The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of Nature. No notion comes near it. Though we may extend our thought beyond imaginable space, yet compared with reality we bring to birth mere atoms. Nature is an infinite sphere whereof the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, imagination is brought to silence at the thought…

Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things, regard himself as lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is man face to face with infinity?

Let us then know our limits. We are something, but we are not all; such existence as we have deprives us of the knowledge of first principles whose source is the Nothing; and the pettiness of our existence hides from our sight the Infinite…

Such is [our] true condition, rendering us incapable of certain knowledge or of absolute ignorance. We sail over a vast expanse, ever uncertain, ever adrift, carried to and fro. To whatever point we think to fix and fasten ourselves it shifts and leaves us; and if we pursue it it escapes our grasp, slips away, fleeing in eternal flight. Nothing stays for us. That is our condition, natural, yet most contrary to our inclination; we have a burning desire to find a sure resting place and a final fixed basis whereon to build a tower rising to the Infinite; but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth yawns to the abyss. Our reason is ever cheated by misleading appearances; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites which enclose it and fly from it…

And what completes our incapacity to know things is the fact that they are simple in themselves, whereas we are composed of two natures, opposite and different in kind, viz, soul and body. For it is impossible that the reasoning part in us should be other than spiritual; and, though it were claimed that we are simply corporeal, that would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself; we cannot possibly know how it should know itself.

And so, if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all, and if we are composed of spirit and matter we cannot know perfectly things that are simple, whether spiritual or corporeal. Hence it comes that almost all philosophers confound ideas, and speak of corporeal things in terms of spirit, and of spiritual things in terms of matter. For they say boldly that bodies tend to fall, seek their center, fly from destruction, fear the void; that the thing possesses inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, which are all attributes that belong to mind alone. And, speaking of spirits, they regard them as possessing locality, and they assign to them movement from place to place, qualities belonging to body alone.

Instead of accepting these things in their pure simplicity, we tinge them with our own qualities, and we set the stamp of our composite being upon the simple things that lie before us.

You would surely think, when you see how we form everything of mind and body, that the resulting blend would be quite intelligible to us. Yet that is what we comprehend least of all. Man is to himself the most abnormal object in Nature, for he cannot conceive what body is, still less what is mind, and least of all how a body can be united to a mind. This is man’s crowning difficulty, and yet it is his essential being. “How the spirit is attached to the body is incomprehensible to man, and yet this is what man is.”

The Speech

Facing an impeachment investigation by Congress and embroiled in the political fight of his life, President Trump has suggested that he may appeal directly to the American people via a “fireside chat”.  I think that's a splendid idea, and I have therefore taken the liberty of revising a famous presidential speech (from March 4, 1987) which could serve Trump well should he opt for a modified limited hang out. ¹

My fellow Americans:

I've spoken to you from this historic office on many occasions and about many things. The power of the Presidency is often thought to reside within this Oval Office. Yet it doesn't rest here; it rests in you, the American people, and in your trust. Your trust is what gives a President his powers of leadership and his personal strength, and it's what I want to talk to you about this evening.

For the past three months day or two few minutes, I've been silent on the revelations about Ukraine. And you must have been thinking, "Well, why doesn't he tell us what's happening?" "Why doesn't he just tweet to us as he has in the past when we've faced troubles or tragedies?" “Can that possibly be his real hair?” Others of you, I guess, were thinking, "What's he doing hiding out at Mar-a-Lago?" “Why does Melania always look so unhappy?” Well the reason I haven't spoken to you before now is this: You deserve the truth, and I didn’t want you to have it. And as frustrating as the waiting has been, I felt it was improper to come to you with sketchy reports, or possibly even erroneous statements, which would then have to be corrected, creating even more doubt and confusion. There's been enough of that, and it’s starting to catch up with me.

Let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my Administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, mostly by Rudy Giuliani, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for Rudy Giuliani’s behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds -- well, as the Navy would say, this happens all the time. Get over it.

Let's start with the part that is the most controversial. A few weeks ago, I told the American people I did not withhold military aid from the Ukraine so that the Ukrainian government would dig up dirt on Joe Biden. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true; but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. ² So, damn the facts and the evidence.

What began as support for the beleaguered Ukraine, deteriorated in its implementation into trading American military aid for my personal political gain. This runs counter to my own public statements, to Administration propaganda, to what my friends at Fox News keep saying, and to the original strategy Congress had in mind. There are reasons why it happened, but no excuses. It was a mistake, and it’s Rudy Giuliani’s fault. The buck stops there.

It's clear from testimony before Congress that I let my personal concern for getting re-elected spill over into the geopolitical strategy of supporting Ukraine. I asked so many questions about Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and the missing DNC server where Crooked Hillary’s emails are stored, that I didn't ask enough about the specifics of the Ukraine situation. Also, I trusted Rudy Giuliani too much. I’ve always been a very trusting person.

Much has been said about my management style, a style that's worked successfully for me in building my magnificent real-estate empire, in becoming the world’s greatest reality tv star, and in winning an historic electoral victory in 2016 against Crooked Hillary, Lying Jim Comey, the lovers Strzok and Page, and the Fake News media. The way I work is, I use my very good brain to identify the problem, I figure out what’s in it for me, I hire Rudy Giuliani, let him find the right individuals to do the job, and then let them go to it while I maintain plausible deniability, never put anything in writing, and never let anyone get a look at my financials. I've found this invariably keeps me out of jail; at least, it has so far.

Yesterday I met with the entire professional staff of the National Security Council, most of them Never Trumpers. I defined for them the values I want to guide the national security policies of this country and to ensure my re-election. I told them that I wanted a policy that was as justifiable and understandable in public as it was in secret, where it would have remained if it weren’t for that treasonous whistleblower. I wanted a policy that reflected the will of the Congress as well as of the White House, and that promotes my own personal interests. And I told them that there'll be no more freelancing by individuals other than Rudy Giuliani when it comes to our national security.

One thing still upsetting me, however, is that no one kept proper records of meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I demanded the Ukrainian investigation into Joe Biden in exchange for military aid before or after I spoke to Putin about it. I did demand it. I just can't say specifically when. Well rest assured, there's plenty of recordkeeping now going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as plenty of document-shredding.

Now, what should happen when you make a mistake is this: You take your knocks; you learn your lessons, you find someone to blame, and then you move on. That's the healthiest way to deal with a problem. This in no way diminishes the importance of the other continuing investigations into my administration’s unprecedented corruption, but the business of our country and our people and my personal aggrandizement must proceed. I've gotten this message from Democrats in Congress, from former allies around the world who don’t trust us anymore, and -- if we're reading the signals right -- even from President Putin. And of course, I've heard the message from you, the American people, because, trust me, I have the very best ears and the very best hearing.

You know, by the time you reach my age, you've made plenty of mistakes. Or so I’m told; I’ve never personally made any mistakes. And if you've lived your life properly, so you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You find a scapegoat and throw him to the wolves. You get rid of the deadweight and the Deep State traitors, you punish your enemies, and you move on.

My fellow Americans, I have a great deal that I want to accomplish with you and for you and despite you and without your knowledge or consent over the next twelve years. And the Lord willing, that's exactly what I intend to do, because Article II of the Constitution gives me absolute power to do anything I want for as long as I want.

Good night, and I wish all of you the best of luck in your future endeavors. MAGA!

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The original of this inspiring speech is at: https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganirancontraspeech.htm

¹ “Modified limited hang out” is classic Nixonian jargon; see https://theruggedindividualist.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/modified-limited-hangout/

² Bill Clinton should have borrowed this as well: "A few weeks ago I told you that I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true; but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." 

Can Marco Rubio Save Capitalism from Itself?

Mirabile dictu, Senator Marco Rubio is the latest Republican to discover that Capitalism, for all its bounties, comes at a steep price. Following in the rhetorical footsteps of colleagues like Josh Hawley and Ben Sasse (and sounding not unlike George W. Bush when the latter preached “compassionate conservatism”), Rubio proposes something he calls “common-good capitalism” as an antidote to what ails our restive neo-liberal age. In an August article at First Things (“What Economics Is For”) and more recently in a speech delivered at Catholic University (“Human Dignity and the Purpose of Capitalism”), Rubio has staked his claim as an advocate for what Eric Levitz terms “producerist populism”. No one will confuse the senator’s economic prescriptions with those of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but to the extent that they (and he) flout right-wing orthodoxies, they are surely a step in the right direction.

Citing Roman Catholic teaching on economics and social justice, Rubio observes that “When dignified work is lost or unattainable, it corrodes the human spirit. Recent years have seen the destruction of jobs that provided a way of life for families and communities for generations. Despite the claims that a “new economy” would rescue them, the new fabric of American work is not thick enough to sustain them. Entire regions have been hollowed out. Even among those who have succeeded by the terms of the financial economy, there is an inescapable sense that their work is not productive in the way it was for generations prior.”

Rubio’s nostalgia for some Golden Age of American capitalism obscures the fact that the phenomena he describes are, and have always been, part and parcel of the capitalist bargain: “creative destruction” and all that. The absence of meaningful work, along with capitalism’s other affronts to “human dignity,” is nothing new, as social critics from John Ruskin to Lewis Mumford to Paul Goodman have pointed out.

Citing statements from a number of Catholic popes, Rubio reminds us that “the inviolable right to private property” must be balanced against “the essential role of labor unions” and must include “the moral duty of employers to respect workers not just as means to profit, but as human persons and productive members of their community and nation.” At the heart of a just economic order should be “the inviolable dignity of every human person, the work he or she does, and the family life that work supports.” Yet, inspirational as all that sounds, Rubio offers only the mildest of modifications to our current regime: he proposes “taxing stock buybacks and encouraging physical investment, building new hubs for manufacturing and innovation, and further expanding the federal per-child tax credit and enacting a paid family leave policy.” At the same time, and in deference to the same economic orthodoxy he criticizes, Rubio consistently votes for federal tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans, and votes against increases to the federal minimum wage.

In his speech at Catholic University, Rubio went out of his way to demonize not the capitalist system but its left-wing critics. While acknowledging that “the quest for profit goes too far when businesses desert the workers and communities that made them profitable in the first place simply to make goods more cheaply in other countries,” he emphatically rejected (even “derided”) socialist alternatives:

“Some politicians today entice us to embrace socialism, with the promise that only the government can provide us these things, but in practice that’s never how it works. A government that guarantees you a basic income is also one that decides where you work and how much you make. A government that promises you free health care—and it’s not free—is also one that decides who your doctor is and what care you’ll receive. A government that promises free college—and it’s not free—is also one that decides what school you must go to and what you are taught.”

That Rubio’s assertions are wrong on their face is less important than his willingness to recycle the same tired right-wing tropes that have been around since the New Deal almost a century ago, tropes  that were central to Ronald Reagan’s destructive “don’t trust the government” messaging. ¹ It’s hard to take seriously the idea of “common-good capitalism” when it’s based on such palpable nonsense. As Stephen Milies, from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, observed: “Rubio’s diagnosis is sound, but his solutions need some work.” Asked to be more specific, Milies replied, “Begin by abandoning capitalism.”

There’s an economic agenda worth promoting!

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https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/what-economics-is-for

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/11/06/marco-rubio-promotes-common-good-capitalism

¹ Speaking out in the mid-Sixties against “socialized medicine” (by which he meant Medicare) and its supposedly inevitable totalitarian consequences, Reagan warned “Once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment, from here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism -- to determining his pay, and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go, or what they will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”

Books Report

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." {Mark Twain}

RIGHTING AMERICA AT THE CREATION MUSEUM examines Ken Ham’s monumental exercise in disinformation (“alternate facts,” if you will): the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati. The authors, Susan and William Trollinger, both teach at the University of Dayton; for what it’s worth, they are also both listed at www.atheists.org. Their intention is plainly stated at the outset: “The Creation Museum seeks to shape Christianity and Christians in powerful ways that will have a lasting impact on American life. All of us have a stake in understanding what is happening at the museum and its role in preparing and arming crusaders for the ongoing culture war that polarizes and poisons U.S. religion and politics.” Alas, the Trollingers’ academic perspective results in a book significantly less entertaining than its subject matter promises, bogged down with solemn observations about “the linear grand narrative of developmental progress,” “the patriarchal family with its corresponding sexual division of labor,” and about how 19^th-century museums, in the face of “troubling forms of social and cultural decay at the hands of monopoly capitalism and technological change…provided encouragement especially for men about the dominant role that they needed to fulfill so that things might be right once again in America.” Reading RIGHTING AMERICA, it’s difficult not to wish it had been written by Bill Bryson, Jon Ronson, or someone else with a sense of humor and an appreciation of the absurd.

John Reeves’ THE LOST INDICTMENT OF ROBERT E. LEE presents The Forgotten Case Against an American Icon. That case, as Reeves reminds us, was both legal and moral in the wake of America’s deadly and hideously destructive Civil War; the decision not to put on trial the leading Southern general proved more consequential than any at the time could have known. It will come as a surprise to most readers—it did to me—that Lee was actually indicted for treason in June, 1865 by a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia; the presiding judge, John Underwood, declared that the Confederacy and its leaders had “hands dripping with the blood of slaughtered innocents.” THE LOST INDICTMENT tells the story of how it came to pass that Robert E. Lee was not only spared trial and conviction, but emerged as a tragic figure caught between conflicting loyalties; Lee’s transformation from traitor to hero became central to the postwar narrative of Southern nobility, gallantry, and honor.

Finally, THE LAST ADAM is A Study in Pauline Anthropology, written as a doctoral dissertation by Pauline scholar Robin Scroggs and published in 1966. According to Scroggs, Paul’s anthropology (his understanding of humanity) was conditioned by his Christology (his understanding of Christ); in his letters, Paul elaborated the contrast between the “old Adam” whose story was told in Genesis and the “new Adam,” the risen Christ who had been revealed to Paul by God. That contrast was stark, to say the least, and its implications were startling:

Just as the subjection of the cosmos was due to man’s sin, so the release will be due to man’s redemption from sin. In effect this means that the cosmos as well as man looks to the Last Adam for salvation…Paul does not use the term “new creation” as a metaphor. Man in Christ will be, indeed already is, a truly new creature...Paul is [not] speaking simply of some emotional, intellectual, or decisional experience of the natural man. Paul’s language implies further that the reality of this new nature is nothing more nor less than a restoration to that truly human reality God has always desired for man.

Paul took an exalted view of the “new Adam,” both as exemplified by Christ and as presaging the future status of the human race:

Christ by virtue of his resurrection is not changed from being a man; he is rather changed into the true man. While the two natures—earthly and exalted—differ radically in their existence, both are nonetheless human natures. The very fact that Christ is “first-born of many brethren” is an indication of his continuing humanity.

Paul contrasts the earthly nature of the first man [Adam] with the non-corporeal nature of the eschatological man, a nature which is probably to be seen as like that of angels...Christ’s resurrected body is of a heavenly “substance” [and] as a result of the life-giving pneuma, the believer will also possess a spiritual body. [For Paul] Adam and Christ are the founders of two races of men, the mankind of death and the mankind of life…Christ is the reality of true humanity [and] the revelation of divinity...Paul has taken up the radical emphasis of Judaism upon the theomorphism of man.

“Theomorphism” refers to the notion that humanity, created “in the image of God,” is destined for a God-like end; as Paul said, “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” THE LAST ADAM possesses the salutary virtue of taking Paul seriously and of not attempting to rationalize away his mysticism, however puzzling and even outlandish it may seem to modern readers.

Sunday Sermon

Robert W. Jenson, from “How the World Lost Its Story” (2010, First Things):

The modern world, the world that instrumental and critical reason built, is falling about us.

Modernity, it now becomes evident, has been all along eroding its own foundations; its projects and comforts have depended on an inheritance to which it has itself been inimical. Walter Lippmann spoke of “the acids of modernity”; as it turns out, the stones attacked by this acid have been those on which the modern world was itself erected. Analysts from all relevant disciplines converge on one insight: Modernity has lived on a moral and intellectual capital that it has not renewed, and indeed could not have renewed without denying itself. They moreover agree that this intellectual and moral capital was that built up by the Christian church’s long establishment in the West, also if they themselves do not share the church’s faith or even admire it.

The self-destruction of modernism can be described basically under two rubrics: story and promise…

The use of realistic narrative as the normal way of understanding human existence supposes that reality out there, “the world” itself, makes dramatic sense…into which narrative the stories we tell about ourselves can and sometimes do fit.

Modernity has supposed we inhabit what I will call a “narratable world.” Modernity has supposed that the world “out there” is such that stories can be told that are true to it. And modernity has supposed that the reason narratives can be true to the world is that the world somehow “has” its own true story, antecedent to, and enabling of, the stories we tell about ourselves in it.

There is no mystery about how Western modernity came by this supposition. The supposition is straightforwardly a secularization of Jewish and Christian practice—as indeed these are the source of most key suppositions of Western intellectual and moral life.

If there is little mystery about where the West got its faith in a narratable world, neither is there much mystery about how the West has lost this faith. The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring dis-allegiance from the God who was that faith’s object…Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.

The experiment has failed. It is, after the fact, obvious that it had to: If there is no universal storyteller, then the universe can have no story line. Neither you nor I nor all of us together can so shape the world that it can make narrative sense; if God does not invent the world’s story, then it has none, then the world has no narrative that is its own. If there is no God, or indeed if there is some other God than the God of the Bible, there is no narratable world.

Moreover, if there is not the biblical God, then realistic narrative is not a plausible means for our human self-understanding. Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives.

So much for story. Now for promise. Modernity was constituted by secularization of an aspect of Christian faith. The gospel is ineradicably an eschatological message…Modernity’s secularized version of eschatological faith was its notorious confidence in progress, and was constitutive for modernity’s whole practice and self-understanding. In its liberal version, confidence in progress shaped Europe and founded the United States. In its Marxist and pre-Marxist versions, confidence in progress fueled the great modern revolutions.

The First World War terminated Western Europe’s liberal faith in progress; and disastrous experiment has now terminated the Marxist version. America escaped the worst devastations of the wars and has always been more exclusively shaped by modernity than other nations, and so held on a couple of generations longer; now America too seems slowly to be accepting the evidence…when hope in progress has been discredited, modernity has no resource either for renewing it or for acquiring any other sort of hope. The mere negation of faith in progress is sheer lack of hope; and hopelessness is the very definition of postmodernism.

Most of those who talk of postmodernism are belated disciples of Friedrich Nietzsche. And to understand ourselves, we must indeed study Nietzsche. Specifically, we must learn from Nietzsche about nihilism, about an historical reality defined purely by negations. But only half of Nietzsche’s prophecy shows any sign of being fulfilled. In Nietzsche’s vision, the nihilism in which Western civilization ends was to be at once a collapse into decadence and the fulfillment of an absolute freedom. There would at once appear the hollow “last man” and the glorious “superman.” The “last man” is plainly on the scene, but superman is so far missing…while the Western world is now “post”-modern in the sense that modernity is dying around us, it is not “post”-modern in the sense that any new thing is yet replacing it.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/how-the-world-lost-its-story

Liberalism, Love, and Justice

There is no liberal cure for the problems of liberalism. {Paul W. Kahn}

I’ve previously mentioned Paul Kahn’s PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE as an example of an intelligent, nuanced critique of the liberal project—as opposed to the hysterical polemics of reactionaries and die-hard traditionalists, the sort of thing featured in my previous two posts. Kahn is hardly the first to note that liberalism emphasizes, and indeed demands, the supposedly autonomous individual, a self that is self-defined and always open to reinvention; nor is he alone in pointing out the price that is paid, by individuals and by the larger society, for that autonomy.

Paul Kahn:

The liberal’s understanding of the autonomous character of self is held in opposition to an understanding of the self as embedded or constituted by relationships that are always already in place…Liberalism [privileges] the subject’s capacity to separate self from context and to re-form the self on the basis of deliberative choice. The opponents of liberalism, on the other hand, privilege context over choice—that is, the already formed self over a critical capacity for reform.

Liberals are not unaware of the constraints placed on individuals by “context”; for example, they have long pointed to the relationship between poverty and crime, and between educational opportunities and future success. Despite that awareness, however, liberal theory (much like modern economic theory) continues to be predicated on a generic “individual” making choices in a vacuum:

To exercise choice as an autonomous, rational agent requires at least an imagined withdrawal from every relationship within which the subject finds him or herself. Existing relationships become authentic only when, and if, they are reaffirmed through choice. Life becomes a project made and unmade through the exercise of choice. Choice is valuable just to the degree that it produces an “examined” life. Thus, the autonomous individual frees the self from the unexamined irrationality of tradition. Context is evaluated by the autonomous chooser, and the source of that normative scrutiny is reason.

The elevation of reason over will is itself one of modernity’s more questionable moves. Among other things, it leaves liberalism unable to take seriously the (supposedly) unreasonable:

Our ability to engage in moral deliberation suffers from the success of liberalism. That success has left us with a moral language too impoverished to recognize what is at stake when we confront extreme differences in cultural norms. This should not be surprising, since the end of liberalism is to create a form of public discourse in which these differences would have no significance…Liberalism has literally nothing to say to those whose beliefs are illiberal.

Passions and “irrational” attachments are not to be taken seriously in a liberal polity; everything must be resolved through reason and logic, and all reasonable people should come to identical conclusions. In any disagreement, it is always the Other who is being stubborn and unreasonable. Kahn notes:

The belief that differences in values can be overcome through discourse is itself only a restatement of the liberal faith in a dialogical model of reason as though talking together will inevitably move us toward a set of common propositions. Ethical inquiry, however, is not science; it occurs across a field of difference that is not properly understood as grounded in mistake or ignorance. Normative differences can remain even after each party fully understands the other. Achieving an “unbeatable” argument, or reaching a synthetic proposition upon which all will unite, may simply not be possible.

Moving on from the realm of irreconcilable differences, Kahn focuses on the conflict between liberalism and communitarianism (variations of which can include Socialism and Personalism):

[Communitarian critics of liberalism] ask not, what should I do? But, for whom am I responsible? Individuals never appear for themselves alone, but are always already tied to others—family, friends, fellow citizens, or coworkers…On this view, the conditions imposed on moral deliberation are not those of pure reason, but those of attached individuals: love, friendship, trust, and support…Concrete difference, not abstract equality, is the starting point of moral behavior. That which is most morally praiseworthy in the individual is not the product of reasonable choice, but of the community’s power to move us in ways that are beyond reason. Parents’ actions on behalf of their children, just as citizens’ actions on behalf of their state, are based on virtues other than justice: for example, courage, duty, love. We are not attached to others on the basis of choice. Indeed, if we reason about these attachments as if they were objects of choice, we are likely to fail to be true to ourselves.

Naturally, we would like to have our cake and eat it too, combining the freedom of individuals with stable and lasting communities. Alas, no easy solution is in sight:

The problem of combining freedom and necessity has been a traditional puzzle of metaphysics; it is no less a problem of political and moral theory. We respond to both freedom of choice and commitment to others as ultimate values. We live a life in which the freedom of the self is constantly confronted by the need to constrain that freedom for the sake of others, whether family, friends, or fellow members of a common political community. Individuals and communities need both love and justice. We cannot say one is more important than the other.

It is not just liberalism, of course, that must seek to find a proper balance between autonomy and embeddedness: it is the task of any political order, just as it is the task of each of us as individuals. PUTTING LIBERALISM IN ITS PLACE is about liberalism’s shortcomings, but Paul Kahn has no illusions that anything superior is on the horizon; he simply wants to remind us that love and justice must be at the heart of our political life, or else that life, whatever its virtues, will leave us deeply dissatisfied.