More Thoughts on the Crunchy Con Debate

Having followed the crunchy con debate, I'd like to record some of my thoughts. These are going to be mostly critical, not because I think the Crunchy Cons are all wrong, but because I think they are really putting their worst foot forward in the debate.

1) One thing that really bothers me is the seemingly universal master narrative in which once upon a time thought patterns supposedly existed that made ordinary life sacramental, and now they have disappeared and we are left in the ruins. It's not true, people! I don't like to "pull rank," but really, take it from me, a professional historian, dividing all history into befores and afters is a guaranteed to be factually incorrect. Guys like Foucault will come along every once in a while and announce a big before and after story, like "Childhood didn't exist before the Romantic movement" or "Romance was invented by troubadours". But they will always be shot down sooner or later.

Does that mean the past has no good ideas? Of course not! That would be just another before and after story (before bad, after good). But what it does mean is that every good idea and practice of the past is all mixed up with bad ideas and practices of the past. That life is much less coherent than you are taking it to be. That there is no Archimedean point, no thought pattern one can grasp (such as becoming spiritual, converting to Christianity, rejecting nominalism, turning your back on consumerism, recovering the sacramental vision, whatever) that will then effectively result in the resolution of the evils of this life.

Read Ecclesiastes, now! Please! And remember what J.I. Packer said about it, that this is a book written not for hopeless pre-Christians, but for new "white-hot," "on fire for the Lord" (or for a new vision of holistic living, or what have you) Christians, to tell them that being a Christian does not give you a oracular vision into the motherboard of reality.

Christian readers have no excuse for forgetting that there is only one before and after story of loss and exile, and that story happened long before recorded history.

2) "Over tacos and quesadillas, we talked about electromagnetism and gravitation, and how both the left and the right, in the main, seem to be out of good ideas on how to create a unified field theory." Is this a problem? That neither Ted Kennedy and Noam Chomsky, nor George Bush and Pat Buchanan can figure out how to unite gravitation with the other three fundamental forces? No? Why not? Because "left" and "right" are political concepts, and hence applicable to people working in the political field, and we don't expect politicians to have solutions to problems in advanced physics.

Well, what Rod Dreher was really talking about was restoring "America’s lost sense of community." (Side note: OK, the idea that America once had a sense of community, and then lost it, that's the kind of just plain wrong before and after story I'm talking about). He noted that this liberal urban developer had lots of great ideas about urban development. Is this a surprise? Why shouldn't liberal architects, for example, have good ideas about architecture? And why should we be disappointed that the left and right politicians don't have very good ideas about how architecture can anchor healthy communities? As Thomas Sowell sometimes says, no algebra textbook has any essential vitamins and minerals -- and is that a problem? A reason to criticize algebra textbook sellers? To insist that algebra textbooks be fortified with iron and niacin?

Let's expect from politics and politicians the things they can give us, which is not "a sense of community" (whether lost, or merely suffering one of its periodic downswings), but reasonably good courts, fair property tax assessments, etc.

3) I guess this brings me into my third point which is that just as all history can't be divided into before and after, so too all the people out there can't be divided into us and them. Rod Dreher quotes Russell Kirk:

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

In other words, the real political line is between philosophical materialists, and religious people (in the broad sense, including Platonists, Jews, Christians, etc.)

OK, is this supposed to be an empirical observation? If it is, then as Willmoore Kendall pointed out long ago, it is just plain false: at no point in American history (and I would venture to generalize in human history either), have all the devotees of permanent things been on one side and all the mere materialists been on the other.

Or is this supposed to be some kind of normative vision, some demand that the conservative movement expell the non-religious among them? If so, it's a dog, but let's let that slide. Let's assume one can actually form a political movement on this basis. If all the religious people are supposed to be on one political side, and all the materialists on the other, then I'm sorry to point it out to you, but that's the same as saying if that all the religious people are required by their religion to be on one political side. How is saying "Only idolators who worship stock speculation could oppose a tax on short term stock sales" different from saying "Only envious liberals who think 'Thou shalt not steal' doesn't apply to them could oppose a capital gains tax break"? Of course, this is not surprising: if we really have an "integrated view of life", well then, church and political party will be integrated, won't they?

When I first heard the "Crunchy Con" idea of life I liked it because it was going to dis-integrate our view of life, that is, show us how, just because I am a (fairly mainstream) conservative in politics, that says nothing about how I dress, how I eat, the friends I have at work and how we get along. Unfortunately, that's not how some people are playing it (and Rod Dreher seems really to be a lot better than many of his buddies on this score). Rather after first lamenting that "The existing political party lines put all us good religious people into different parties," what they are really proposing is that "We need to readjust our political party lines so that all religious people can feel comfortable supporting one party." What will follow on that? Well, go to some "Justice Sunday" "Moral Majority" church, switch around the issues a bit and you'll see. The same old lifestyle righteousness and the same old "vote how you pray" line. Count me out.

So no, don't quote Russell Kirk or Eric Voegelin to me on that. They're just plain wrong. Wrong on the facts, and even more wrong on their normative principles. Economic and political life is mostly about trade-offs and knowing the really permanent things gives little guidance there. Solomon was wiser than either of them when he said, "For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow? Who can tell him what will happen under the sun after he is gone?" And if that's so, let's cut each other some slack -- and that holds, whether it's the mainstreamers who need to cut the crunchies some slack, or the crunchies who need to cut the mainstreamers some slack.

4) All this talk about "reining in the market" and how that might be too strong medicine for the mainstream conservatives out there: to me it seems like pretty weak tea. Rod Dreher asks what we should do about the pornification of life? I have a great idea: throw pornographers in jail and don't allow their products to be transmitted through the mails or the data lines. If you want to do it and have the political will, it can be done. Not perfectly, of course, but as well as we prohibit bad checks or credit card fraud. And when that sort of thing is being done, who is out there on the frontlines? The much-maligned Christian right, that's who. But leaving that aside, let's not fool ourselves that "reining in the market" in general, and "critiquing the excesses of capitalism," let alone "recovering a spirit of community" is going to have anything more than marginal impact on pornography (or abortion, or divorce, or other social ills). Moral reform, absent direct legal measures, won't do the job. (Of course neither will legal measures absent moral reform.) So please don't sell it as if it will.

In short, I think the biggest problem with the Crunchy Con vision is the misapprehension that it is a new vision linking the political to the religious to the personal. As such it will fail to succeed and fail even if it succeeds to implement its aims, as such it will produce a kind of "new monasticism," and as such it will degrade religion into a new version of visible advertising and branding. But if the Crunchy Con vision is that politics and religion and the personal should be disconnected, that one should approach each in its own separate integrity, and not try to fuse them, then it will be helpful and salutary.

Two Fascinating Links

I have come across two fascinating old on-line pieces that readers might be interested in. The first is an old piece at Beggars All on a certain "Charles Finney University", a Christian school in the Michigan area (the school's real name is revealed here). I must say, the main effect on me of this post is to confirm my general feeling that Christian education is absurd. I very much doubt whether Concordia is any better. Why is it so absurd? My gut feelings run this gamut: 1) because learning involves grades, which is works, which means kingdom of the left hand. 2) Because most Christian schools aren't that good, which means the faculty are mostly wannabes (a guy like Gene Veith stands out all the brighter by contrast), and wannabes are the stupidest, most dogmatic liberals; 3) because Christian schools are drenched in the treacly atmosphere of affirmation at all costs, which makes it impossible to do anything intelligent. (You know, in Buddhism, intelligence is supposed to be a transmuted form of anger. I think there is a lot of psychological insight in that.)

UPDATE: While the Here We Stand version of this post has a number of positive testimonials about Christian education (follow the link to the comment box), the Bayly brothers' blog, Out of Our Minds, Too argues that Christian colleges (at least - - they are big fans of homeschooling and/or truly evangelical Christian grade schools) are particularly dangerous to . . . Christians.

Here's another link to an essay by Allan Carlson, my favorite family historian, on Luther's idea of the family. It's a great essay; please read it.

BUT, I'm going to concentrate on the very end where he trails off into an all-too-common historical error. After summarizing Luther's idea of the family, he notes that for four hundred years it served the Lutheran lands well. He then asks, so what happened now, why did it decline? and offers the idea, that maybe not making marriage a sacrament was a bad idea.

OK, I confront this fallacy among my students all the time. It goes like this: any institution that doesn't last forever is a FAILURE and has a "FATAL FLAW" (cue most thoughtful look) deep in its foundation. It makes you sound like a very deep and long-term thinker, but really it's completely illogical. Marriage was not a sacrament in 1875 when the Lutheran family ideal was working in Lutheran lands, and it was not a sacrament in 1975 when it was being rejected. What basis (other than the hankering to water down the Reformation usual to tired Protestants) does he offer for linking one to non-sacramental marriage and not the other?

Two rules of thumb for would-be deep thinkers on history:

1) NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. If something lasts 100 years, it's a collossal success. What if humanity ever did create the absolutely ideal society? Our first order of business would be change it--you know, to improve it.

2) YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN A CHANGE OF STATE BY A CONSTANT. For example, non-sacramental marriage is a constant of the Lutheran marriage ideal; its twentieth century breakdown must therefore be related to some other thing happening relatively soon (and four hundred years ISN'T relatively soon) before the breakdown happens. Now that change (the efficient cause to use Aristotelian terminology) may well interact with a constant in a particular way, but the constant by itself can't be the reason for the change.

3) In general, every big thinker should have ECCELESIASTES 7:10 branded on his forehead. Actually the whole book should be required reading for any would be macrohistorian.

Allan Carlson's got lots of other good stuff on the Family Research Council website:
"Two Becoming One Flesh"
"Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace"
"'Conjugal Happiness' and the American Experience"
"Standing for Liberty"
"Marriage and Procreation"
"The Failure of European Family Policy"
"The Natural Family Meets the Moral Hazard at National Health Care Gulch"
"Making Social Security Reform Family Friendly"

Originally posted at Here We Stand

Why I Believe in the Intermediate State

As Josh says, there is little on the soul’s life in heaven in the Bible. Little, however, but not nothing. One of the keys to analyzing the Biblical evidence is recognizing the possibility that the Old Testament saints had a different experience, and certainly a different understanding, than that of the New Testament. In this perspective, the gate to heaven for those in the intermediate state in heaven was opened by Christ in his triumphant procession through hell. I find this view makes the most sense of the Biblical facts.

We have to take seriously the passages in Psalms 6:5 "No one remembers you when he is dead; who praises you from the grave?"; Psalm 88:11 "Is your love declared in the grave, your faithfulness in destruction?" A word search of "grave" in Psalms (try here) finds no use of it as a gateway to any kind of life worth living, rather as something which one can only wish to escape. Similar is the description of the grave in Job 3:11-19, in which it is a land of darkness (cf. Job 17:13) and rest and concealment from God (cf. Job 14:13). In the Old Testament, then, I believe man had not yet received his liberation from the curse of death and those who died went down to at best a dreary semi-existence. As an example of this viewpoint, for example, I see no reason to rationalize away the appearance of Samuel after death in 1 Samuel 28.

But as always, there are exceptions. Enoch and Elijah were carried up to heaven bodily. Likewise the body of Moses was never found (Deut. 34:6) and later Jewish rabbis concluded that Moses too had been assumed bodily into heaven. (I don’t think it is an accident that it was these two who appeared as bodily resurrected in the Transfiguration.)

In Daniel and the Apocrypha, the glimmer of hope offered by these exceptions and passages such as Psalm 16:10-11, becomes a settled expectation, although only for the far future:

Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever (Daniel 12:2-3)

and

And when [Judas Maccabee] had made a gathering throughout the company to the sum of two thousand drachms of silver, he sent it to Jerusalem to offer a sin offering, doing therein very well and honestly, in that he was mindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they that were slain [as martyrs under Antiochus Epiphanes] should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. And also in that he perceived that there was great favour laid up for those that died godly, it was an holy and good thought. Whereupon he made a reconciliation for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin (2 Maccabees 12:43-45).

Note that in these passages as in Jesus’s confrontation with the Sadducees in Matthew 22, the only issue is the resurrection at the end of time. No intermediate state is in question yet. (Nor be it noted, does this have anything to do with Purgatory, as Catholic apologists have attempted to make it read.)

Yet the Pharisees themselves believed in something more. The author of Ecclesiastes calls us to

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth . . .[before] ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it (Ecc. 12:1, 6-7).

Of course not all Jews accepted this body-soul dualism. The Hellenized and rationalistic Sadducees denied both the resurrection and the intermediate state. (I regard the usual "Greco-Roman pagans are dualists but Hebrews reject dualism" line to be a gross oversimplification. Philo the Jew and Lucretius the Roman would give a rather different take on this.)

In this regard, Jesus was basically one with the Pharisees (cf. Acts 23:6-9). Hence he too spoke of body (soma) and soul (psyche), the later being liable to be tormented in hell (Mat. 10:28). In the light of this passage, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man is harder to dismiss as just a parable.

But unlike the Pharisees, Jesus regarded HIS person as the key to having continuing life after death. When Jesus tells Martha that Lazarus will rise again, she responds by casting her hope in the far future: "I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." But Jesus then tells her (in elliptical language) that in him hope is much nearer: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will love, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die" (John 11:22-25). The natural force of this citation is that Christ is promising more than the resurrection in the far future, indeed eternal life uninterrupted by this death. The same is true of His promise to the repentant thief on the cross. He calls out to Jesus saying "Remember me when you come into your kingdom," an event he seems to regard as far in the future. Jesus then answers saying "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:42-43). Again, he is saying in effect, no, you will not have to wait until the far future but today, before the resurrection, you will experience joy.

Another problem for those who deny dualism is the state of Jesus on Holy Saturday. On that day, as we confess Jesus was in hell, was fully God and fully man, yet his body was still dead. His body was dead, but something of His was there. And that something (remember Christ as fully God and fully man has alike a reasonable soul) preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19) and released the first-fruits of the Old Testament dead into the bodily resurrection (Mat. 27:51-53). Now all those who believed in the Messiah to come are in heaven in their souls (Rev. 14:1-5), and a first fruits have already been resurrected, with incorruptible bodies like that of our Lord Christ.

More than that he gave us the promise that we would not rest in the grave as in the gloomy foreboding of David and Job. As we read in the Revelation 14:13:

Then I heard a voice from heaven say, ‘Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.’

"From now on"–it was not this way in the past. The good deeds of Samuel and Job and the prophets had not followed them until Christ broke the bands of death and Hades. The souls of those who die now are conscious of events going on in earth, crying out in Heaven for justice on the oppressors of the Christian church (Rev. 6:9-11; like Mark Louderback I see no reason not to take this passage pretty much as is).

Of course, to be with God in soul alone is no comparison with the incorruptible bodies we will inherit, but still, even such a "naked" soul is with Christ and rests from the trials of this wicked world (2 Cor. 5:1-10) as it awaits the mansion being prepared by Christ, which is our resurrection body (John 14:2-4).

Originally posted at Here We Stand