"...the philosophy of Light" (ramblings and parables from orthodox rebels)

Recently I flipped through an essay by Roger Scruton called "How I Became a Conservative," where he charts his course to philosophical conservatism from the Student Riots of 1968's Paris to his professorship in the 1980s. He mentioned how during the Student Riots, a friend of his (one of the rioters) justified the mayhem with a book by Michel Foucault called The Order of Things. Scruton had few kind words for the book, but one thing he did say stuck with me: "The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth...." 

That last remark in particular wedged itself into my mind. As a member of the postmodern "millennial" generation, I have found myself flummoxed by the strange audacities committed in our name. Rampant relativism, the near deification of doubt and skepticism, and a narcissistic insistence on a conformity to our own "authenticity," i.e., if something doesn't speak to or "resonate" with us then we have no ears for it and that's that. A lot of books have been written in defense of these atrocities, many of them religious in content, all of them mystical in tone.

It is that mystical quality that often astounded me. When I would read the "history" of Foucault or the "theology" of Rob Bell, I found a singular consistency: what they said was gibberish, but it was artful gibberish, and very often infused with a romantic flair or delivery. Some of Foucault's best chapters are his last ones, where he drops all pretense to scholarship and simply slips into the artist that he is, weaving an intoxicating and provocatively put pack of lies. Bell is even better, being an artist from start to finish. His books are more a product of creativity than serious study. Anyone with a critical eye can see through all the ornamentation to the real substance of the work, which is either terrifying (Foucault) or damnable (Bell). In either case, it is utter nonsense in fancy garb.

Yet they gain traction, and it is because of the fancy garb. There is something to be said for the power of beauty: it has a moral force. As such, its abuse is incredibly dangerous. It can turn a man's heart faster than any syllogism. I speak as an artist myself: in the grand scheme of any debate, rhetoric often trumps logic. That is the meaning behind Scruton's statement. It's not what you say but how you say it, and if you speak it well then you can bombard people with any number of things, hiding your true meaning and purposes behind a flurry of colorful lights, like a fireworks display obscuring an incoming storm.

The exact purpose of all this rhetoric is indeed "subversion," and the goal of subversion is the destruction of every "truth" that has apparently imprisoned us. Such a task can sound very noble, especially if you dress it up with terms like "tyranny" and "liberty," "oppression" and "authenticity". It can even speak of "truth" in a sense, i.e., all of the "truths" we've been given are just the oppressive constructs of dead, white, European men. We must tear down those constructs so that we can get to the real essence of things (if there even is such an essence). One could very well argue (and I'm sure that some have) that subversion is all about "truth": the destruction of its counterfeits and the discovery of its true form or nature.

"White is only the beginning."

Calling "subversion" the search for truth through destruction reminds me of The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf recounts his ill-fated meeting with Saruman. Gandalf discovers that Saruman has rejected his title of "the White" and has instead become "Saruman of Many Colors". Gandalf retorts that he "liked white better." Saruman sneers at this: "White! It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten, and the white light can be broken." Gandalf's reply is another statement that has stuck with me: "In which case it is no longer white, and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

Tolkien was referencing a medieval theory of light. Medieval Christianity viewed light as the perfect physical image for God, being not only pure and clarifying but also an absolute unity of multiples. Such logic is fundamentally trinitarian, as is all of Christianity. Every inch of Christian thought and act and artistry revolves around this central notion of separates being one while remaining separates (neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance). The Trinity is the highest expression of this (three in one). There is also the Incarnation (God and Man) as well as Atonement (God and man). The Church fits the bill (one body, many members), as does the Bible (66 books of different genres written at different times and places in different contexts, yet all unified around a singular theme). The Liturgy is built upon many separate elements coming together to form a singular worship, while the sense and structure of stained-glass windows and the cathedrals they adorn give vivid concrete testimony to the amassing together of many into one (without losing the many).

Out of many, One.

For the Christian, existence (from the foundations of ontos to the spectacles of quarks and quasars) has always been a fragmented whole, a great and glorious tapestry of many threads of many colors(!) woven into a singular image. Reality, truth: these things have always been a work of art, not a didactic platitude. Truth cannot be summarized in a statement; that is why it was summarized in a person (John 14:6). The swirling complexities of reality are captured by the irresistible gravity of an incomprehensible center that is God. But that capture does nothing to diminish the complexities, anymore than gravity diminishes the stars. On the contrary, it is their capture that gives us the beauty of the night sky, with its constant constellations and expansive milky way. From the foundations of trinitarian doctrine, you arrive at a philosophy of light, which says that it is neither unity nor diversity, neither solidification nor fragmentation, but rather the whole spectrum working in unison, in perfect, sublime harmony and holism.

Not that I see it, but that I see all else.

It is this "both/and" trinitarian logic that has been missed by the radicals of yesterday and today. They fear solidification at every turn, so they tear it down. To them, the light is nothing to them but blinding, so they break it that they might better see. But then it is not light at all, just disparate colors scattered about without direction or clarity. And in such a catastrophe, one of two things typically happens. Either they revel (or despair) in the prismatic chaos they have created, or they try to contain the madness by reducing everything to one of the disparate colors. Thus, everything becomes a reductionism: it all boils down to economics, or genetics, or sex, or race, or class, or truth-to-power, or pacifism, or Republicanism, or patriotism, or doubt, or whatever else comes and goes in fashion. Whatever way they go, they have broken the whole, and have left the path of wisdom.

I end this random ramble with a parable, told by G.K. Chesterton in the first chapter of his book Heretics. It is not his best book, but it is relevant here. Each chapter has Chesterton dealing a deathblow to a different kind of reductionism, for subversion (rhetorical or otherwise) has been in vogue for a long time now, which is why today we are practically drowning in it:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good---" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality.

But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted an electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, and some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery, and some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes.

So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we may have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

-Jon Vowell, et. al. (c) 2013

 

"...a beautiful city..." (Nolan's Defense of Civilization in The Dark Knight Trilogy)

Aristotle once said that man is a "political animal." He did not mean that we instinctively form voting blocks. What he meant is that human beings are fundamentally communal: they come together and form families, and many families come together to form communities, and many communities come together to form the city, the "πολις". Nations and empires also emerge from this ascension, but what also emerges is what we call "civilization," an ordering of human conduct and affairs around our communal instincts. Whether in the home or in the city, there is (or ought to be) a general sense of deference to those who share the space with you. We all belong to the city; we are all in this together. To be "civilized" is to respect your fellow man as a member of your community; to act otherwise is to go the way of the brute, the savage.

For millennia, civilization was thought to be a good thing, or at least better than barbarism. Heaven was often viewed as the place of ideal order and community, and thus Augustine lauds The City of God, while Charles Williams' Arthurian poetry contrasts the Christian image of Logres with the pagan wildness of Broceliande. The key to all of this is the idea of order: order is good, while chaos is bad. In the Christian worldview, the whole of existence is built on the order that is Christ (Col. 1:17), and the city (with its inherent civilizational bent) was  meant to be a concrete emblem of that order, of Christ, of heaven itself. Thus, order was beautiful, order was true, and order was good, and thus so was the city.

Not everyone agreed or agrees with this idea. There have always been anarchists and extremists who view order as the height of oppression. Ovid's subversive narratives in the Metamorphoses, the barbarism of the dark ages, Romanticism's revolutionary poetry and practices, anarchical terrorists at the turn of the 20th century as well as postmodern deconstruction at its end: history is full of those who would see order fall, fail, die trying. They have existed alongside and in tension with civilization, and the howling debate between the two rages on to this day: is civilization good? when and how does it become destructive? ought it to be defended? how ought we to defend it?

One of the most recent voices in this debate (I believe) has been director Christopher Nolan and his Dark Knight Trilogy (henceforth, DKT). Ostensibly a set of Batman films, Nolan's work has been lauded for legitimatizing the "superhero" film as a genre capable of true cinematic quality and narrative depth. It was not just his move towards realism (as opposed to the visions of Burton and Schumacher), but also the serious substance that he gave to his films: they proposed intriguing scenarios, asked interesting questions, and provided powerful (and sometimes controversial) answers. One such scenario was the various dangers that can threaten the "city" (viz., Gotham, which comes from a nickname for New York City), which lead to questions about the inherent goodness and defense of civilization itself. I believe that Nolan's answer to this scenario and subsequent questions is that the "city," while far from perfect, is good and ought to be defended against all extremists.

DKT is full of extremists, some more easily recognized than others. Of course, the Joker is the most obvious example. The self-described "agent of chaos," he sees "these civilized people" as monsters just like him: their "moral codes" (i.e., the deference towards others that creates civilization) are all flimsy facades, "dropped at the first sign of trouble." Unique in his anarchism, the Joker is not out to destroy the city but rather prove that it is already destroyed: we maintain the illusion of civility and order, but "when the chips are down, [we'll] eat each other." Thus, for the Joker, the city and civilization are not just bad; they are a "bad joke," and he feels called, like an unholy prophet, to point us all to the punchline.

The League of Shadows is a unique kind of extremism. Whereas the Joker sees civilization as so meaningless as to be illusory, characters like Ra's al Ghul and Bane see civilization as so paramount that they will destroy any and all that do not meet their ideal standard. Thus, they will "bring justice to Gotham," but it is justice in the void, cut of from any other balancing virtue (such as mercy or wisdom). They are so sure of Gotham's irredeemable corruption that they will not simply destroy it; they will let it destroy itself, whether through "fear" or revolution (two highly corrosive elements to any civilization). There is a certain satanic allure to both their and the Joker's extremism: civilization is often messy and imperfect, and the drive to burn it all down and either start afresh or just "watch the world burn" can become irresistible to those who have lost all hope for the city.

It is indeed possible to lose hope for the city, but it only comes when you first give in to another kind of extremism, an extremism that is far more subtle, and if you weren't watching the films carefully you would've miss it. I am referring to the extremism of characters such as Officer Jonathan Blake, Commissioner Loeb, and (most significantly) Harvey Dent. This is the extremism that says that the city ought to be defended, but its defense must always play by the rules of the city. Thus, Commissioner Loeb wants the "vigilante" known as Batman "off the streets," and Blake always works inside the system (often with an air of pretentious self-righteousness). In their world, the rules are the city, and to work outside of them is to not only defy civilization but also (in effect) fundamentally deny it. As Blake tells Gordon, "You've betrayed everything you've stood for." Why? Because Gordon broke the rules.

Gordon is an excellent counter-example to this, as he (and Batman) are there to teach us the hardest lesson of all: if you would defend the city, then you must get your hands dirty. This is a hard truth for many (esp. Americans) to swallow, but it is an incredibly necessary and relevant hard truth. When you run into people who "don't want anything logical like money," who "can't be bought, bullied, reasoned to, or negotiated with," you have to take them down for the good of the city. Furthermore, you must realize that more often than not "the systems fail" you (as Gordon says), and "the rules aren't weapons anymore, they're just shackles, ways for the bad guys to get ahead." In those moments, you have to do what needs to be done (what "needs to happen," as Batman puts it), not what will look good on paper. Gordon stated it perfectly to Dent: "I don't get political points for idealism. I have to the best I can with what I have." If you do not have this balanced view, if you succumb to the extremism of the system, then you will fall when the system inevitably falls.

Harvey Dent is the prime example of this fall. As Gotham's district attorney, he is the system, but he has balance in the beginning. He's willing to turn a blind eye to Batman's "outlaw" activities, mainly because they're accomplishing the goal of taking out organized crime (a cancer on any civilization). But he still believes that "we can be decent men in an indecent time," and when he discovers that there are those who will use your systems against you (as the Joker tells him, "I took your little plan and turned it on itself"), he falls into madness and despair. As Two-Face (the hypocrite, the law turned criminal), "the world is cruel, and the only morality [i.e., civilizing deference] in a cruel world is chance," i.e., chaos, the flip of a coin. This is what the extremism of the system does: when it fails (and it does fail), you run the risk of falling with it. (It is important to note that Officer Blake avoids this fate.)

One special case must be mentioned, and that is Alfred. In Batman Begins (BB) and The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR), he too is an extremist (albeit a sympathetic one). In the beginning, he fears Bruce's transformation into Batman is mere "thrill seeking" (a "taste for wanton destruction" as he says in TDKR), and in the end he wants Bruce to give up Batman and work with the police, instead of around them. There are two ironies at work. The first is that he sees Batman as an extreme action when, in fact, Batman is the proper balance (as we'll see). The second is that some of the best statements on that balance come from Alfred, all in The Dark Knight (TDK). This film is unique in that when faced with the Joker, even Batman feels the pull towards the extremism of the system: he will turn himself into and cooperate with the police because "I see now what I have to become to stop men like him.... Batman can't take this." It is Alfred who pulls him back from the brink:

B: "What would you have me do?"

A: "Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They'll hate you for it, but that can be the point of Batman. You can be the outcast. You can make the choice no one else can make: the right choice."

Alfred understandably forgets his own advice by TDKR, as his concern for Bruce overcomes his understanding of Batman. Nonetheless, for one moment (or film) at least, he did understand the "point" of Batman: the police don't need Bruce Wayne to work with them; they need Batman to work around them, doing what they can't do, going where they can't go, being willing "to plunge his hands into the filth so that you can keep yours clean" (as Gordon tells Blake).

Batman's "point" is to be a paradoxical balance. He is the defender of the city by going outside its systems. He ensures the success of justice by breaking the law. He only has "one rule" (i.e., he won't kill: "I'm no executioner"); any others are expendable. "At what cost?" we may ask along with Lucius Fox (a man also tempted by the extremism of the system). To that question, Batman gives no answer then, but he does later to Gordon: "The Joker cannot win." That is the view Batman maintains (through great struggle) throughout the trilogy, and it is the balanced view. The Joker cannot win; the extremists must not win. The city is good, and it must be defended, even if it takes drastic steps (like "burn[ing] the forest down," as Alfred puts it). That is the messy yet necessary paradox that Batman embodies.

Batman is for the city, for civilization, and he is for it against all comers, willing to even take its reproach in order to save it. ("You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things.... I'm whatever this city needs me to be.") The greatest image of this comes in the climactic battle in the final film. Bane, in seeking to "bring justice [i.e., destruction] to Gotham," has started a pseudo-revolution between the haves and the have-nots. Batman mounts his offensive against this extremist activity, and he does so with an army of police officers. This is significant because the police are symbolic of the city; their name even comes from the word "πολις". So when Batman faces down the extremists one last time (because he cannot stand by "while my city burns"), he does so with the literal embodiment of the city itself, all uniformed, marching as one, in defense of civilization.

It is fitting that when Batman is presumed dead at the trilogy's end, Gordon reads a passage from A Tale of Two Cities(!), a passage that could very well summarize the Batman credo, and the credo of all who would defend civilization:

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see their lives, for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.

This is the final logic of all defenders of the city, of the dark knights and the watchers on the wall: we defend the "beautiful city" because of the "brilliant people". The city must be defended, for the city is good because people are good. It is not necessarily a moral goodness (for we are all sinners), but an ontological goodness: we are, and we make and commune after the image of our Creator. To attack the city and the civility that it stands for is to attack people per se; to attack people per se is to attack God per se, and that is the greatest anarchy, and evil, of all.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Unnecessary Divorces (an orthodox rebel responds to Frank Schaeffer)

I've mentioned before how there is a great swath of young Christians who feel the need to rebel against the perceived dead formalism of past generations and subsequently create a more vibrate, living Christian Faith. As I've listened to the "conversation" of these well-intended souls, I stumbled across this article by Frank Schaeffer (the son of Christian luminary Francis Schaeffer). I suggest you read it carefully, because he says some interesting things.

Now, I am glad that Mr. Schaeffer feels the loss of connection between modern Christianity and its ancient Faith and practice. I too think that a return to the liturgy, and the fundamental communion that it brings, would do a great amount of good in every Christian circle. It is a great shame that most modern, American Christians have been severed from their past, which (as I've demonstrated elsewhere) is full of a much wisdom and beauty.

However, just like every other so-called "progressive" Christian, Mr. Schaeffer can't seem to shake off one misguided mantra: solid theological content is ultimately irrelevant (because it is divisive); what really matters is just the ceremony itself and a sense of "[m]ystery and open-mindedness when it comes to theological content: uncertainty is good" (emphasis mine). The substance is unimportant. What is important is the show: grasp the rites and rituals with an iron grasp, but let things like doctrine and truth be fluid and in flux. This is the same old foolish idea that monkey-wrenches the whole operation.

As I've said before, I'm all for a return to humility in our doctrine. We need to recognize that God is so much bigger than our systems that we make for Him. It is a dangerous mistake to put God in a box, but it is an equally dangerous mistake to think that He has no sharp, distinct lines at all, lines that He Himself laid down for us, revealed to us in Scripture. True, He does not reveal all (for there are not enough books in the world to capture it all), but He has revealed some, and that some is fixed and immoveable. It cannot be erased without disastrous consequence.

Think about it: what is the liturgy without doctrine? What is all our Christian ceremony without those nasty creeds codified from the Scriptures (that nasty closed canon)? What does the Eucharist even mean without the hard doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, without the fixed, substantive idea that Christ was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," etc.? What does worship mean without the hard doctrines of God's Holiness and Incomprehensible nature, without the idea of "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth"? What does community and communion mean without the hard doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, without the idea that we "believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints," etc.?

I will tell you what they all mean: nothing. They mean absolutely nothing anymore, because they have no substance. The beliefs, the hard, doctrinal truths that we believe, are the substance. Lose them, and the whole thing evaporates, leaving behind the husk of dead formalism, the very thing that many in Mr. Schaeffer's camp are trying to escape. What they need to realize is that there is nothing without belief in solid, revealed truth, the truth of God's word, simultaneously simplified and expounded in creeds and dogmas and doctrines. There is no liturgy or community or worship or even Christianity itself without the certainty that certain things are true.

I will never understand the unnecessary divorces that we commit in the name of Christ. The old fundamentalists and evangelicals divorced Truth and Life, fell on the side of Truth, and received an impotent religiosity. But "progressive" Christians (from emergents to anarchists) are no better, for they too have divorced Truth from Life, but instead fell on the side of Life, and what have they gotten for it? An anti-formalism and fundamental skepticism that can find no place to rest, no identity to call its own, and not even the Faith they love so dearly can survive the corrosive chaos. The saddest thing about modern, American Christianity is how from generation to generation we always take a part of the picture rather than the whole, and the result is always worse than where we began.

Here is one true dogma, and I state it defiantly in the face of all modern Christian simplifiers, from radical fundys to radical pomos: it is not Truth or Life but rather Truth and Life: Certainty and Beauty, Light and Love, infinite solid ground beneath our feet and an infinite sky over our heads. They hold each other in a fierce and fiery paradox, and by their presence the whole edifice of the Christian Faith rises and rest stable and secure. But lose either of those elements, and you don't have Christianity anymore. In fact, you have nothing at all.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Gospel to the Postmoderns (A Philosophy of Potatoes, Part V)

"I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create [national] calamity. I, the Lord, do all these things. Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. Let the earth open, and let it bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together. I, the Lord, have created it." Is. 45:6-8

There are always gaps in our lives: gaps of knowledge, of understanding, of ability, of identity and purpose. The truth of things always seems just beyond our reach, lost in a cloud of contradictory witnesses, all shouting their personal preferences in a private language of their own making. The white noise created by their effusions and emanations drowns out the clear cadences of reality, and we despair of ever getting to the truth of things, of ourselves. Our only hope (and what a paltry hope!) is to make our best guess, our best approximation to a target we cannot even see clearly. It is no surprise, then, that we all fall short.

It is no surprise to God either. It is the biggest joke of our contemporary, postmodern world that it thinks itself the new thing when it is really the old thing. The same old thing. The same old unbelief, now writ large. The same old failures: failure to see, to hear, to understand, to believe. All of our newest thoughts are merely a shiny new wrapper on the same old junk. We say that the authorial origin is displaced from us by our excess of discursive derivatives. God put it much simpler: we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We are separated from the Divine Origin of Being and Goodness by our primal deviation from His course. Consequently, we have all of us gone astray, even turning others to their own way, every man doing what is right in his own eyes because there is no king in the land. No authorial center to know and reference and be. We lost Him long ago. In our ignorance and arrogance we are lost, spiraling further down into the ever-widening yet ever-increasingly empty abyss of our lostness.

What can bridge this infinite gap? What can slice through all of the derivatives and find the Origin? What can retrace all the traces back to the Source? What can refill every absence with the presence of Meaning? What can reset all displacement and dispersion until the Whole is realized again? What can wash away our Sin? Nothing but the blood, the blood of God in Christ. Nothing but grace, the grace of God in Christ, for in Christ God became flesh and dwelt among us. The Origin became a derivative, the Source a trace, the Whole a discursive displacement, becoming one with the text, the conversation, the discursive field of play, the flesh and blood of men and the whoop and wharf of time. This was not an act of detached Reason, or cold Machine or mere Mind, nor another absurdism of fundamental Chaos. This was an act of grace, grace on the part of One greater than us, greater than all our noise, all our displacements, our mythologies and differances, greater than all our Sin.

Hear the Word speak into our present day delusion and crisis: grace alone is the bridge that spans the gulf of our mighty separation, the sword that slices through the jungle of our seemingly endless texts and myths and positions and postures and preferences and opinions and interpretations, cutting right through all of our jargon and gibberish, navigating the vacuity of our hyperspaces, deconstructing all of our simulations and simulacra, powering through every wall and obstacle that we have erected, crashing through with infinite, furious love and passion and purpose. His head is bleeding. His hands and feet and side are bleeding. His body has been demarcated by those in power. He was wounded for our dispersions, and by His stripes we are healed. By His resurrection, He defeated death and displacement and truth-to-power, so that at His name every knee shall bow and every discourse confess in one voice that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God most gracious. See what His grace has done. What only His grace could have done. It has brought us back to God. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Doubt Your Doubts (an orthodox rebel responds to David Dark)

In my previous post, I mentioned how there is a movement amongst many young Christians to break out of what they perceive to be the confining and dead systems that defined the Christianity of their parents' generation. Sometimes that's a good thing, leading you out of a cramped or shallow mock-Christianity and into the real fellowship of the real God and real Christ. Other times, however, and more often than not, it becomes an excuse to dissolve every central doctrine of the Faith and erect your own private edifice instead. Rebellion is a good thing when it leads to the truth, but a horrible evil when it becomes a cloak for your own will.

If you're wondering where this kind of thinking came from, rebellion's as old as Adam. If you want to know where the current kind of thinking amongst most young Christians came from, then go do some research (this is a blog, not an encyclopedia). However, if you want a starting point for understanding this kind of thinking, then I recommend reading this article (and maybe even the book advertized in it). Author David Dark, aside from having the coolest name ever, lays down what he believes to be the foundation for a true Christian faith: the sacred duty of doubting.

I'm not sure what you'll think of that article, but it absolutely frustrates me, for two reasons.

The first is because I actually agree with its surface assertions. God has not called us into a holy bubble. There is a place for mystery as well as a deep sense of the "incomprehensible" (as some church fathers put it) in God and His activities. There is no reason to simply discount something outside of our preconceived parameters (e.g., if Nietzsche says something legitimately true, then it is true regardless). As I've argued multiple times before, God regularly smashes our preconceived notions and parameters to pieces so that we may draw closer to the real Him. The foundation of all Christian thinking and living is humility, i.e., the recognition of my smallness before God's bigness. On these points, I am in agreement utterly and without question or qualification.

However...

The second reason that it frustrates me is because of what's underneath all of those agreeable assertions. I cannot help put sense that they are simply a veneer hiding something, something that not even Mr. Dark may see. But I do see it, because I've seen and heard it plenty of times before: he attempts to convince us that doubt is not a "dirty word" by making "certainty" into a dirty word.

Yes, absolute certainty can be "corrosive" (as he says), but does Mr. Dark really not see that absolute skepticism is equally corrosive? If you claim to know everything, doubting nothing, then you cannot have community (except with those who agree exactly as you do). But if you "question everything," doubting all, then you cannot have community either, for community requires something around which we can unify. Much to Mr. Dark's chagrin, you cannot unify around doubt. It is impossible, because doubt is fundamentally fragmentary: it holds to nothing but its questions, and to question is to pull apart, to dissect the whole, to deconstruct the structure until it spills its secrets. In short, doubt can never build. It only destroys.

Sometimes such destruction is necessary. Take the Socratic Method, for example. The whole thing is based on questioning and questioning, on leaving no interrogative stone unturned. Yet the point of such questioning (and this is key) was to arrive at, or at least approximate, some kind of answer that would satisfy. It was destruction that was a precursor to construction. It was going somewhere, somewhere real and solid, somewhere that could be reached and not endlessly deferred. I find it odd that Mr. Dark would quote Chesterton to back up his claims, the same Chesterton who believed in "drawing the line somewhere," and who said, "I open my mind for the same reason that I open my mouth: to close it again on something solid."

Of course, the Bible is full of people who had "doubts and honest questions." Just look at the Psalms, right? But then again, really look at the Psalms. Every time God's goodness is questioned or His sovereignty doubted, it was always reasserted by the end. Every time honest doubt was expressed, there was always a return to the sacred certainty that God is who He says He is. That is real solid ground and not just a bubble. But if you elevate questioning to a "sacred duty," then there can be no solid ground, because there is no answer that ought not to be questioned and questioned and questioned and questioned and questioned and questioned and questioned....

If I could meet Mr. Dark, I would actually like to ask him a question:

"To where is your so-called sacred questioning leading us? Where can it go if it doesn't want an answer? Isn't endless questioning without desiring an answer merely babble? Isn't journeying without seeking a destination merely being lost? Are you not opening a void before us, one that can never be filled, not even with the infinite substance of God? You say you want to lead us closer to God, but how can that be possible when all there is is questioning? What's to keep God Himself from dissolving in your acidic doubts? Shall we doubt that He is love? That He is holy? That He came in the flesh? That He is even there at all? Why shouldn't we? After all, the only sacred thing is questioning, which means that the only sacred thing is that nothing is sacred."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The End of America, Part II (continued political contemplations by an orthodox rebel)

(Note: Please read "Part I" before proceeding.)

The genius of the founders is matched only by their gamble. Take the wild wonder that is "freedom" and try to cage it in a basic notion of "God". It may hold (and did hold) for a while, but the nagging question still lingers: what's to stop "freedom" from eroding "God" away as well? Honestly, there was nothing. Perhaps a sense of idealism could make one think that all men would all be Christians (or at least theists) at all times, but such a notion is a pipedream. If we are built on freedom, including religious freedom, then God has to be open to dissolve just like any boundaries must be. And make no mistake: He has been dissolved, not actually but virtually, in this nation.

How God has been dissolved is a matter of debate, but I would identify three main dissolvants, which I will list in ascending order. The first and lowest would be the volatile and vocal presence of the so-called "new atheism". Believing god doesn't exist is obviously a means of dissolvement/destruction, but they are not a significant enough presence in this country to be the main means. The second and middle one is what I call the "new deism," which sums up American spirituality. Every poll or survey under the sun may say that the vast majority of Americans "believe in God," but you're kidding yourself if you think they believe in any kind of substantial God, a God that matters in all areas of life, a God of blood and flesh; in short, the Christian God. The God of most Americans is some nebulous power in the sky whose presence is ultimately irrelevant to my life.

If He ever does become relevant, however, then we have the third and highest and (I believe) true dissolvant of God in America today: postmodernism. I know some may roll their eyes at that, but I am afraid that I must hold my ground on this. I seriously doubt any average American knows what that term means (or has even heard of it), but the facts still remain: if you are a child of the late 20th century in the West, then you are postmodern whether you know it or not. You believe (in some form or fashion) that you are free to forge your own fate, your own identity, and than all other notions or claims to truth are simply opinions that can either serve as tools to your own ends or as means of oppression by white males (or whomever your ire is currently directed towards). In short, postmodernism is simply a fact of our times, a fact that eye-rolling does not change.

Perhaps you see why postmodernism would catch fire in America: both are based on a notion of freedom, except that America had a unifying factor for its freedom, but postmodernism lives to destroy all unifying factors. And in postmodern America, our freedom has been unbound, and God has been deconstructed and dismembered. He has ceased to be an objective reference point and has been turned into a divine sounding-board that validates my personal preferences: "Gay marriage is wrong because God says so!" "That's a lie! God made me this way!" / "God is against the greed and tyranny of socialism!" "No! He's against the greed and tyranny of capitalism!" / "God wants you to live right!" "God wants me to be happy!" How can anything be accomplished in such a mess? What use is God in such a political climate as ours? He has because useless precisely because of His overuse: He has become anything to everyone, and thus He has become nothing at all, dissolving away in the acidity that is the postmodern "conversation". It is yet another tragic irony of our age.

This is why America as we know it is coming to an end. This is why the country is "dissolving," why it seems to lack unity and identity and purpose. It is not because of gay marriage or socialism or gun control or some other political bullet point. Rather, it is a combination of two things: (1) our lack of a center, and (2) our fundamentally fragmentary force. To put it another way, we lost God (by our free overabundance of Him) and without Him America will tear itself apart by itself. It needs no other stimulant, no other motive than its own forward momentum. The nature of America is freedom, and freedom cannot help but literally go awry, to fray outward and onward until it unravels everything, including itself. Therefore, God's place as its head was necessarily a short-term deal. It was never going to survive the very nature of the nation. America will end, and it will end because it is America. That is yet another, and perhaps the ultimate, irony of our age.

An addendum to this gloom is required, and I will close with it. In the face of America's intrinsic destruction, what must we do? Here are some things to consider: (1) This cannot happen in a night. The "end" may be generations away. The point is that it will come if we continue on without a unifying factor. (2) A new (or old) unifying factor could save us from our end, but it may be equally devastating (like socialism), and furthermore it will not survive either. If we dissolved God, then we can dissolve anything. (3) The end of America does not mean the end of the world or even our daily lives. The decentralized structure of America means that if America were to completely fray, it would fray into a myriad of new, individual states with their own unifying factors (or lack thereof). I am not saying that these states will be good or bad things. I am only saying that they are the most likely scenario and an intriguing one at that. (4) Remember what I said before: God was not actually "dissolved". A notion, an idea, a phantasmic consideration was dissolved, but the true Almighty remains and reigns. He has been and always will be bigger than any nation's use or abuse of Him.

In connection to that thought, let me add this: I said earlier that biblical arguments were "useless" in political debates. I fear some may think I am viewing the Scriptures in a weak light. On the contrary, I answer that I am viewing them in their truest, strongest light. Scripture is useless in political arguments in this nation, not because they are weak but because they are about things that are so much bigger and greater than any nation. By the very nature of their eternal value, they are necessarily "useless" to fundamentally temporal things. They are true; all else is lies, and lies have no use of the truth. The truth is too strong for them; it either breaks them or outlasts them, and the truth of God's word will outlast the small speck in the whirlwind that we call "America". And this is its truth, truth you would do well to heed, truth that I leave you with:

God is our refuge and strength

     a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear though the earth be removed,

     and though the mountains be carried into the midst

     of the sea;

though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,

     though the mountains shake

     with the swelling thereof.

[...]

The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved;

     He uttered His voice, the earth melted.

The Lord of hosts is with us;

     the God of Jacob is our refuge.

 Come, behold the works of the Lord,

     what desolations He has made on the earth.

He makes wars to cease unto the ends of the earth;

He breaks the bow and cuts the spear asunder;

     He burns the chariot with fire.

Be still and know that I am God;

     I will be exalted among the heathen,

     I will be exalted on the earth.

The Lord of hosts is with us;

     the God of Jacob is our refuge.

(Psalm 46)

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013