I think only the last two lines make a marginal amount of sense, but Fry said we didn’t have to worry about that yet.  I recommend this book if you’re looking for a fun project anytime soon.

One of Fry’s points that resonates most with me is his insistence to read poems aloud and to savor the physicality of them.  Poetry, Fry insists, is a tactile pleasure and attempts to remove that tactile pleasure (one of the most well-intentioned and horrible pieces of advise is the speed reader’s demand to stop reading aloud, even mentally) ultimately remove the poetry from the poem.

But if we’ve lost, as Fry seems to think, our ability to appreciate poetry as a physical pleasure, we’ve put something else in its place.  Too many people view poetry as textual leftovers from a bout of mysticism; it’s a remainder that needs to be interpreted and figured out.  Popularly, the joy of poetry is the joy of the analyst.  Fry does his best to encourage his reader to avoid focusing first on meaning or interpretation.

Fry also points another problem with popular ideas of poetry.  In the face of the information required to get a grasp on the nuances of poetry (see the 20 page glossary), some teachers have opted to encourage students to express themselves or their feelings, and meter be damned.  Poetry as free verse romanticism is even more confusing than the intellectualist approach to poetry.

Modern folks tend to pursue one direction or the other; an intellectual gnosticism or a willfully ignorant retreat from it.  Poetry is a highly complex form of intellectual communication, or it’s an emotive explosion of words onto a page.  I dislike both these ideas so I’m happy to see Fry does as well.

Stephen Fry is great, and here’s a couple of clips.  Oh, and he’s an Auburn fan.  War Eagle, Mr. Fry!

The Incarnation is rooted in two things, which, according to Athanasius, must happen for true redemption to occur.  Because the fall consists in both an offense and a corruption, there must be both propitiation of the transgression and a restoration of nature.  Athanasius asserts that, while any deity could pardon the offense by fiat, only an incarnate divinity could take on the task of restoring nature.  The incarnate divinity must necessarily be the Creator of the race as well; what was created free from corruption must be redeemed from its corruption by the one who established it in the first place.

If we allow that a deity could, by fiat, establish some kind of redemption based on observances and works, there remains the nasty problem of the corruption of nature.  Such a fiat would be an eternal and transcendent decree, and it is hard to imagine, without pointing fingers, how a religion based on this kind of redemption would look.  But it also brings to mind a dilemma: either there is a corrupted human nature which requires some kind of divine action in the immanent realm, or, if there is no corrupt nature that requires such an action, there is a problem of explaining why sin occurs at all, let alone at the scope it does.

I’m interested in knowing whether this little treatise was preserved in the West at all.  According to Jaroslav Pelikan, during the 10th and 11th centuries, theologians realized they could not address the issue of predestination without first understanding the person and work of Christ.  Pelikan notes that a number of theologians not only explored the Incarnation as a requirement of redemption as  Athanasius did in the early fourth century, but asserted that Incarnation was a metaphysical requirement, regardless of the particular religion.  For them, the Incarnation was not merely a peculiar feature of the Christian religion, but a way to judge other religions wanting.

Cease to do evil,

Learn to do good;

Seek justice,

Correct oppression;

Bring justice to the fatherless,

Plead the widow’s cause.                                                         Isaiah 1:16b-17

Isaiah is communicating a sequence of moral development that avoids legalism in some important ways.  It connects morality with two kinds of abstract ideas: those that are best understood attributes of God, and those that are the inverse and privation of those attributes in fallen man.  The Israelites became legalists when they started following minute laws while forgetting the sources of those laws.  The way to avoid a similar fate is to focus on the good and the just, and to understand the practice of the law in the context of who God is.  The result is a spiritual morality based on emulation of these attributes of God, not a series of cultural practices in the process of ossification.

These verses don’t give us merely with a list, but a sequence.  Beginning with an admonition to washing, Isaiah describes a sequence of actions primarily with the cessation of evil-doing.  Then we are to learn to do good.  In the same way, if you were giving directions to someone lost on the road, you might tell them to “Come to a complete stop, and then turn around.”  It is a tragedy when all we say is “Stop,” and fail to give another alternative.  This kind of stop-morality is the image of Christian preaching in the United States, and if we follow Isaiah correctly here, we should realize that it’s not enough to qualify as true preaching.  If our scope of exhortation stops at any point on this list, we’ve failed to admonish people to morality in full.

Seek justice.  Once the Israelites learn to do good the next step is the search for justice.  Note that here we have a search, and not a discovery.  The sequences that began with inwardness has moved to outwardness and extension.  Once we have identified justice, we are to correct oppression.  Building off a knowledge of evil we may see injustice clearly, and having learned to do good we may enthusiastically fight against oppression.  Training in the individual prepares us for fighting in the social.  And the former should lead to the latter, not as a replacement, but as a necessary progression as the result of the mastery of the former.  Such a mastery could not be considered a mastery without such an outgrowth.

This passage wonderfully undermines two significant tendencies in our modern churches.  The first is the tendency towards a moralism that focuses on the individual.  These folks stop after “learn to do good.”  Not realizing that moral spiritual development is a sequence, they have abridged the process and forestalled growth, which is why these churches so often to the outside world appear stagnant.

The second tendency is the focus on the more social side of the sequence, such as the correction of oppression and the alleviation of suffering.  This is why theological movements away from morality and towards social justice are short-lived and are often transmuted into something else.  Instead of realizing that communal restoration depends on personal restoration, people try to go for the fun-sounding social justice immediately without the trying individual cultivation required for the sustainability of such actions.  To other Christians, these people seem confused and even contradictory.  To the outside world, they do not seem like the threat or offense in the ways that, according to some good sources, they should.

The individual and the social so seamlessly fused as we do in this passage connote ideas of the Trinity.  The final couplet even justifies this idea by invoking both God the Father and God the Son.  In bringing justice to the fatherless, we mimic the Father in his adoption of us.  In pleading the widow’s cause we mimic Christ who not only pleads the case of us his lonely bride but eventually takes the Church as his wife.

If what we’re seeing here is an actual sequence, and not simply a list, then the stakes are much higher than previously imagined.  Every time I do evil, not only do I do evil in the context of myself, but I stall my progression on the list, becoming complicit in the evils of injustice, oppression, and abuse.

As Kester notes, in earlier generations Christianity was conflated with power and moral authority.  In reacting to that, younger people have imagined Christianity as a reservoir of hip, where a seeker can find a handful of truths and creeds, which, out of their context, seem dreamily archaic.

These two positions (power and cool) have established an unnerving spectrum in churches.  You already know what the positions are, and you already know the debates.  You could play through them in your head if you wanted.  And because power and cool are the factors that matter, it guarantees that discussions will always miss the point, because the terms we use are not Christ.  In seeking to be hip, the cool generation missed the opportunity to critique the preceding generation’s lust for power in a way that would actually have saved that generation.

Now, opposition to hip Christianity often looks like a return to power Christianity.  Which is why people leave churches because some vote for Obama, the child-killing Muslim, and why others leave because they can’t stand that fellow congregants believe that Obama is a Muslim and feel awkward condemning abortion.  This is disturbing enough as it is, without thinking about all the lost time spent on a bad debate.  And without thinking that we still don’t have (even though we always have) a solution.

His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified . . . John 12:16

John has some of the most inspiring and instructive asides in his narrative to be found in literature:  ”I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” “these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,” and so on.

Until Pentecost, we get the impression that the disciples are a bumbling crowd of misfits who have more in common with broken clocks than with the great writers of Christianity.  And while a number of factors account for this, in the quoted passage it seems like there is a distinction between the disciples looking at Jesus and the crowds, who are shouting hosanas as they see the king on the donkey.  By seeing Jesus against the backdrop of their daily lives, the crowds saw how he stood out not only from their sinful lives, but also from the way that sin was treated by religious leaders.  Jesus, the son of God, Jesus, who when a prostitute was brought before him for a verdict, forgave her, even as Pharisees sought to stone her with material that had been created through Jesus.

And yet John writes that the disciples understood all of it only later, and it seems like a very typical problem for the people who are around Jesus most of the time.  We look at Jesus, we work to understand him, but we still don’t see him the way others do.  He’s always around.  Worship is effort, and prayer is labor.  We are tempted to treat Jesus as a common thing, as someone for whom we’ve accounted.  But, as John writes, Jesus addresses even this problem as well as his glory passes through the world.

But today I was thinking on Chigurh’s crash in the final sequences of the film, and I was struck by how it deviates from the gnostic theme of the movie to critique the possibility of chance overcoming fate or evil.  It’s McCarthy’s demonstration of an attempted deus ex machina, in an almost literal interpretation of that device.  Chance can’t stop Chigurh though, who throws $100 at some boys for a shirt while they look on in awe of his compound fracture.  He gets up and hobbles off before the authorities arrive to inspect the scene, escaping justice once again.  It’s McCarthy saying that God isn’t going to help out, and no, the universe isn’t going to right itself either.

Hunter correctly emphasizes that all the talk about cultural engagement does one thing, and only thing only: it keeps us from noticing that meaningful change isn’t happening.  Using Colson as a source, Hunter identifies this mode of cultural interaction as a fight for the “hearts and minds” of the population.  The premises being that good societies are made up of good individuals, Colson’s enterprise was bound to develop a kind of schizophrenia.  By most statistics, observations, and even the nightmares of freedom-seeking New Atheists, the U.S. is still a patently Christian nation, with many people classifying themselves as such.  But governance is no good.  So if people are good but the larger society remains with corrupting laws, political action is the solution.  But political action hasn’t produced any notably positive results for Christians, and it’s made Christianity sound shrill to the outside world.

The keyword for considering whether someone is good or not, for Colson, was “worldview.”  A person’s worldview was at total system through which all entering information was processed.  Philosophically, we’d say this was an internalist perspective, in which beliefs are always internally validated.  This model for “worldview” has been passed down through recent decades, even becoming a part of RUF’s four-vectored growth model.  But Hunter critiques it for its idealism.  By idealism he doesn’t mean romantic and woozy feelings about changing the world.  No, he means big bad capital-I Idealism.  You know, the German stuff.  Manifested in the context of religious debates, idealism makes any kind of common ground impossible since disagreeing observers have two fundamentally different perspectives of the same issue.  A compromise would not be seen a a product of debate, but as a breach of worldview and a loss of faith.  And we’re seeing the results of politicized idealism all over the place, as parties make platforms by adopting increasingly extreme positions.  And the cultural change, at least as it was imagined, is yet to be seen.

Hunter instead promotes a different model of cultural change.  It only happens when three factors converge: intellectuals and leaders, institutions, and resources.  Hunter provides a brief history of Christian effectiveness in a culture and it is, primarily, a top-down approach.  Instead of converting the hell out of everyone, figures like Alcuin influenced institutional leaders like Charlemagne to dramatically changed the Carolingian empire.  What followed was an eighth and ninth century renaissance in all areas of culture.  Cultural benefits trickled down.  He follows the example with others like the politics of the Reformation and ethical reform movements in the modern era.  Following the emphasis that cultural change happens from the top down, he shows how present Christians have very little to do with our culture’s most elite areas like top-tier academies (including their funding), outstanding liberal and fine arts, and philosophies of ethics and law.  In the higher levels of society, Christians are notably absent.

If Hunter sounds like an elitist, it’s because he’s concerned about a prevailing egalitarianism in Christian communities, especially in Baptist circles.  Christian egalitarianism, in combination with a separatist worldview, has left us with Christian bookstores, Christian television and movies, and, worst of all, contemporary Christian music.  In pursuing a parallel culture, Christians have actually replicated some of the worst parts of the culture at large, thereby losing opportunities to faithfully witness and prophetically denounce consumerist lifestyles.  As Hunter writes:

“Speaking as a Christian myself, contemporary Christian understandings of power and politics are a very large part of what has made contemporary Christianity in America appalling, irrelevant, and ineffective—part and parcel of the worst elements in late-modern culture today, rather than a healthy alternative to it.” p. 95

Hunter instead proposes a method of faithful presence that permits a true engagement with the culture at all levels, which will presumably be the subject of the second essay.

I contend that the dominant ways of thinking about culture and cultural change are flawed, for they are based both on specious social science and problematic theology.  In brief, the model on which various strategies are based not only does not work, but it cannot work.  On the basis of this working theory, Christians cannot “change the world” in a way that they, even in their diversity, desire.  p. 5

This looks to be a very promising read, and not just because I always like people busting on the social sciences.  Keller, Taylor, and Wolterstorff blurbed it for starters, and Hunter’s bibliography is even more encouraging, with major appearances by Taylor, Wolterstorff, Volf, Milbank, Ward, Ellul, and Popery team captain Brown.

To Change the World has already received some serious endorsements from friends in Austin and it’s already a part of my heavily revised summer reading, which is mostly comprised of classical texts and their critical companions, but also include some of the books I had originally planned to read.  Alright, back to the book.