The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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American Religion History: Manifest Domesticity

Given the sharp separation of spheres between men and women in 19th-century America, one would not expect women to play much of a role in the expansion of American power.  Empire-building was man’s work, while women tended the heart-fires back home.  In an award-winning 1998 article (pointed out to me by my colleague Chris Schlect), Amy Kaplan showed that the spheres were not divided in this fashion, that imperial symbols and rhetoric were employed in American discussions of domesticity, and that Americans played off the fact that “domesticity” had both a familial and a national connotation (as in “domestic policy”).  Kaplan found it curious that domesticity was valorized at the very time that American embarked on a frantic expansive policy across the American continent.  The two movements seem to be connected.  (If nothing else, Kaplan’s title, “Manifest Domesticity,” deserves an award all by itself.)

Recent work, Kaplan acknowledged, had already deconstructed the two–sphere ideology by showing that “the private feminized that space of the home both infused and bolstered the public male arena of the market, and that the sentimental attached to maternal influence values were used to sanction women’s entry into the wider civic realm from which those same values theoretically excluded them.”  Yet, “this deconstruction structural of separate spheres, however, leaves another opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign.”  She proposed that we more accurately capture the 19th-century mentality if we place “domestic” in opposition to “foreign” in addition to its opposition to “political” or “public.”

She also proposed that the boundary of foreign and domestic was too static:

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History: Elizabethan Plagiarism

Arthur Golding is usually credited with translating Seneca’s de Beneficiis into English, but in a 1961 article H.H.  Davis described an earlier English translation: “there was an earlier translation by Nicholas Haward of this same moral essay, printed nine years before Golding’s, entitled The Line of Liberalitie Dulie Directinge the Wel Bestowing of Benefites and Reprehending the Comonlie Used Vice of Ingratitude. Anno 1569. Imprinted at London in Fletestrete Neare to S. Dunstones Church by Thomas Marshe. Haward translated – or at least published – the first three books only, as against the full seven of Golding’s version.”

This has not always been recognized as a translation of Seneca because, Davis says, “the earlier translation has no acknowledgment that this is the English of De beneficiis, nor is there any reference to Seneca.”

History: Ancient surgery

In a harrowing article about the reconstruction of a young man’s face after an electrical burn in The New Yorker, the author says in passing: “Reconstructive surgery is an ancient art, dating back at least to the time of the Upanishads, in India. In about 600 B.C., Sushruta, a scholar from Varanasi, catalogued more than three hundred surgical procedures, among them what may be the first documented rhinoplasty, which involved using the leaf of a creeper as a measuring device. ‘A patch of living flesh equal in dimension to the preceding leaf should be sliced off from the region of the cheek and, after scarifying it with a knife, swiftly adhered to the severed nose,’ Sushruta advised. A pedicle—a bridge of skin keeping the patch linked to the cheek—provided blood to the graft while it integrated with the nose, and was later removed. An ear, he noted, could be repaired the same way.”

Sushruta’s treatise made its way into the West in the sixteenth century, and helped birth modern Western medical practice.

 

History: Sponsoring the temple

VanderKam quotes 2 Maccabees 3:1-3′s claim that “King Seleucus of Asia defrayed from his own revenues all the expenses connected with the service of the sacrifices,” and comments: This continues “the centuries-old practice that the foreign overlord of Judea pay at least a part of the expenses involved in the Jerusalem cult.”  He cites Ezra and Josephus’s quotation of an edict of Antiochus III.

The prophetic visions of kings supplying sacrifices and other materials for Israel’s temple worship thus had an historical precedent.  The prophets were envisioning a restoration of the earlier practice of Gentile support and sponsorship for the temple.

History: Friends of Abraham

1 Maccabees famously includes a letter from King Areus of Sparta to Onias, high priest of Israel, in which it is stated that “the Spartans and the Jews . . . are brothers and are of the family of Abraham.”  Scholars dismiss the genealogical connection, and many even deny that the letter is authentic: Would a Spartan king claim ancestry with a barbarian people?  But James C. VanderKam (From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile) assembles evidence that make a plausible case for the authenticity of the letter.

To start, he cites Moses Hadas’ claim that Greeks took up whatever genealogy that could be advantageous to them: “It was the Greeks themselves who set up the precedent; their ancient genealogies . . . made a place for the founders of various eastern nations, including Egypt and Persia, and in the historical period they were not above inventing genealogies when it suited their political ambitions.”

Besides, there are other ancient documents that make a connection between Greeks and Hebrews.

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History: What it looks like from the other side

William Appleman Williams writes in his Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962) that “in expanding its own economic system throughout much of the world, America has made it very difficult for other nations to retain any economic independence.  This is particularly true in connection with raw materials.  Saudi Arabia, for example, is not an independent oil producer [this was written before OPEC took off].  Its oil fields are an integrated and controlled part of the American oil industry.  But a very similar, if often less dramatic, kind of relationship also develops in manufacturing industries.  This is the case in countries where established economic systems are outmoded or lethargic, as well as in the new, poor nations that are just beginning to industrialize.  American corporations exercise very extensive authority, and even commanding power, in the political economy of such nations.”

If we scrape off every tonality of complaint here, ignore the factors of greed or skullduggery, and we are still left with a difficult problem.  Suppose a brand new energy source were developed, and it was discovered that Burundi was the place where most of this new energy source was located.  Given the sheer size and reach of American economic activity, it would be virtually impossible for Burundi to develop this source in a way that protects its interests and benefits its people above all.  We are the big cat in the global economy, and however it may look to us it can look pretty threatening from the other side.

American Religion History: Clash of Civilizations

Charles Adams (Those Dirty Rotten taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America) notes that the clash between North and South was exacerbated by the Confederate decision to lower tariffs and create a free trade zone.  Northern interests recognized that this would ruin their trade and manufacturing, as cheap European goods were redirected to Southern ports.  The North reacted with ferocity, claiming that Southern trade policy was an attack on northern civilization.

This, Adams thinks, accounts for the savagery of the war, which is summarizes in a sobering paragraph: “It has been difficult for many Civil War students to fathom why the northern states would sacrifice so much money and blood to conquer the South and force them to remain in the federal Union.  It seems especially strange for a people who believed in government by consent to want to force on another people a government against their consent.  And force they used, of monstrous proportions that shocked the civilized world.  This was no minor military encounter.  To take away from the southern people their right of self-determination, there had to be a massive destruction of life, of cities, of towns and villages, of farms and private homes – almost a total annihilation of the social order.  Europeans looked upon this aghast, and reasoned that the Americans must have learned this kind of warfare from the native Indians, certainly not from their European roots.  Napoleon was a kindly gentleman compared to Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.”

History: Confessional Gentility

In his The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present, Jan de Vries notes connections between the “Confessionalizing” movement of the seventeenth century and the rise of “genteel” standards of taste and consumption: “While an awakened desire for God’s grace should not be made one with a new desire for a more refined manner of living, or genteel grace, the practice by which the construction of both types of desire was cultivated interacted with each other.  The inward religious project assumed outward material forms (church architecture, bibles, books, and, in Counter-Reformation Catholicism, objects of veneration for the home) while the outward projection of more elevated or refined daily life depended on the development of a suitable material culture.”

He cites an article by Mark Peterson: “If we understand Puritanism as a culture that replicated itself by cultivating in believers a demand for certain experiences, a demand that could only be satisfied (and then only partially and temporarily) through access to sophisticated cultural products, of which communion silver was one, then we can begin to see how Puritanism created patterns of thought and feeling that flowed as easily into the genteel forms of a culture of consumption as they did into the frugal and disciplined norms of the ‘spirit of capitalism.’”

New luxury items were not status-distinguishing but unifying, and the result was, increasingly, national standards of taste: “By the late seventeenth century the striking feature of Dutch material culture is its uniformity.  The basic form of expressing status and achieving comfort were remarkable similar between city and country, and between rich and poor.  It was the cost and specific quality rather than the types of objects and their general form that differed.”  What happened in the Netherlands happened throughout Europe.  He quoted from John Nef: “With the help of a new artistic craftsmanship, a style of living spread throughout Europe that led all Europeans to want to share, at least to some extent, in that douceur de vivre, accompanied by high standards of virtue in actual living, which a very considerable few were coming to possess for the first time in history.”

American Religion History: Rebs and Indians

Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War is a chilling book, but one of the most chilling moments comes at the end, in a quotation of a letter from General Philip Sheridan to Sherman in 1873: “In taking the offensive [against Indians] I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends; and, if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.  During the war did any on e hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women or children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?”

Sherman’s own views were expressed in a response to an earlier massacre: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”

History Politics Theology - Ecclesiology: Unwitting secularizers

Gregory VII won his battle, but lost the war.  Joseph Strayer (On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton Classic Editions)) notes that “by separating itself so clearly from lay governments, the Church unwittingly sharpened concepts about the nature of secular authority.  Definitions and arguments might vary, but the most ardent Gregorian had to admit that the Church could not perform all political functions, that lay rulers were necessary and had a sphere in which they should operate. They might be subject to the guidance and correction of the Church, but they were not part of the administrative structure of the church. . . . In short, the Gregorian concept of the Church almost demanded the invention of the concept of the State.”   And the State was seen as having a particular role, the “guarantor and distributor of justice.”

Gregory’s reformed ended up solidifying a political nature/grace duality, separated the sphere of love from the sphere of justice.

History: Priesthood of the plebs

A pregnant paragraph from Gellner.  He discusses the challenges of specialized education in traditional societies, where specialists are “viewed ambivalently”:

“In the end, modern society resolves this conundrum by turning everyone into a cleric, by turning this potentially universal class into an effectively universal one, by ensuring that everyone without exception is taught by it, that exo-education becomes the universal norm, and that no one culturally speaking, shaves himself.  Modern society is one in which no sub-community, below the size of one capable of sustaining an independent educational system, can any longer reproduce itself.  The reproduction of fully socialized individuals itself becomes part of the division of labour, and is no longer performed by sub-communities for themselves.”

Several things here: Modern societies are organized by a secular version of the priesthood of the plebs. Insofar as this is a product of the Reformation’s assault on Catholic order, we can broaden Stanley Hauerwas’s comment and say that not just America but modern society as a whole is an experiment in Protestant social formation.  Finally, the last two sentences clarify the stakes in contemporary debates and battles over education, whether Christian schools or home-schooling.  Insofar as Christians are capable of forming their own educational systems independent of the public systems, just so far they can sustain themselves over time as “sub-communities.”  If successful, the establishment of such sub-communities would be a massive blow to the modern state.  And for that very reason modern states cannot abide the prospect.

Parents who teach their kids at home, or put them in Christian schools, may simply want a better, more Christian education for their kids.  But, wittingly or no, they are participating in a grand political project, that of taming statism.

Economics History: Paradoxes of specialization

Specialization and division of labor is often seen as one of the marks of modern society.  Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past)) notes that the situation is more complicated.  There are, he observes, specialists in complex agrarian societies (like medieval Europe), scholastics of great sophistication with a high degree of specialized training.  In a sense, he says, they were even more specialized than modern specialists.  In modern societies, “the distance between specialists is far less great.  Their mysteries are far closer to mutual intelligibility, their manuals have idioms which overlap to a much greater extent.”

The reason, Gellner suggests, lies in our highly unspecialized educational system: “the major part of training in industrial society is generic training, not specifically connected with the highly specialized professional activity of the person in question, and preceding it. Industrial society may be most criteria be the most highly specialized society ever; but its educational system is unquestionably the least specialized, the most universally standardized, that has ever existed. The same kind of training or education is given to all or most children and adolescents up to an astonishingly late age. Specialized schools have prestige only at the end of the educational process. . . . specialized schools intended for a younger, earlier intake have negative prestige.”

History: Israel the prototype

God’s work in and with Israel is the pattern and prototype for His work in and with all nations.  How far can we press the analogy?

Babel unified the nations but they were dispersed.  Yahweh chose Abram to launch a counter-Babel movement, and over the next half-millennium slowly, achingly slowly, established Israel as a nation in a land.  Israel herself was soon broken in two, and eventually shattered into pieces and scattered to the four winds, the empires of late antiquity.  In those empires, Jews rose to high positions of great prominence.

Rome was a new Babel, unifying the peoples of the Mediterranean.  Within that empire, Jesus the seed of Abraham was born to launch the climax of God’s counter-Babel movement.  The church born in exile took form within Rome, and eventually Rome was ruled by kings who professed Jesus as King.  The formation of a “world empire” was preparation for the Christianization of that world.

Rome broke up too.

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History Philosophy: Limits of Postcolonialism

Ramachandra notes a couple of limitations in recent post-colonial discussion.  One is the blindness to the influence of Christianity.  Christianity is “naively identified with Europe and the United states,” and thus missionaries, their achievements, and their disciples, are considered “mere pawns in the hands of colonial administrators.” Ramachandra notes the irony: This is precisely the “Orientalist stance in reverse, the division of the world into Christian West and exotic east.

More fundamentally, postcolonial theory is stuck between aligning “with humanist notions of an autonomous, sovereign subject,” which risks “subsuming heterogeneous identities and histories into an abstract essentialism” or, on the other hand, “embracing a post-structuralist antihumanism and do denying any universal moral platform from which to contest the material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter.”  That is, they must either embrace the colonizers metaphysics of the subject, or give up any ground for criticizing the colonizers.

Some recognize the dilemma: “Gayatri Spivak has suggested a ‘strategic essentialism” that rejects the idea of an essential human nature but adopts “an essentialist stance toward the colonized self” in order to pursue “emancipatory practice.”  The schizophrenia is glaring.  Others, like Said, contest the post-structural attack on essentialism “because of his commitment to a universal human solidarity,” which he recognizes developed and became universal in the colonizing West.

History Politics: Collateral Damage

In his The Just War Revisited (Current Issues in Theology), Oliver O’Donovan distinguishes between collateral damage and indiscrimination (a violation of just war criteria) by pointing to the intention.  How can intention be determined? He offers this analysis: “One can test the intention to harm non-combatants by putting a simple hypothetical question: if it were to chance that by some unexpected intervention of Providence the predicted harm to non-combatants did not ensue, would the point of the attack have been frustrated?  If on 6 August 1945 all the citizens of Hiroshima, frightened by a rumor of what was to occur, had fled the city, would the attack have lost its point? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then there was an intention to harm them, and their deaths were not collateral. . . . The truly collateral damage in war is that which, if it could have been avoided, would have left the intended attack on a combatant object uncompromised.  That is what is mean by calling it a ‘side effect.’”

On this analysis, a scorched-earth campaign is legitimate since “burning of a crop does nothing to harm productivity, and may even improve it.”  Thus burning a crop interrupts the supplies for an opposing army but does not permanently disable the economic basis of the society.  On the other hand, “Poisoning the land or its water-supplies . . . was categorically prohibited; for that would attack the very possibility of future cultural life in the region.”

Vinoth Ramachandra (Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World) finds the distinction compelling, but chides O’Donovan for limiting his examples to “nongovernmental military (or military-style) organizations.”  He suggests that the same distinction needs to be applied to what the Allies called “strategic airwar” during WW II.

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History: Theoretical words

Eric Gregory offers this wise counsel: “Words do not work the same way in normative theorizing as they do in historical inquiry. It is enough that ‘Donatist,’ ‘Pelagian,’ and “Manichean’ exist as live options in moral, political, and religious discourse – even if Augustine or later storytellers invented them in order to coordinate doctrine with their experience of God in Christian faith and practice.  These words, and the narrative scripts they signify, provide broad classifications for a range of commitments.”

Historical study has an important role in helping “dislodge settled grooves of thought and make us skeptical of the stories we tell.  They can show the normative consequences of how we construct intellectual histories. They can also challenge us with an Augustine we thought we already knew by helping us understand the world behind the texts.”  But also those uses don’t rob terms like “Stoic,” “Platonic” or “Augustinian” of their conceptual usefulness, especially in “normative theorizing.”

History Politics: Politics as church history

Figgis again: “when all reservations have been made, there can be little doubt that it is right to treat the growth of political ideas, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a branch of ecclesiastical history.  With a few exceptions religion or the interests of some religious body gave the motive for the political thought of the period; to protect the faith, or to defend the Church, or to secure the Reform, or to punish idolatry, or to stop the rebellion against the ancient order of Christendom, or to win at least the right of a religious society to exist; this was the ground which justified resistance to tyrants and the murder of kings; or on the other hand exalted the Divinely given authority of the civil rulers.”

These centuries were still medieval in the sense that political theory was a branch of theology.

History Politics: Wycliffite politics

Figgis has his Catholic prejudices, but he’s on to something in this summary of the political ecclesiology of Wyclif, forerunner of teh Reformation:

“Scholastic in form, Wyclif’s writings are modern in spirit.  His de Officio regis is the absolute assertion of the Divine Right of the King to disendow the Church.  Indeed his stated theory is more Erastian than that of Erastus.  His writings are a long-continued polemic against the political idea of the Church or rather the political claims of the clergy; for his State is really a Church.  How far his communism was more than theoretical is very doubtful. In practice, and now and then in theory, he was the sup0porter of aristocratic privilege.  Yet he asserts the duty of treating all authority as a trust, and there can be little doubt that he recognised the dignity of every individual as a member of the community in a way which we are apt to regard as exclusively modern.  Wyclif indeed was in many respects more modern than Luther, as he was a deeper thinker – except in his entire lack of sentiment.  His world of thought is the exact antithesis of medieval ideals, in regard to politics, ecclesiastical organisation, ritual and external religion.”

The combination of concerns in the last clause is worth pondering.

History: Withering of the state

Marx looked forward to the withering of the state.  He was centuries late.  Figgis says it already happened in the middle ages:

“As Professor Maitland pointed out, under feudalism there is no public law; all rights are private, including those of the king. It is this absence of a theory of the State as such which characterises especially medieval history, except for the great Church as a whole. In the strict sense of the term, there is no sovereign in the Middle Ages; only as we find even a little later in France, there is an etat which belongs to the king; but there is also an Etat de la Republique, while even a lawyer in the Paris Parlement has his etat.  Only very gradually does State come to mean the organisation of the nation and nothing else.”

History Politics: Church as State

JN Figgis (Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius) writes, “In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, but the State; the State or rather the civil authority (for a separate society was not recognized) was merely the police department of the Church.  The latter took over from the Roman Empire its theory of the absolute and universal jurisdiction of the supreme authority, and developed it into the doctrine of the plenitudo potestatis of the Pope, who was the supreme dispenser of law, the fountain of honour, including regal honour, and the sole legitimate source of power, the legal if not the actual founder of religious orders, university degrees, the supreme ‘judge and divider’ among nations, the guardian of international right, the avenger of Christian blood.”

This is the opposite of the Yoder thesis: Not the church becoming an arm of the state, but the state of the church.  Not that this form of church-as-polis would make Yoder happy.

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