A Heart in the Door

The politics of modernity has so successfully made Christianity but another life-style option it is a mystery why the new atheists think it is important to show what Christians believe to be false. Such a project hardly seems necessary given that Christians, in the name of being good democratic citizens, live lives of unacknowledged but desperate unbelief just to the extent they believe what they believe as a Christian cannot be a matter of truth.

As a result, Christians no longer believe that the church is an alternative politics to the politics of the world which means they have lost any way to account for why Christians in the past thought they had a faith worth dying for.

The widespread confidence that medicine will someday “cure” death is a fantasy. The attempt to develop and maintain a medicine so aimed, moreover, depends on the creation of wealth as an end in itself. A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like “Why does a good God let bad things happen to good people?” Such people cannotP imagine that a people once existed who produced the Psalms. If we are to learn to say “God,” we will do so with the prayer, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I think “ethics” depends on developing the eye of the novelist. If my work is compelling, I suspect it is so to the degree I am able to write like a novelist. If I have a novelist’s eye, it is not accidental. I have, after all, spent many years reading novels. Reading novels will not necessarily make one better able to see without illusion, but it can help.

I have spent a lifetime being misunderstood by people who think they know what I think, given what they think, but in fact I am trying to change how they think.

From Rowan [Greer] I learned to distrust the accounts of the debates surrounding the Trinity and Christology that presented the issues largely in philosophical terms. The issues, at least as Rowan presented them, were exegetical. I became increasingly convinced that he was right.

The presumption of many scholars at the time was that the task of theology was to make the language of faith amenable to standards set by the world. This could be done by subtraction: “Of course you do not have to believe X or Y”; or, by translation, “When we say X or Y we really mean…” I was simply not interested in that project. From my perspective, if the language was not true, then you ought to give it up. I thought the crucial question was not whether Christianity could be made amenable to the world, but could the world be made amenable to what Christians believe? I had not come to the study of theology to play around.

I read as much Kierkegaard as I could get my hands on. I was sure Kierkegaard was right to put stress on the “how” of the faith as necessary for understanding the “what.” Put differently, I was learning from [Paul] Holmer’s account of Kierkegaard (as well as from [Julian] Hartt) that theology is best understood as a form of practical reason. Moreover, I learned from Kierkegaard that the truth of practical reason is Christ, and thus practical reason cannot be constrained by the accommodated form of the church identified with Christendom.

My father understood that the world was changing; and therefore he never wanted me to follow him into bricklaying. Yet the training I received left an indelible mark on everything I do. I assume change is inevitable, but I am deeply conservative. My understanding of of what it means to be conservative is shaped by the craft tradition. My criticism of liberal political presumptions is based in my presumption that politics, like bricklaying, is a wisdom-determined activity. Liberalism too often is the attempt to have concrete replace stone in an effort to avoid the necessary existence of a people with wisdom.

…I think of theology as a craft requiring years of training. Like stonecutters and bricklayers, theologians must come to terms with the material upon which they work. In particular, they must learn to respect the simple complexity of the language of the faith, so that they might reflect the radical character of orthodoxy. I think one of the reasons Ii was never drawn to liberal Protestant theology was that it felt too much like an attempt to avoid the training required of apprentices. In contrast, Karl Barth’s work represented for me an uncompromising demand to submit to a master bricklayer, with the hope that in the process one might learn some of the “tricks of the trade.”