The Week February 15-21, 2016

Vision
Beauty
Perhaps it is true, as Humberto Eco explained in his lovely book, History of Beauty, that we don’t quite know what beauty is, but that it is is beyond dispute. Every age and culture of human beings has held to notions of beauty, and has expressed those notions by means of a broad range of experiences and artifacts. In simplest terms, beauty is that which brings delight, and those things are truly beautiful, or so William Cowper insisted (“The Task”) to which we return in delight again and again. I have been doing a good bit of reading on the subject of beauty of late, and this much at least is clear: As hard as it is to define beauty, it’s even harder to write about it in a way that, following Cowper, makes you want to read about it over and over. Beauty is both objective – that is, it exists in things external to us – and subjective – within the human soul. Philosophers, theologians, aestheticians, and others struggle to say much more than this, and, more importantly, to explain the relationship between these two aspects of beauty, without having one devour the other. Christian writers on beauty tend to lodge the ultimate expression of beauty in God Himself, especially as revealed in Jesus Christ (see, inter alia, Daniel J. Trier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin, eds., The Beauty of God, and Francesca Aran Murphy, Christ the Form of Beauty). If God is beauty, as Augustine suggested, then perhaps we might actually gain more insight to the subject, not by studying beauty per se, but by a more careful consideration of God as the Subject and Sustainer of beauty – a Biblical theology of Beauty, as it were. Such a study might lead, first of all, to our delighting in the Lord in ways more in line with what the Scriptures teach, and, second, with our being able both to appreciate more of the beauty God sustains around us, and to infuse more of His beauty into the yet-ugly nooks and crannies of everyday life.

Disenchantment
Charles Taylor argued in his book,A Secular Age, that a primary characteristic of our modern world is that it has dismissed all notions of transcendence, of anything beyond what is merely material, and that it insists on making of everything something to be understood, inventoried, and made useful. This idea that our secular age has broken away from all spiritual and metaphysical restraints, and is now free to exploit science for the common good, is perhaps the way most people think about secularism and our secular age. But as Eugene McCarraher explains, the reality is that our secular age has simply substituted one raft of transcendent realities for those which the Christian worldview espoused for some 1500 years (“We Have Never Been Disenchanted,” Hedgehog Review, Fall, 2015). Whether the unseen thing we worship is money or things or some spirit or force within creation, people today live just as much lives of enchantment as people ever did. Every worldview is thus a form of faith, with its own enchanted vision, its specific disciplines, and its benchmarks (outcomes) for assessing progress. This is an important point to understand, because it precludes people being able to dismiss the Christian faith by claiming they don’t believe in religion or aren’t religious. They do, and they are; and the challenge we face as witnesses for the truth is to help people understand their religion and then to lead them to assess their enchanted worldview against the claims and historic record of the Christian movement.

Disciplines
Information Processing
Robert Epstein is concerned that Google is manipulating everything within reach of its search engine to advantage its own interest and friends (“The new mind control,” Aeon, 18 February 2016). He writes, “We are living in a world in which a handful of high-tech companies, sometimes working hand-in-hand with governments, are not only monitoring much of our activity, but are invisibly controlling more and more of what we think, feel, do and say.” He and his colleagues at The American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology have demonstrated the power of Google to affect people’s political views and decisions. Dr. Epstein invokes thoughts of Brave New World and 1984 in his warning. He does not believe Google should have so much power. And he implies that someone should regulate Google in order to control its powers of persuasion. But isn’t Google an information medium? Like The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker? Does it not have a right to use all its legitimate powers to persuade? Who says Google has to be neutral or “fair and balanced”? The problem is not, it seems to me, with Google, but with information consumers too lazy or undiscerning to practice caveat emptor as they should. After all, force Google to submit to government standards and criteria of free and fair speech, and soon enough we’ll all be little more than government tools or targets.

Biblical Interpretation
Joseph Epstein (A Literary Education and Other Essays) describes departments of English in America’s universities as having been taken captive by the winds of ideological fashion, so that they have “sold out the riches of literature for a small number of crude ideas – gender, race, class, and the rest of it – and hence gave up their cultural birthright for a pot of message.” This is what they do who practice what might be described as a hermeneutics of convenience. Theologians, preachers Bible teachers, and writers who begin the work of interpretation with some preferred opinion or view will inevitably wrest the Scriptures to support their position. Having hoisted their sails into the spiritus mundi or the whims of fancy, they twist the plain teaching of Scripture into a mandate for their preferred agenda. In the process, they forfeit the long heritage of Christian interpretation and culture, and take the faith once for all delivered to the saints captive to mere ideology. A hermeneutics of convenience can distort the Scriptures as well by beginning with a Biblical idea and making it the key to all Biblical understanding. Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship (chapter 3) is very much to the point about this matter, demonstrating how we can allow an abstract principle, even the principle of grace, to keep us from complete submission and explicit obedience to the Word of Christ. Those who approach the work of hermeneutics in this way would remake the whole history of Biblical interpretation into their own image, which, if they are allowed to succeed, would destroy interpretation of Scripture by making hermeneutics the servant of messaging, rather than the other way around.

Outcomes
Sin
Terry Eagleton insists that downplaying wickedness, vice, and sin isn’t good for anyone. He reviews a new book entitled The Dark Side of the Soul and concludes that, as the author sees it, sin is not something we can avoid or escape, so we may as well make some accommodation with it (The Guardian, 17 February 2016). The soul, it seems, is not so much dark but “turns out to be simply a dozen or so shades of grey.” The worse part about evil, the author explains, is the harm it does to the one who perpetrates it. Mr. Eagleton will have nothing to do with that idiotic idea: “personally I don’t care much what moral damage a serial killer inflicts on himself as long as he keeps his hands off my throat.” We’re all afflicted with evil, the author reports, so we should not condemn the evil in others, but learn to adjust to it, as we do the evil in ourselves. Mr. Eagleton: “It is not clear how a spot of introspection might result in letting Goebbels off the hook.” The book represents the spirit of the age: “A feelgood culture such as our own is allergic to ideas of sin and wickedness...” But the tragedy of this book is that it is written by an Anglican priest, whose views on sin are shared by large sectors of the contemporary American Church. So we should perhaps take to heart Mr. Eagleton’s closing words, when he says that this book “helps to confirm the view that the church is as out of touch with actual vice as the Borgias were with saintliness.” Ouch.

Envoi
Thought and Craft
In the war against time and mortality which is my writing, thought and craft unite to reclaim as much lost ground as possible from the enemy of truth. In this expedition, thought is both general and foot soldier, while craft manages the logistics of communication and supply. Thoughts rush the targeted field like an unruly horde, staking out and claiming all the redoubts, resources, and materiel, engaging the occupiers, raising banners and flags, and scrambling over the invested ground with an ordered mania that finds them crashing into and tumbling over one another, joining regiments, and plotting new campaigns. Meanwhile, craft brings up just enough supplies to feed the far-ranging thoughts before they move on to their next assault. Then it tidies up the grounds and prepares an acceptable report. 

T. M. Moore