Canon Revisited

One of the first things I am interested in when I read a contemporary academic book is why the author felt it necessary to write this book. Surely other things have been written on the subject, often a lot of other things, and what is it that makes this work stand out from the crowd. In other words, why is this better or different than something written 50 years ago on the subject?

Entry points into already extensively charted territory are what make the life of a modern academic particularly difficult. Universities demand production of articles and books and producers demand novelty and so it winds up that many books that ought not to be published get published.

What drew me to Dr. Michael Kruger’s book Canon Revisited was that he was attempting to answer a question that very much has intrigued me for a long time and a question to which I had never received a satisfying answer: why do the 27 books that we have in the New Testament comprise the New Testament? This may seem like a simple question, so let me tease out why it vexes me like it does.

After Dan Brown’s ludicrous DaVinci Code was published, it caused a flurry of scribbling about the date of the formation of the Christian canon and how widespread fidelity to and belief in that canon was in early Christian history. Brown’s contention was that heterodox Christianity had ruled the day until the mean patriarchal Romans took over and burned all the evidence of alternate gospels and enshrined the alpha-male version of Christianity in opposition to the feminine divine so prevalent in actual early Christianity. (Seriously, this was chick lit at its worst.)

The premise of the book, however laughable and far-fetched, had the virtue of exciting interest in otherwise hardly marketable topics, and in my early Christianity history class at Colorado State that year (where we actually read the book!) I wrote a paper about the historical belief in Christ’s divinity in the early church that taught me a lot. (Confirming me in my orthodoxy might be the exact opposite of the effect desired by Dan Brown when he wrote the book, a fact that pleases me very much.) I still have the paper and still enjoy reading it from time to time, though the writing style of my 20 year old self can be a bit painful to witness.

My point is that the question of early Christian belief in Christ’s divinity and even in the historical acceptance of the canon of Scripture we read today has been settled in my mind for a long time, and though I know there are many challenges to the canon from historical standpoints, by my lights the orthodox have arguments just as persuasive as the detractors. Everyone who writes on the canon writes from a position of faith, after all.

But the question that still vexed me was different than the one I answered when I was young: I wasn’t merely interested in the fact of early Christian acceptance of the canon; the question I wanted answered was why these books are all Scripture and why the canon has been closed. For example, if we found another letter of St. Paul’s in some ancient Persian library why would we not consider it for inclusion in the canon? If another gospel account was shown to bear apostolic authority and was orthodox, say The Gospel According to Bartholomew, why would that not be considered? And what about books like 2 & 3 John, whose authorship is dubious, or the epistle of James, which Martin Luther famously lamented was part of the canon at all. How do we know these books, and none other, constitute God’s word to his Church?

That is the question Dr. Kruger set out to answer in this book and, while I still have questions and am not fully satisfied, I was cheered to read in his introduction that historical questions regarding the canon are not the only ones to concern ourselves with, important as they are, we must also be vigilant in pursuing the theological questions of canon.

In a series of posts to follow I will engage with this work of Kruger’s, mostly summarizing his contentions, but also seeking answers to some of the questions this book raises that I hadn’t anticipated.

Dan Brown and the Illusion of Knowledge

When Dan Brown’s page turner The DaVinci Code blew up and sold more copies than the Bible several years ago as well as sparked a temporary but vigorous national interest in historical topics such as the Knights Templars, the Emperor Constantine, and Mary Magdalene unrivaled until 300 came out a few years later and all of a sudden every bro in the lower 48 became a minor expert on the Battle of Thermopylae, I was a lowly sophomore RA at Colorado State. The floor atheist gave me his copy of the book to read, thinking, I imagine, that it would blow my dogmatic mind. When our hall director saw me reading it at the front desk one day he complimented me, giving me a knowing nod as if we were in on some great treasure together. And he said, and I swear I am not making this up, “Dan Brown is like John Grisham for smart people.” You know, cuz it’s, like, about art and shit.

Nothing better encapsulates the way most people think knowledge is acquired in our culture than that comment of my hall director, and Dan Brown has turned this desire for “knowledge” on the fly into a bestseller factory in a tough industry.

This is a man, after all, who in his most recent book, Inferno, includes a whole chapter’s worth of a “lecture” that his protagonist gave at a Dante society event in Vienna (naturally, such things do not happen in Poughkeepsie) which provided a blow by blow summary of the levels of hell in the Inferno. This would be the equivalent of going to a conference for mathematicians and working your way level by level through Pascal’s triangle. It is ludicrous, entirely simplistic. But of course this lecture isn’t really for the ostensible audience at the posh Viennese conference center, bedazzled by the symbological wizardry of our American art professor-hero, it is for the shlub reading the book at home in Cedar Rapids. The audience who largely has not read Dante’s epic, but now unfortunately feels as if they have.

Brown is at his best when he is moving the story along quickly, not giving people time to pause and consider the degree of realism of the events being described. He is at his worst when he is functioning, as he does for much of most of his books, as some sort of Frommer’s guide to cosmopolitan European locales. His books are filled chock-a-block full of extraneous information that is added only to tickle the intellect of the reader without actually forcing them to do anything at all with their mind. A cascade of paintings and famous buildings with famous architects attached to them, all added as if we are in a double-decker bus traversing Florence while we watch our hero and the girl on their caper.

Brown is also at his worst when he actually tries to describe even mundane situations. He has a tin ear for style. Consider the following paragraph as evidence of Brown’s rhetorical facility:

“The ponytailed doctor now took his right arm and removed the makeshift bandage that she’d fashioned out of his jacket, which she laid on the kitchen table. Then she carefully examined his wound. As she held his bare arm, Langdon could feel her slender hands trembling.”

Even in this simple paragraph, I can count about 12 words that do not need to be there, at the top of the list being “ponytailed.” Who in the world has ever used that adjective? Seriously, I was embarrassed to be reading the book when I read that sentence, grateful that it was being done on the anonymity of my Kindle. And that is what you see bad stylistic writers doing, accumulating silly adjectives and adverbs (I for one am glad that she “carefully examined his wound” with her “slender hands”, without which adverb I could only imagine she hastily and carelessly examined it with banana hands), completely unnecessary sentences and phrases (do we really need to know where she laid the removed bandage?), and tautologies such as “makeshift bandage that she’d fashioned out of his jacket.” Allow me to take a turn in his style: The renowned and bestselling author Dan Brown recklessly litters his groundbreaking new novel in characteristic abandon with such inane stylistic faux pas as the ones previously catalogued, including others that the rush of time's winged chariot prevents this intrepid writer from enumerating fully.

None of this is to say that Brown is not an entertaining writer. He certainly is, and it is because of his great ability to entertain that he continues to find such a vast audience. But it is also because he aspires to something more than mere entertainment, to educate the masses, that he has grown so popular. No one can read 50 Shades of Gray and imagine it be anything other than titillating fantasy fulfillment. However, when you read Dan Brown you are encouraged to think that this is something more than pulpy entertainment, but high literature about grand subjects. And, what’s more, by reading this book you are somehow vicariously touring Paris or the Vatican or Florence.

Such non-demanding pretenses of knowledge have mushroomed in our culture. Documentary films, TED talks, most news websites, all seem to proffer knowledge on a subject but all they really do is pass on a very small amount of information, distilled into catchy solutions that make the consumer feel smart for listening or watching. PBS survives on this, as does NPR. You watch Carl Sagan hosting Cosmos and imagine that osmotically his brilliance transfers to you, and all of this physics stuff is really pretty comprehensible. You hear Shelby Foote’s rich Southern drawl in Ken Burns’s Civil War, and you feel like you are becoming an expert on Antietam. Michael Pollan has made food experts, and Monsanto haters!, out of everyone who has watched Food, Inc.      

But this is not knowledge. Knowledge is not so cheaply won. I have studied the Bible for close to 10 years, reading numerous commentaries and systematic theologies, and know next to nothing about it. I’m reading N.T. Wright’s tome on Jesus now and I realize how little I know about Jesus. I have read Paradise Lost at least ten times and read half a dozen books explaining it or some aspect of it and still feel like a novice to the world of Milton. And so it goes.

We don’t have the time for patient accumulation of knowledge anymore. We demand it quickly and about a variety of subjects. Too many other things to be consumed. In a sense this is fine. Time is finite. I can’t read every book about Jesus or every commentary on Scripture or even every book produced about Milton in a single year let alone throughout history. But what knowledge breeds that TED talks do not, for instance, is humility. A glimmer of true knowledge opens you up to everything that you don’t know and can’t ever hope to learn. Pithiness closes us off, making us feel like we are in the know when we really all that we are doing is flattering ourselves.

This cheapness is what offended me so deeply about my hall director’s comment about Dan Brown and John Grisham. I didn’t learn a single thing more in reading The DaVinci Code than I did in reading A Time to Kill, and I imagine my hall director today can hardly remember a single detail about what he “learned” in Dan Brown’s book that separated the book as wheat from the chaff of other suspense writers. The least we can do when we are entertaining ourselves is admit it. What we tend to do, though, is encourage ourselves to think that we are becoming better people. And this bearded blogger finds that problematic. 

Is Even Good TV for Dummies?

I read Liel Leibovitz’s recent article in Tablet, a magazine that even a goy like me can enjoy, provocatively titled “TV is for Dummies.” His basic thesis I am inclined to agree with: the great novels are more satisfying and intelligent than today’s great television. As a great lover of the great novel, and a great lamenter of the fact that people watch Two and a Half Men and whatever the show about physicists hanging out with a hot blonde is called, as well as 34 iterations of CSI and other acronym-based franchises, it is self-evident to me that Dostoevsky beats Chuck Lorre. But as I read on and reflected I realized that I didn’t agree with Leibovitz overall, and the examples he used of TV shows inferior to the novel displayed a lack of actual engagement with these shows.

Leibovitz assures the reader that he is fine with the high estimation of many of the modern prestige television shows, but that he loses patience when the contemporary TV proselyte utters what he calls “the Phrase”: “TV is so good now that it’s just as great as our great novels. Maybe even better!” First of all, I am not sure who has ever uttered that phrase seriously. I know lots of people who love these shows, but I have never heard anyone compare Mad Men to Middlemarch. I myself am a hopeless addict of many of the modern shows Leibovitz namedrops here, but I have never entertained the thought that they are better somehow than the great novels of the past. The new shows are certainly better than most anything that came on TV before The Sopranos put television on a trajectory to actually be more interesting than movies, but they are not great art like War and Peace or David Copperfield.

But television shows are a different medium altogether than the book and it is therefore not possible to compare the two side by side. It is like comparing painting to epic poetry. Leibovitz praises what masters such as Henry James can do with different perspectives and word choice and accuses television of not having the same power, but his critique is merely a fancier way of saying books are written on paper and television uses live action and spoken words. A kinetic experience such as television will of necessity be different than the static book-reading experience.

Moreover, what serialized television allows that comparable mediums like film do not is a chance to slow the pace down and let things happen at a cadence truer to life. So when Leibovitz writes “(i)n television narrative, any television narrative, the commandments are few and simple: Something must always be happening, for otherwise there would be little reason to tune in next week; and whatever’s happening must happen on screen, for this is a visual medium, and a shot of Walter White brooding in his kitchen isn’t quite as gratifying as a shot of Walter White shooting some guy in the head” he is ignoring the way in which the multi-episode structure of a show like Breaking Bad allows us to see Walter White brooding in his kitchen, which we often do see. In fact, we see Walter White brooding far more often than we see him shooting someone in the head, something which makes one question if Leibovitz was merely beginning from ignorance in his jeremiad against prestige TV. 

This slower pace is what makes the sudden and stark violence of the show all the more affecting—it is set against the backdrop of a much slower and far more human experience than the typical action movie with its ten minutes of beginning exposition and hour and a half of violence. In other words, the fact that there are 13-16 episodes in a season of one of these shows and they therefore get 585 – 720 minutes of run time compared to the 100 – 120 minutes of a movie allows them, despite the differences in medium, to more closely resemble the muted structure of a novel.

Another quibble I have with this article is a fallacy I will call reductio ad Dostoevskyum. If Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, is not an intellectual and storytelling heir and equal to Fyodor Dostoevsky than current television is for the people Neil Postman warned us about in Amusing Ourselves to Death. (A similar fallacy would be, in conversations about the dire straits of contemporary Christian music, reductio ad Bachum, in which modern musicians are berated for not being equivalent to the quintessential musical genius.) Listen, I am reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot right now, and it is incredibly brilliant. It is difficult, packed with philosophy and history and theology, incredibly slow-moving at times, and filled with such a list of characters (all of whom have three or four nicknames, Christian names, or last names they are referred to as at different times) that you really do have to make a list to keep everyone separate. But Dostoevsky is freaking Dostoevsky. An unparalleled genius. A man so amazing and with such a rich life and a catalogue of works of such depth that Joseph Frank of Stanford wrote a five volume biography of the man. Of course Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner is not Dostoevsky, but whoever was before him and whoever will be again?

I have my own problems with the state of contemporary television, but part of me wishes we could all get along—the TV lovers and the TV haters. Because, really, most of the people who watch Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Americans are also people inclined to read a book and not really the people you need to encourage to pick up a copy of Dickens. You can tell by all of the people and outlets who cover those shows as compared to all of the critical analyses of, say, CSI: Omaha. And maybe it is a bit silly to imbue television shows with all of the meaning and creepy level of addiction that some people do, but there is nothing wrong at the same time with a little entertainment. You can’t read Henry James all of the time (and who in the hell would want to?).   

Humbled

So I had my first foray back into running last weekend. And it was painful, terrible, and utterly embarrassing. I had an off day, an off week before that really, but even given those considerations, this was easily the worst race I have had since the Horsetooth Half-marathon in 2007 when I ran way too fast up the dam(n) hill at the start of the race and was nearly blacking out by mile eight. The major difference between the two days: I decided to run the Horsetooth race the day before while hanging out in Estes Park with some friends. This one I at least trained for six weeks in preparation for.

The major difference: age. I am getting older. I can’t get into half-marathon shape overnight anymore. And I still felt like I could.

Even standing at the starting line of the race on Saturday morning my confidence was inordinate. I had a bit of a swagger, thinking I was back and that my fast times would be back with me. I didn’t have visions of a PR or even anything close to it, but I did think I would be back in the 1:40-1:45 range. I ran a 1:52, good for my slowest time ever outside of the Horsetooth race. Slower than when I was 19 and had never run farther than 7 miles. When I was training for a marathon a few years ago I regularly clocked half-marathon times of 1:33-1:35 in runs of 20+ miles. My time this weekend was a full 20+ minutes slower than my PR. It is hard for me to even dignify the performance by calling it a shadow of my former running-self. A shadow assumes some substantiality to cast it—here there was none.

Undoubtedly my feeling about this day is overwrought and out of proportion. But really I am fine with that. I operate well in response to shame. And in our medals-for-5k culture no one else is going to shame me for running a half-marathon faster than 80% of the other participants. I have to do it myself. After Horsetooth I wore that race shirt on nearly every long training run to remind myself of the ignominy of that day. And every time I looked down and saw that light blue, too short in the belly tech shirt I ran faster. Something similar is called for in this instance.

Because for me running isn’t about finding something that will make me thin or make my heart healthier or because I enjoy chafing in weird areas, but a way of life, a way of experiencing this world in all of the frailty of my body. I want to see how far and how fast I can go. And for the past nearly three years I have pursued this all too lazily, imagining that I could somehow coast on my earlier (meager) accomplishments. And unsurprisingly I have grown fatter, lazier, and slower in that time.

Last Saturday’s humiliation may be the straw that finally broke my love-handled camel’s back. I don’t know that I will be a good runner again for a long time, but I know that I want to be and I know that is worth sacrificing sleep and comfort (not to mention my nightly habit of whiskey) to achieve.

Some Thoughts on Revolution and Christianity, Courtesy of Jonathan Edwards

Over the week of my internment after surgery in late February I read George Marsden's justly lauded biography of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards is a fascinating figure and so far removed from the caricature of the high school philosophy class excerpts of Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God. I had intended to write more about this at the time, but other concerns presented themselves. So here is the first in what may turn into a set of reflections on the great theologian and philosopher of early America. And it begs a pretty interesting historical question.

Edwards was a British citizen as well as the foremost American theologian in an era when this was not yet a contradiction. One of the more interesting historical "what ifs?" surrounding the life of Edwards is the question of what role he would have played in the American Revolution had he lived to see it come. Edwards was slightly older than Benjamin Franklin (Franklin actually published a number of Edwards' treatises from his Philadelphia printing house) so it is not inconceivable that had he been spared his unexpected death at the age of 54 he could have been called on to play a pivotal role. Princeton University, of which Edwards was president when he died, was a hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the war and it is difficult to see how it would have become this way under Edwards' leadership. 

Edwards believed in a hierarchical structure as a God-ordained ordering of society. In his role as minister he saw himself as more than just the spiritual life coach of today's stripe, but as a father to his children. He believed that God had called pastors to serve as leaders in all areas of a community's life. He was a loyal subject to the crown and believed that God appointed kings to lead a people. This is not to say that he could not have been swayed by the arguments of the revolutionaries, merely that it was not the default position for a colonist to be against King George and his tyranny. 

Thinking of the speculative response of Edwards to the revolution has caused me to think a lot about the revolution myself. Just as we are taught that the Crusades were 100% the work of evil Christians, we are taught that the revolution is a purely noble event, wherein the forces of liberty banished the forces of oppression. The plucky little underdog defeated the best military in the world. 

But of course it is far more complicated than that telling. There is a joke in Richard Linklater's early 90s nostalgia-fest Dazed and Confused where a hippie teacher dismissing her students into the summer of 1976 cautions them to not get caught up in the patriotic fervor of the bicentennial: "Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes." There is enough truth in that to bring a smile to the face of even the most ardent patriot. We have a lot to be proud of from our revolutionary heritage but a lot to be ashamed of as well. 

Clara and I were talking the other night about how conservative Christians tend to view the revolution as a battle for religious freedom as much as a battle for political or social liberties. But the England of 1776 was not the England the Puritans fled in 1620. England in the early seventeenth century was a nation torn between competing loyalties, with Catholic strongholds in the north yet to be broken, and numerous splinter sects of crazy cult groups. The state church was oppressive and cruel with dissenters, and the idea of separation between church and state had yet to take root. But the Puritan revolution and the English Civil War of the 1640s did away with a lot of these tensions (unless, of course, you were Catholic; but early America was not exactly a bastion of Catholicism either). Dissenters became the leaders in Cromwell's commonwealth. Even after the Restoration Charles II was crafty enough to not punish dissent with the same severity. 1776, after all, is after the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley had made Methodism an intractable part of British Christianity. (This is a grievously incomplete picture of one of the most fascinating centuries of any country, ever, a fact of which I am well aware. Read this and this and this.) In short, the issues between the colonists and Britain were not religious, but largely political: "No taxation without representation", etc. 

And for Christians this raises interesting questions. I remember well the moment when I first started really reading the Bible for myself and read the texts about submitting to our rulers and the thought flashed through my mind in an instant: what about the Revolutionary War? How did Christians find justification for overturning the legitimate, God-ordained authority of King George? Since then I have read Augustine's theory of just war, Niebuhr's modern adaptation of the idea, Milton's impassioned defenses of liberty and distinction between king and tyrant and in general have come to accept the Revolution as a net good, but it is interesting to make note of the fact that it was far from clear at the time and is still murky today. 

The argument is entirely plausible that a nation following the dictates of the New Testament will tend toward democracy and greater liberty for the individual, but the question of whether to use force to bring this state about is far from clear. Particularly when the matters of freedom are more economic and political than religious or despotic. In any event, the Revolutionary War seems to have a far smaller degree of legitimacy than the Civil War, which some on the right are prone to argue was an egregious misuse of federal power and a denial of gospel gradualism.

I don't know. Something to think about. At the very least, thinking through these things has helped me see a more balanced view of history, one that is neither hagiography approaching idolatry about the founders of this nation, but at the same time doesn't buy into all of the sarcasm of the hippie teacher in the movie. The truth is so much more complicated and so much more interesting.