Force Becomes Structure: David Bentley Hart on the Cause of Controversy

July 14, 2010

More pressing matters have delayed me from saying more about the controversy conference, but I do want to return to it and say a bit about some of the other lectures while the memory is still fresh.  The afternoon of the first day of the conference was graced by the presence (via videoconference) of David Bentley Hart and Robert Jenson, both titans of the American theological landscape and both known as well for their colorful personalities, which came through even from 5,000 miles away.  

Hart’s lecture was entitled a “Penitential Approach to Controversy,” though that was not really its main focus.  The penitence referred to was his own, coming to us as he did with a  legendary reputation for bombastic theological rhetoric.  We can, he said, invoke the prophets as a model for dramatic controversial pronouncements, but we must acknowledge that most of us are not called to be prophets in this way, and that went for him as well.

Hart proposed in his lecture to offer us not so much an argument as an intuition of why it is that ferocious controversy has been such a perennial feature of the Christian Church’s life, despite the New Testament’s clear calls for peace and unity.  His suggestion was provocative and intriguing, disturbingly similar to liberal reconstructions of the early Church of the von Harnack variety, and yet refusing to grant their apostate conclusions.  

There is a deep tension at the heart of the Christian faith, he suggested, between its apocalyptic other-worldiness and its need to become assimilated to history, to life in this world.  Dogma and cult were the means by which the Church had to tame, as it were, the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Gospel and make it suitable for millenia of waiting for the consummation.  Christianity entered history not as a set of doctrines, but as an apocalypse; it constituted an overturning of history and nature as we know them, or as we think we know them.  There could be no simple return to the sacred as formerly understood, and there didn’t have to be, because history was coming to an end.  Christianity thus accords ill with any purely cultic rationality. 

It would take some time, and some adjustment of expectations, for so singular an interruption of the eschatological into the temporal to be recuperated into a stable institution of words and practices.  Christianity had to become historical again, cultural again, cultic again.  Christianity was forced to take on the morphology of the religions which it had replaced, without compromising its content.  What began as force had to become structure--the event had to crystallize. 

Now thus far, this has a great deal of similarity to certain liberal narratives, but Hart does not take all this to mean that the assimilation to history was wrong, or something that we need to undo.  It is necessary and valuable--dogma and cult and all the rest.  Nonetheless, there is a tragic element to this accomodation between apocalypse and cult.  The apocalyptic force of the Christian revelation, its newness and power, its difference from all that came before, is too volatile to permanently and comfortably sit at ease within its own institutional boundaries.  It is for this reason, suggests Hart, that Christianity has proved so uniquely fissile, and creative even of a militant atheism and nihilism.  There is an ungovernable destructive energy at the heart of Christianity that is always at tension with its constructive impulses. 

Dogma, therefore, the Christian event’s assumption of a fixed, historical, and institutional form, although it can be the poetic discovery of language for speaking about God, is also in some sense the language of disenchantment.  It wants to recuperate the force of a cosmic disruption in the form of institutional formulae.  This is not something to be lamented--we must accept the workings of providence.  But dogma always has some quality of disappointment about it.  We speak in these formal terms because we have not yet seen with our eyes and felt with our hands.  And with this disappointment comes an impulse to anger.

It is this anger, this spiritual discontentment, and not merely the mixing of the Church with politics, that explains part of the violence of the controversy witnessed in the early Church.  Theological hatred, Hart suggested, may be at some level a reflex of fear, fear that the Gospel, exposed to the corrosion of ordinary time, may be reduced only into history.  

Another phenomenon might also be going on: there is something in the pursuit of theology that is a constant frustration of human pride, and thus calls forth ever more assertive expressions of human pride.  We are thwarted by the surfeit of truth over the limits of human language.  But even more importantly, all our attempts to speak about God are overwhelmed by God’s speaking of Himself in time.  It challenges and cancels our customary attempts at meaning, and destroys the human ambition to ascend unaided to the summits of truth.  Theology thus carries with it a certain measure of resentment, a resentment toward grace.  

It is from this resentment, our unspoken recognition of our inability to gain a true grasp of that of which we speak, that leads to the anger that bursts forth so intemperately in the midst of theological controversy.  Controversy must therefore always be carried on in penitence, penitence for our resentment against God.

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I have nothing to add to this fascinating and powerful thesis, except the objection that was voiced by several in the Q&A afterward--namely, that Hart’s thesis is perhaps better seen as a paradigm for understanding what is always true about the Christian revelation, than as a historical explanation of how the Church evolved.  Indeed, that is more how I have presented it here.  But, although he was counseling no return to primitivism, he did seem to claim that the Church was in the beginning characterized by this apocalyptic otherworldiness, in constant expectation of the end of the world, and then only after a century or so realized that it had to settle down and develop doctrine.  This obscures the fact that controversy over doctrine and the institutional shape of the Church is present already in the New Testament itself.  Nonetheless, with this caveat, I find that Hart’s intuition seems to ring true, and promises to perhaps shed a lot of light on the theological experience.

Church and Controversy Quick-Takes

July 5, 2010

(This post is not about VanDrunen--can you believe it?)

I just returned from an immensely fruitful weekend in Aberdeen, attending the conference “Theology, the Church, and Controversy,” hosted by the wonderfully hospitable Francesca Murphy and featuring such luminaries in theology and ethics as John Webster, Robert Jenson, David Bentley Hart, Brian Brock, and the inimitable Peter Leithart.  The conference featured an excellent lineup of papers exploring how the Church ought to engage in controversy from historical, ethical, and theological angles, and a fantastic roundtable discussion at the end that wrestled its way through the question of how we ought to engage the homosexuality controversy today.  (Not to mention, of course, the “Church Controversy Charades” that featured such once-in-a-lifetime experiences as watching John Webster attempt to visually act out the heresy of universalism, or Peter Leithart reenacting the castration of Abelard.)

A recurrent question that seemed to go back and forth during the conference in an irresolvable tug-of-war was: is controversy a blessing for the Church or an aberration that should be avoided wherever possible?  

A couple months ago this question was highlighted by Davey Henreckson at Theopolitical a couple months back, who pointed to an article in Christianity Today comparing an N.T. Wright conference in Wheaton with a simultaneous neo-Reformed conference at Louisville.  For the neo-Reformed, 

“protecting disputed doctrines against heresy is where good theology is born. Clear thinking comes from friction and protestation, from Hegelian dialectics (R.C. Sproul spoke on this), but not from compromise. The Patristic Fathers got it right whenever they were ironing out disputed doctrines and fighting against heresy, said Ligon Duncan in his talk. But on matters that were not disputed, he said, their thought sometimes got muddled up.”  

This is a common sort of claim to make, especially in Reformed circles.  Controversy is necessary to bring truth to light; without it, we would grow dull and lose our grip on the Gospel.  Fighting, then, is a necessary and desirable part of the life of the Church, suggesting that, if we ever find ourselves without fights, we should perhaps stir some up to get ourselves back in shape.  

Although no one at the Aberdeen conference put things quite that combatively, there were certainly a few talks that sought to emphasize a bit more the positive side of theological controversy.  Robert Jenson, for instance, argued that “provocations” are an important part of the Church’s life, and although some of these will be wholly destructive, and some would have been destructive but for God overruling and bringing good out of evil, some are clearly constructive, despite painful side-effects, such as when some Christians began preaching against segregation in the 1960s.  Peter Leithart, too, despite being the gentle irenist that we all know and love, sounded a rather combative note in his defence of Athanasius, so much so that he was quickly type-cast by some who did not know him as the stereotypical pugnacious Presbyterian.  

Brian Brock, on the other hand, taking as his subjects Stanley Hauerwas and the French philosopher Michel Serres, argued that Hauerwas’s combative, intentionally provocative style stood at odds with his pacifistic convictions, and that Serres’s pursuit of peaceful discourse was a more consistent pacifism.  This was not to say that there was no legitimate place for Hauerwasian provocations, but it must be a very subordinate place.  The most powerful account of the negative role of controversy was given in a brilliant and sophisticated paper by John Webster, “Theology and the Peace of the Church,” which came first, and set the tone for much of the rest of the conference, culminating in a fascinating exchange between Leithart and Webster at the roundtable discussion at the end of the conference over the doctrine of God and theological method.

Intriguingly, the flamboyant and combative David Bentley Hart sounded, if anything, a more Websterian note, appearing before us as a public penitent for his own propensity to violent rhetorical outbursts against error.  (Needless to say, I hope that he does not overcome this vice too quickly, as it makes for jolly entertaining reading!)  

That’s just a little taste for now; I hope over the next few days to be posting reflections from each of these talks and a couple others, with particular attention to Webster and the discussions he engendered.

Some gems from Hart on Religion in America

David Bentley Hart's essay on "Religion in America" from In the Aftermath had me chortling with glee at various points, and pondering profound observations at others. Hart's generous-minded, boisterously cynical assessment of the absurdities of American Christianity, which nevertheless compares favorably with the desiccated wasteland of modern secularist Europe, is one of the finest essays I have read.

In this post, I will just offer some of the more delightful lines and sharpest daggers from his glittering prose:

The station's oblong pillars were blackly begrimed; shreds of posters in garish hues hung limply from the walls; in shallow depressions of the concrete floor opaque pools of oleaginous water glistened with a sinister opalescence; an astringent chemical odor of antiseptics vying with various organic purulences suffused the damp air; a scattering of gaunt torsos farther along the platform bore eloquent witness to the malaise of Britain's post-war gene pool.

The last line there really had me in awe.

Or how about this vicious jab at American culture:

Obviously, in any number of ways, America is late modernity's avant-garde; in popular culture, especially, so prolific are we in forms of brutal vapidity and intellectual poverty that less enterprising savages can only marvel in impotent envy.

And one of his best summary statements on American Christianity:

Most of us, for instance, rarely have cause to reflect that some of the variants of America's indigenous evangelical Christianity, especially of the "fundamentalist" sort, would have to be reckoned--if judged in the full light of Christian history--positively bizarre. Yet many of its dominant and reputable churches have--quite naturally and without any apparent attempt at novelty--evolved a Christianity so peculiar as to be practically without precedent: an entire theological and spiritual world, internally consistent, deeply satisfying to many, and nearly impossible to ground in the scriptural texts its inhabitants incessantly invoke.

In justifying his confidence that the evangelical denominations will soon wholly outstrip the liberal mainline denominations:

I merely observe that theologically and morally conservative believers tend to have more children. Conservative American Christians reproduce at a greater rate than their liberal brethren, and at an enormously higher rate than secularized America; the extraordinary growth of traditionalist Christian communities in recent decades is something that has been accomplished not only by indefatigable evangelization, but by the ancient and infallible methods of lawful conjugation and due fruition.

A description of the current culture war in America that is second to none:

"It is a tension that--for want of that precious medium, civilization--looks likely to increase, for our extremes are becoming very extreme indeed: a modernity drained of any of the bright refinements and moral ambitions of Enlightenment reason or humanist idealism, reduced to a "high" culture of insipid ethical authoritarianism and a low culture consisting in a dreary hedonism (without a hint of healthy Rabelaisian festivity), ever more explicit and repetitive celebrations of violence, sartorial and sexual slovenliness, atrocious music, and an idyllic emancipation from the fetters of literacy or (in fact) articulacy; and an antiquity of real and dynamic power, but largely uncontrolled by any mediating forces of order, stability, unity, or calm. To the dispassionate observer, there might be something exhilarating in the spectacle, the grand titanic struggle--within the very heart of their homeland--between a secular culture of militant vanity and incorruptible coarseness and a Christian culture of often prosaic experientialist ardor."

Finally, the best, a delightful dismemberment of the liberal Episcopalian, John Shelby Spong:

"All of which [the rise of African Christianity] tends to make rather hilarious a figure like John Spong, the quondam Episcopal bishop of Newark. It was Spong who, in 1998, produced a hysterical screed of a book, pompously entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die, that--in arguing for a "new Christianity," unburdened by such cumbrous appurtenances as, for instance, God--succeeded only in making audible the protracted death rattle of a moribund church. It was Spong also who, that same year, appalled that African bishops at the Lambeth Conference were about to defeat movements towards an official Anglican approbation of homosexuality, delivered himself of a fiercely petulant diatribe almost touching in its unreflective racism; these Africans, he declared (all of whom were far better scholars and linguists than he, as it happens), had only recently slouched their way out of animism, and so were susceptible to "religious extremism" and "very superstitious" forms of Christianity. Now, admittedly, Spong is a notorious simpleton, whose special combination of emotional instability and intellectual fatuity leaves him in a condition rather like a chronic delirium tremens; so it is not surprising that, on being somewhat unceremoniously roused from the parochial midden on which he had been contentedly reclining, his reaction should be puerile and vicious; but is perplexity and rage were genuine and understandable."

Hart on Christ and Nothing

In this flat-out phenomenal essay, David Bentley Hart argues that there is no danger of our culture reverting into a kind of paganism; on the contrary, the only remaining alternative to Christianity in Western society is the nihilism of individualist self-love. This is far worse than the rather more noble ancient paganism, which, for all its problems, at least had some sense of the numinous, some sense that there was something to be feared, that man ought to stand in awe at. Christianity, he suggests, in asserting the absolute ultimacy and universality of God, devoured all that was good in the ancient pagan faith, all the traces of nobility which held nihilism in check, showing that they were properly fulfilled in the Christian God. Because of this, paganism was so thoroughly demolished that it is no longer a genuine option for Western civilization…all roads to paganism ultimately lead to Christ now. All that is left is the husk of nihilism that was left when Christianity plundered paganism.
I really shouldn’t give it all away, but here’s the last page, just to give you an idea of how amazing it is:

Modern persons will never find rest for their restless hearts without Christ, for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity; and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myth of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. And, where it works its sublimest magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet, and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair. But perhaps Christians—-while not ignoring how appalling such a condition may be—-should actually rejoice that modernity offers no religious comforts to those who seek them. If this is a time of waiting, marked most deeply by the absence of faith in Christ, it perhaps good that the modern soul should lack repose, piety, peace, or nobility, and should often find the world outside the Church barren of spiritual rapture or mystery, and should go about vainly looking for terrible or merciful gods to adore. With Christ came judgment into the world, a light of discrimination from which there is neither retreat nor sanctuary. And this means that, as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve the God Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—-the nothing. No third way lies open now, because—-as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not—-all things have been made subject to him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath his feet, until the very end of the world, and—-simply said—there is no other god.

Reveling in Milbank and Hart

I got two new books in the mail yesterday (the first time I’ve ordered new books in a depressingly long time), and rarely has so much genius graced my mailbox with its presence. I could barely restrain my excitement as I opened them—John Milbank’s The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology and David Bentley Hart’s In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments. Being both collections of occasional essays, rather than sustained monographs, they will be perfect for the kind of morsel-sized reading I will have time for in the next month of travel across our vast and scattered nation. Since I was too impatient to read both to abandon one to devote attention to the other, I read first the Preface of Milbank’s and then the Preface of Hart’s. And I was already captivating. From page 1, Milbank is at his usual business of hitting ideological nails on the head with a hammer of remarkable weight, and Hart is at his usual business of deftly plucking them from the wall with the other end of the hammer, swinging them around his head, and lobbing them across the room.

Consider the following from Milbank, which puts very neatly what I have been clumsily trying to say for the last few months:

Today, of course, what we really have is two versions of a ‘left’ celebration of the ‘Many’ either as individuals or as a democratically voting mass. For reasons still not yet sufficiently accounted for by historians and social theorists, we have a ‘liberal right’ stressing economic negative liberty and a ‘liberal left,’ stressing cultural and sexual negative liberty. In reality, of course, the two liberalisms are triumphing both at once and in secretly collusive harmony. So perhaps what still sustains party conflict is alternating anxieties amongst the populace about the inevitable insecurities generated by now economic and now cultural ‘freedom’ in different temporal phases.

In just ten pages of Preface, Milbank makes the most intellectually powerful case I have yet seen for sweeping aside the false options of both right and left and adhering instead to a “Christian socialism” that is ecclesiocentric, anti-statist, and simultaneously democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical. No doubt this book will make many appearances on this blog over the coming couple months.

Meanwhile, Hart’s sparkling prose had me chortling with glee. He grudgingly offers some apology for his fiercely satirical criticisms, and then says,

My only defense—apart from confessing my sense that imperturbably mild manners often make for boring copy—is that I have never intentionally used language I thought disproportionately fierce in regard to any proposition or thinker, and that in reviewing these essays I cannot honestly find an instance of invective I particularly regret. Perhaps the most savage personal remarks I have ever committed to print are those I made regarding the bioethicist Joseph Fletcher in an article entitled ‘The Anti-Theology of the Body,’ and they astonished even me by their vehemence when I read them again in preparing this volume; I did not, however, alter them, or even soften them to the degree that the editors of The New Atlantis did when the article originally appeared, for the simple reason that they still do not seem unwarranted to me given the altogether loathsome nature of Fletcher’s ideas, and the scandal that so many of our tenured intellectuals do not recoil from those ideas with the horror and revulsion they merit. I do not know if I believe that any quantity of abuse heaped upon persons like Fletcher is truly excessive, except in tactical terms: if one wants to convince others of the justness of one’s views of anything, perhaps one ought to proceed in as moderate and cautious a manner as one can. But, then again, perhaps one occasionally should not; some ideas are simply evil, and the persons who conceive them somewhat depraved, and there may be something rather disgraceful in an unwillingness to say so.

Then he goes on to discuss his vicious critique of Daniel Dennett,

who, whatever his faults, could never be indicted of the sort of moral idiocy that permeated Fletcher’s work. In matters historical, religious, and even philosophical, Dennett is clearly something of an ignoramus; and he has always been a bad philosopher, however much he may be adored by journalists and book reviewers and his ideological comrades; and, since his work now belongs to that parasitic subcategory of analytic philosophy that serves simply as a sort of adjunct to the hard sciences, he no longer writes philosophy anyway. All of that would be quite pardonable, though, were it not for the self-importance, condescension, and imperiousness of his writings on the relation between scientific reason and religious belief. Ignorance and defective logic become truly offensive only when combined with invincible and self-deluding arrogance….[His book Breaking the Spell] is no worse, admittedly, than the books of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens (though Hitchens, even if he cannot think his way to the end of a simple syllogism, can write fairly well, as Dennett most emphatically cannot); but the arguments of a philosopher—even a bad philosopher—must be held to a higher standard. Of course, the truth is that the entire tribe of the ‘New Atheists’ is a disappointment. A reflective and brilliant atheist is a man much to be admired, if he truly demonstrates an understanding of what it is he is rejecting; and an atheist genuinely willing to accept the full implications of his convictions (Nietzsche being a nonpareil example) should not be reviled for those convictions. But it seems obvious that among the innumerable evidences of late modern culture’s lack of spiritual depths one must include its manifest impotence to produce profound atheists. Instead, the best it seems we can hope for today are dreary purveyors of historical illiteracy, theatrical indignation, subfusc moralizing, and the sort of logical confusions that Richard Dawkins has brought to a level of almost transcendent perfection.