The Theology of the Body #2: The Rejection of Modern Dualism

One of the main themes running through John Paul II's TOB (Theology of the Body) is the rejection of modern gnostic tendencies that are enshrined in modern philosophy, twisted in Romanticism, implemented in technology and finally worshiped in liberal theology. It is, after all, a theology of the body. But why does John Paul II put it this way? Why call it a theology of the body? I think there are many reasons one could point to in answer to this question, but let me just suggest two in the space of this blog post.

The Biblical Doctrine of Creation as the Foundation of Biblical Theology
First, John Paul II's project is a theological anthropology grounded in the doctrine of creation. God created man as a body-soul complex and the body is neither incidental to our true nature nor dispensable. We are our bodies. So John Paul II can speak of the "language of the body" as if the body was a person - because it is. I am my body and I speak through my body; this is what is behind the common phrase "body language." How if fidget, whether I make eye contact, what I do with my hands - all these things are part of the way "I" communicate. The person who is Craig Carter is a body and this fact is the reason why physical death is so unnatural and so fearsome; we rightly fear death because we fear the disintegration of the person as the body dies. We do not take lightly the loss of our bodies for the very good reason that we are our bodies and we are therefore talking about the loss of self.

For John Paul II, the Bible is a unified revelation that speaks to the way we are, what is wrong with us and how we can become what we were created to become. He finds a teleological understanding of human being not only in reason, but in Divine revelation. The Bible begins with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends with the marriage supper of the Lamb. The heart of the Bible is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

In the OT the relationship between Yahweh and Israel is compared to that between a bride and her husband and in the NT the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to that of a bridegroom and bride. Near the physical center of Scripture is the Song of Songs, about which John Paul II thinks everybody is right. He thinks that the Fathers and the mystics who treated it as an allegory of the relationship of the soul to God were right on one level. But he also has sympathy for modern Evangelical literalists who interpret it as Middle Eastern love poetry and argue that God must not be embarrassed by sexual joy. John Paul II thinks it is about that too. And those who, like Barth, see it as linking the old and new covenants by foreshadowing the relationship between Christ and the Church in the context of the prophetic teaching on marriage as the relationship between the LORD and Israel are also right. Bodies do just fine, John Paul II thinks, as analogies for the Divine human relationship.

The point is that the Bible has an awful lot to say about bodies. Those who think it is a "spiritual" book are not wrong but bodies have spiritual significance and any sort of body-spirit dualism that says that one has little or nothing to do with the other does not understand biblical spirituality. For John Paul II, our bodies are at the center of God's creative activity, they are fallen as a result of sin, yet the image of God is not destroyed by sin and God is at work to redeem our bodies, a process which one day will culminate in the resurrection of the body into a glorious new divinized, spiritualized, glorified order of existence. The Bible, one might say with little exaggeration, for John Paul II, is all about bodies.

The Biblical Doctrine of Creation as the Basis for the Rejection of Modern Philosophical Anthropology
The second reason it is called a theology of the body is that John Paul II is here attempting to provide an alternative to the modern philosophical anthropology that has become dominant since Descartes.

For early modern philosophers like Bacon and Descartes the quest for power over nature was extremely important and a new concept of subjectivity was developed in which a dualism was created between the self, the consciousness, which was exalted to a divine status, and, on the other hand, the body, which was regarded as part of a mechanistic nature subject to the mechanical laws of nature described by Newton. So humans are, in this dualistic understanding, immaterial centers of consciousness, which are free, and bodies, which are subject to impersonal laws of physics. Here is an extended quote from philosopher Kenneth Schmitz, describing the situation that John Paul II faced:

"The mechanistic account of human nature in the wake of Bacon and Descartes denied the interiority of material beings & consequently the kinship of the human person with the subrational natural cosmos. Alone in an inhospitable world that had been deprived of inner meaning, the freedom of the conscious subject becomes ‘absolute,’ detached from sources of meaning: ‘This, then, is the genesis of the modern sense of self as subjectivity. We might say that subjectivity is the self-defense by which consciousness fends off a world either hostile to its inhabitation or at least without companionate room for it, even while consciousness subverts the integrity of that world by its imperious demands. The modern shift gave to the human subject an absolute status precisely in its character quaconsciousness; for human consciousness not only sets its own terms but the terms for reality itself.” (Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, pp. 135-6)

So, in modernity, the non-material center of consciousness is sovereign, rational and free but the body is not.

John Paul II's TOB is an attempt to put the human creature back together on the basis of the biblical doctrine of creation. Man is a body-soul complex, not a dualistic mind somehow connected to a physical body (the mind-body problem of modern philosophy). John Paul II is a Thomist so he does not accept modern philosophy, but in TOB he is not concerned to replace modern philosophical anthropology with a Thomist anthropology; rather, he is concerned to appeal to the doctrine of creation as discovered through biblical exegesis. John Paul II has this weird idea that Thomism is actually biblical and that God has created the world and revealed truth about the world that actually cohere! (See Veritatis Splendor, Par. 44-45 and the work of Matthew Levering, especially his recent Biblical Natural Law (Oxford, 2008).

So for John Paul II, unlike modern dualism, the body is as much an aspect of the person as the mind is. We are as much bodies as we are minds. Of course, the account of sin given in Scripture reveals that we experience a lack of cohesion as persons under the conditions of the fall, and modern dualism is a reflection of that sinful disintegration (which is one reason sin and death are so closely related in Pauline theology, for example). But we were created as unified, coherent beings and our redemptive destiny is reintegration. So Christian theology cannot follow modern philosophy into a dualism in which the body becomes basically as tool of the self, a means by which the self acts in the world but not really the true self. Christian theology, in order to be biblical and reform modern distortions, must therefore be a theology of the body.

For moderns, it is easy to see how the body becomes a despised tool of the self; modern use their bodies to achieve their goals but the body is just ultimately a part of nature. For John Paul II, on the other hand, the body has all the dignity of the person. We should respect our bodies and express ourselves through our bodies rather than using our bodies. The modern tendency for people to "use" each other's bodies for fleeting pleasure is thus preceded by the habit of using their own bodies in that manner. In the TOB bodies are too important to use as tools, manipulate with technology and treat impersonally as means rather than as ends.

How all this relates to personhood will be the subject of a following post.

Lesslie Newbigen: Is He the Godfather of Sojourners or the Manhattan Declaration?

Christianity Today has an excellent article by Krish Kandiah this month on Lesslie Newbigin, one of the great missionary statesmen and theologians of the 20th century. He was born 100 years ago on Dec. 9, 1909. Newbigin was a career missionary who spent 35 years in India learning the language, immersing himself in the culture, preaching the gospel and making converts.

He ended his career as a bishop in the Church of South India, a union of Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Baptist, Penttecostal and Reformed churches. In the excellent biography, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life, Geoffrey Wainwright describes what Newbigin did as a bishop in the Church of South India. He mostly traveled from village to village preaching evangelistic messages, baptizing, catechizing, building up the church and appointing and encouraging clergy. This was a growing, evangelical church, not a dead, liberal one and Newbigin had an evangelical and biblical ministry.

He spent his whole career, however, not in evangelical but in ecumenical Protestant circles and he retired back to England having never moved much in Evangelical Protestant circles. But his life work was only getting off the ground as he turned 65. That year he did three significant things. First, he drove back to England with his wife, a trip that took several months. Second, he read Barth's Church Dogmatics in their entirety. Third, he started a five year stint of teaching missions in a theological college in England. Then the books began to come one after another. It is fair to say that had he died at 65 he would be basically obscure; his reputation came as a result of the books he wrote in "retirement."

Newbigin was able to look at Western culture in the early 1970s with the eye of an outsider, but also as an insider as well. What he saw was a the West as a giant mission field and the Western Church as non-missionary in its outlook. And his sense that something was desperately wrong with this picture resonated with many others, both Evangelicals and Mainline (as they were then) Protestants.

Newbigin was a very bright theologian and extremely well-read and his rethinking of the mission of the church within the context of the doctrine doctrine of Divine election has allowed many of us to see how the Reformed doctrine of election leads directly to evangelism, mission and preaching. In this theological development, of course, he was greatly stimulated by the Barthian reformulation of the Reformed doctrine of election as centering on Christology, rather than on an abstract decree in the mind of God prior to or apart from Jesus Christ.

Newbigin's "big idea" was the public nature of Christian truth, which he portrayed as a narrative of God's action in the world, a narrative which includes within itself the stories of our lives and the story of our culture's history as well. He deplored the secularization of Western culture and called Christians to ignore the Enlightenment rules concerning the fact-value distinction and the is-ought dichotomy and to strive to bear witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life and culture.

But Newbigin's call on this issue has been given substance in two very different forms. On the one hand, we have the rise of a new social gospel movement in which the Cultural Mandate is laid over the Great Commission in such a way that the latter is neglected and obscured. On the other hand, we have those who seek to proclaim the truth of the Christian worldview even in the midst of hostile secularism and resurgent paganism as Truth for all people rather than a private superstition of certain people who are content to huddle in their little corner without challenging the vast majority of cultural activity, which is increasingly becoming pagan.

The awful neologism "missional" has been made popular by those who have been influenced by Newbigin and like all new terms it has had to be defined. There is considerable push and pull going on between those who want to employ the term "missional" to describe the work of the church being like God's work in the sense that the church's mission is everything God does in the world, that is, including not just the preaching of the Gospel but also what Kuyperians would call the work of common grace and what the Neo-Kuyperians would call the "cultural mandate," on the one hand, and those who would want to define "missional" in more traditionally Gospel preaching, convert-making terms, on the other. This tendency to think of the work of Christians as including farming, creative arts, business, economics and government, but especially social work, is often confused by those outside the Kuyperian tradition with the mission of the church, qua church, which is Gospel proclamation. When Evangelicals from Pentecostal, Baptist, and other pietistic traditions become convinced that God is working in the world in all areas of life, not just religious areas, they quite naturally fall into the trap of thinking that it is the job of the church qua church to get involved in all these areas to the neglect of preaching the Gopsel.

In the Kuyperian and Thomist traditions, the work of the Church in bringing the Gospel to the people by Word and Sacrament is a work distinctive to the Church, but living out the implications of the Gospel is the work of the whole people of God every day. They live out of a longstanding and sophisticated tradition of theological thought about the Church and society. But Evangelicals from the more pietistic traditions, who grow up never hearing anything about God being concerned about art or the environment, tend unthinkingly to want such concerns to become the preoccupation of the church qua church.

So for many pietistic Evangelicals in particular (though for some others as well) the tendency is to define missional as letting the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1 overshadow the Great Commission of Matthew 28. It is a reaction against the reduction of the Gospel to a personal and individual message by denying the significance of the personal call to repentance and faith in favor of social service and political action, which is what we see in the Evangelical Left and the Emergent Church. Since the new appreciation for the social and political implications of the Gospel is discovered at the same time as they become aware of the passing of Christendom, it is assumed that the only place to do Christian politics is in the Church. So pastors must become social workers or political activists in order to be relevant.

On the other hand, Newbigin's theology can be viewed as undergirding those who, like the framers of the Manhattan Declaration, view the preaching of Jesus as Lord of Creation to require a costly witness to the sanctity of life and the foundational importance of marriage. In the traditions feeding into this group we have the justification for the creation of many Christian organizations within civil society which are not exactly churches, not the state, and not just individuals. This more traditional model of witness allows the church qua church to focus on mediating the grace of God to the faithful through the ministry of Word and Sacrament, while the whole people of God work to establish Christian social and political ministries that bear witness to Christian truth.

The question is: Who are the true heirs of Lesslie Newbigin's theology? Robert P. George, Charles Colson, and Francis Cardinal George? Or Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo?

Newbigin is, in my view, the Godfather of the Manhattan Declaration and a powerful witness against any who would, in the name of cultural relevancy, water down the Christian witness in any way or make the Gospel of sin and salvation less than central to the preaching and teaching of the Church. His call to engage the culture was a call not to compromise with or accommodate to the culture, but to transform the culture by the power of the Holy Spirit working through a faithful testimony to the biblical Gospel as ordinary Christian act in concert to be salt and light in the world.

Tony Blair Says "Spend Trillions Just in Case"

In the wake of the Climategate scandal, Tony Blair says that we should "take action" to halt global warming even if the science is not certain. From the report in the Daily Telegraph:

"Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”. But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to."

Now does this make sense? Dominic Lawson, writing in the Times Online doesn't think so. He thinks that Blair is using the same reasoning that took the UK into the invasion of Iraq.

"Tony Blair, turned up in Copenhagen to give his take on the leaked emails. The former prime minister declared that they did not lessen by one jot what he called “the need for action” and added: “It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be.” Blair is clearly not troubled by irony, since this approach is exactly the one that got us into such a mess over Saddam Hussein’s suppositious biological threat. The actual evidence was tenuous at the time — but to persuade the public of the need for action, Blair was prepared to say that it was watertight. For weapons of mass destruction, read weather of mass destruction.

Blair now argues that even if the science is less clear than is claimed by the climate catastrophists, we have to act because of the risks to humanity if their worst fears turn out to be well founded. This would make perfect sense if there were no risks attached to what he calls “action”, just as it would if there had been no lives put at risk by attacking Iraq. In fact, there are vast costs involved in the war against weather, which could actually cost lives. The highly respected climate economist Professor Richard Tol, a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that the CO2 tax required to bring emissions down to the levels demanded by the IPCC would reduce global GDP by an amount that would equate — in 2100 — to $40 trillion (£25 trillion) a year. It’s pretty obvious, really: just as cheap energy has transformed the lives of millions for the better, it follows that reversing the process would have an opposite effect."

Willis Eschenbach in a guest post entitled "Climate, Caution and Precaution" at Watts Up With That, analyzes the "Precautionary Principle" that Blair and others are appealing to in this argument. His conclusion:

"All the different types of climate-related destruction that people are so worried will happen in fifty years are happening today. Droughts? We got ‘em. Floods? There’s plenty. Rising sea levels? Check. Insect borne diseases? Which ones would you like? Tornados and extreme storms? We get them all the time. People dying of starvation? How many do you want? All the Biblical Plagues of Egypt? Would you like flies with that?

Forget about what will happen in fifty years. Every possible climate catastrophe is happening now, and has been for centuries.

So if you are truly interested in those problems, do something about them today. Contribute to organizations developing salt resistant crops. Put money into teaching traditional drought resisting measures in Africa. Support the use of micro-hydroelectric plants for village energy. The possibilities are endless.

That way, whether or not the doomsayers are right about what will happen in fifty years, both then and now people will be better prepared and more able to confront the problems caused by the unpleasant vagaries of climate. Fighting to reduce CO2 is hugely expensive, has been totally unsuccessful to date, will be very damaging to the lives of the poorest people, and has no certainty of bringing the promised results. This is a very bad combination.

Me, I don’t think CO2 will cause those doomsday scenarios. But that’s just me, I’ve been wrong before. If you do care about CO2 and think it is teh eeeevil, you should be out promoting your favorite no-regrets option. Because whether or not CO2 is a danger as people claim, if you do that you can be sure that you are not just pouring money down a bottomless hole with very poor odds of success. That’s the real Precautionary Principle."

Read it all here. This guy makes a lot more sense than Tony "We'd Better Depose Saddam Just in Case" Blair.

The BBC is biased on global warming? Who says?

The BBC says so! Well, they haven't quite said so yet, but the BBC is at least asking if maybe they are a bit biased on "climate change." According to the inimitable James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph, who has been generating millions of hits on his blog lately by taking the contrarian view on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the BBC has decided to launch a review of its science coverage with particular reference to AGW and genetically modified foods. The Daily Mail, in the course of reporting this story, notes that:

"Last year a leading climate change sceptic claimed his views had been deliberately misrepresented by the BBC. Lord Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said he had been made to look like a 'potty peer' on a TV programme that 'was a one-sided polemic for the new religion of global warming'.

In 2007 the then editor of Newsnight hit out at the BBC's stance on climate change. Peter Barron said it was 'not the corporation's job to save the planet'. His comments were backed up by other senior news executives who feared the BBC was 'leading' the audience, rather than giving them 'information'. Mr Barron had claimed the BBC had gone beyond its remit by planning an entire day of programmes dedicated to highlighting environmental fears.

His comments had come after the broadcaster had already been accused of not being objective on green issues and of handing over the airwaves to campaigners. In 2007 it had devoted a whole day of programming to the Live Earth concerts."

The website Biased BBC has a good assortment of examples of biased reporting.

In other news, the Times of London is a little embarrassed today after putting up posters all over the underground touting their excellent science coverage and then finding out that the posters were inaccurate - as in very, very wrong. It is such a nuisance the way those pesky facts keep getting in the way of the new global warming religion. Here is the story here and here.

They say that the oppressed, little people can bear being laughed at and can even laugh at themselves, but that our rulers cannot bear to be mocked. (The Devil is also a proud spirit and cannot abide being mocked. He is one of the rulers of this world too, come to think of it.) Anyway, one of the funniest things on the net is the collection of music videos on the website of Minnesotans for Global Warming. My favorite is "Hide the Decline" with "Imagine There's No Global Warming" a close second. But honorable mention has to go to "If I Had Some Global Warming," which is set to the tune of "If I Had a Million Dollars" by the Canadian group "Barenaked Ladies." You can even buy their CD and help set the flamingos free!

Evangelicals and the Contraceptive Mentality

In teaching the Marriage course last semester at Tyndale I encountered no opposition of any kind to the fact that I assigned as my main text John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. The students liked it and no one from the administration or other faculty expressed any concern. Now, I'm well aware of the fact that my fortunate situation is not replicated on all Evangelical campuses. I was talking to a friend at another Evangelical liberal arts college who has witnessed significant anti-Catholicism, including prejudice against Natural Family Planning and the TOB (Theology of the Body).

The TOB in an Evangelical Context
There are two reasons why someone might be concerned about someone teaching TOB in an Evangelical context. One arises from anti-Catholic sentiment and the other from a liberal accommodation to the sexual revolution. I submit that the former is not so much of a concern in most Evangelical liberal arts colleges; there might well be opposition to hiring a Roman Catholic professor, but not to reading Catholic books. This is especially true in philosophy and moral theology, where the major theological differences between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics are not so prominent.

On the other hand, the real likelihood of opposition to the TOB comes from Evangelicals who have embraced aspects of the sexual revolution, second wave feminism and relatively liberal views of Scripture. The problem with John Paul II, in their view, is not that he is Roman Catholic, but rather that he is conservative. If a Protestant advocated the views on sexual morality taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he would be rejected just as quickly as the Pope.

Embracing the Contraceptive Mentality
Are Evangelicals embracing the contraceptive mentality? I consider the contraceptive mentality (which I will define in a moment) to be the heart of the anti-Christian sexual revolution that has spread over the Western world during the past century and especially since the 1960s. The contraceptive mentality is a view of human sexuality that is uniquely modern and which views the meaning of sexual activity as having nothing essential to do with procreation. The separation of sexual activity from procreation means the separation of sex from children and, ultimately, from marriage. When sexual activity is detached from reproduction, women are objectifyed as sex objects by which the lusts of men can be satisfied.

The Pill plays a big role in this objectifying because it makes women available every day of the month and the monthly cycle that differentiates women from men becomes irrelevant to woman's sexual identity. Natural Family Planning works around the monthly cycle and makes family planning a joint project in which a woman's body is respected rather than medicated and mutilated.

The sexual revolution makes pleasure (in the sense of the physical and psychological sense of well-being that is derived from sexual intercourse) central to the meaning of sex. In the traditional view of marriage, pleasure is a by product of sexual activity but not its meaning. Procreation is the meaning and sex is designed to conceive children and also to bind the husband and wife together is a mutual relationship of love, which creates the ideal environment for the nurture, care, education and raising of children.

When pleasure becomes the main meaning of sex, the marriage becomes a matter of what each person gets out of it. It is a contract for the mutual use of each other's bodies for pleasure and when the pleasure ceases the relationship loses its purpose. It is the genius of John Paul II's TOB to join together the two purposes of sexuality, procreation and mutuality, into one thing. The problem with Evangelicals today is not just that they have accepted contraception; the greater problem is that in doing so they have allowed the use of artificial contraception to alter their understanding of the meaning of human sexuality.

The contraceptive mentality makes the woman continuously available for sex and removes the need for periodic continence. It thus has a negative and a positive effect. Negatively, it removes the necessity for husbands and wives to develop the virtue of self-control, which is a fruit of the Spirit. Positively, it puts the focus on pleasure as the heart of the sexual relationship instead of procreation. Thus, contraception trains us to think of sex as a "need" and as something good "in itself" (i.e. detached from its procreative purpose). The result is that sex becomes a "power," that is, a good structure of creation that bursts its boundaries and becomes an idol by assuming too much importance in and of itself.

The TOB does not have a negative view of sexual activity; on the contrary, it views the sexual relationship between husband and wife as having dignity and purity when it serves its natural end - the conception of children and the binding together of husband and wife as the foundation of the home in which those children can be nurtured with the love that parents naturally lavish on their own offspring.

The TOB does not say that sex has no purpose other than conceiving children - as if a couple with four children should only have had intercourse a handful of times in 20 years. But the TOB wisely teaches that sex for pleasure's sake reduces sex to a trivial recreation and deprives it of its power, its beauty and its seriousness.

The contraceptive mentality is not simply a natural law debate about the morality of a single act of intercourse; it is a vision of human sexuality which is shallow and depersonalizing. The implications of the contraceptive mentality are seen in the fact that when it has a chance to develop and become dominant in a society that society loses its ability to understand why homosexual "marriage" is not "just as good" as heterosexual marriage.

Conclusion
If Evangelicals do not recover the traditional understanding of marriage as an inter-generational institution that revolves around the raising and educating of the children by parents (and grandparents), then we will lose our ability to resist the sexual revolution and all its poison fruit (divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, promiscuity, etc.)

I do not see how we can balance forever between the traditional and the revolutionary views accepting part of both and yet ever so slowly drifting toward the modern view. Evangelicals must reject the contraceptive mentality if they wish to build strong families and resist of acids of modernity that threaten to dissolve all human relationships into contracts that create shallow relationships and temporary "family structures" instead of the natural family built on a covenant between husband and wife, a covenant that is enacted and re-enacted in every act of marriage.

Emergent Theology: A Review of "How (Not) to Speak of God" by Peter Rollins

Several people, including current and former students, have asked me to comment on Peter Rollins 2006 book: How (Not) to Speak of God. It has a glowing foreword by Brian McLaren and it purports to be a contribution to the "emergent conversation." The back cover claims (with the usual modesty of back covers everywhere) that the "emerging church" movement "offers an unprecedented message of transformation that has the potential to revolutionize the theological architecture of Western Christianity." Well, obviously no hype there.

It is characteristic of all things postmodern to claim that modernity has been left behind and that we should pay no heed to that very modern looking man behind the curtain. I'm afraid I just don't buy it. A transcending of the modern would look very, very different from what we see in the Emergent Church, which has been called (rather unkindly) the seeker sensitive movement for overgrown youth groups. But it is true that, as Os Guiness points out, the great flaw in the emergent conversation is that all the critique is directed toward a modernity that is supposedly dead anyway, while the contemporary (pop) culture is swallowed uncritically. As long as attention can be distracted by all the "bad, old modern stuff," we don't have to be specific about what the positive program is going forward. Ah . . . but I forgot, it isn't a program but a conversation. A very convenient dodge, that. Does it mean the emergent church is all talk and no action? Does that mean it is just a debating society in a non-academic but still very ivory tower? Or does it just mean: “Don’t try to pin me down on what I believe because I’m not sure anyway.” Anyway, you already knew I was skeptical. On to Rollins.

Like all good books, this one is organized around one "big idea" and it explores that idea from different angles and discusses the implications of that idea for a number of areas. The big idea of this book is that God is unknowable. On the very first page, Rollins writes:

"Christian faith, it could be said, is born in the aftermath of God. Our fragile faith is fanned into life in the wake of what we believe to have been the incoming of a life-giving encounter in which we feel connected with, and transformed by, the source of everything that is. . . such faith cannot be reduced to the mere affirmation of religious dogma . . For Christians testify to having been caught up in and engulfed by that which utterly transcends them.” (p. 1)

Rollins goes on to explain that naming God is only naming our experience of God (p. 2) and that all doctrines that pretend to give a true knowledge of God are idols. (p. 14) He argues that this position is not liberal because it does not give up on the possibility of speaking of God, as liberalism does. While Rollins never names who he means by “liberal” in this book, he seems to have the John Spongs of the world in mind, those who call us to move “beyond theism” to some sort of totally immanent, post-Christian humanism. Rollins rejects this move as one extreme and then describes “Fundamentalism” all theology that purports to declare truth about God (which pretty much takes in everybody from Irenaeus to Augustine to Aquinas to Calvin to Wesley to Newman to Benedict XVI).

“Very briefly, fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs. It can be described as holding a belief system in such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own.” (p. 26)

How on earth is one to respond to such unmitigated nonsense? I can only suppose Rollins finds it convenient to go to a “fundamentalist” doctor when he is ill; that is, one who rules out wrong beliefs in making the diagnoses and stubbornly clings to the “fundamentalist” notion that a belief system built on the existence of germs and antibiotics is superior to one built on the ideas of witches and spells causing all ailments. Or does Rollins believe that “fundamentalism” is only defined this way with regard to religion? If so, he is essentially agreeing with the modern doctrine that religion should be private, rather than public, because religion deals with values while science deals with facts. The restless ghost of Hume mumbling about the inability to derive an “ought" from an “is” haunts the pages of Rollins’ book along with the grisly ghost of Kant ceaselessly flogging his belief in the inability of man to know anything about God.

Although there are no footnotes to Bultmann and Tillich (and there should be) any reader who is familiar with neo-orthodoxy can easily recognize Rollins’ ideas as broadly similar to those of these early 20^th century writers. God as the source of our being, faith as an encounter with that which cannot be named or described, orthodoxy as idolatry – it is all rehashed once again. One is left scratching one’s head thinking “But I thought all that stuff was dead and buried. Has Rollins not heard of the 1960s when neo-orthodoxy ended in the death of God theology, which itself lasted less than a decade?” Is Rollins urging us to go back to the 1950s?

Oh, but Rollins apparently has heard of the “shattered spectrum” of the 1960’s revolt against all theological systems, including the neo-orthodox ones that had arisen during the first half of the 20^th century in opposition to the over-optimistic social gospel of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. The Great War dealt a hard blow to Western optimism and the presumption of progress and the Niebuhr brothers savaged a liberal Protestantism that overlaid a thin religious veneer over a Rotary Club optimism in its role as the culture religion of Modernity.

But the neo-orthodox emphasis on sin and tragedy didn’t last long. When New Left of the 1960s arose, a chastened optimism returned in the form of Marxian views of history, ideology and revolution. Latin American, Black and Feminist Liberation theology preached a message of Christian love re-defined in terms of personal liberation from poverty, restrictive morality and traditional ethics. Rollins gives clear evidence of having bought into liberation theology in his book as he puts forward as a substitute for doctrine about God a teaching that love is all you need.

One has flashbacks of reading Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics at times while reading this book, right down to the examples of the Nazis at the front door when you have Jews hidden in the attic being the reason why lying is sometimes good. (p. 57f) Rollins opposes “ethical systems” (one presumes he means divine command ethics here) to love. (p. 65) He goes on to expound his Marxian (pragmatic) view of truth that could have been lifted straight from John Dewey.

“If we take truth to mean any act which positively transforms reality, rather than describes reality, then there is no problem acknowledging that, while denying there are Jews in the house is empirically incorrect, it is true in a religions sense precisely because it protects the innocent.” (p. 57)

The problem with this view is how one knows what it means to positively transform reality as opposed to negatively transforming reality. Not all change is for the best as even Rollins would acknowledge. (If you doubt this, ask him if the election of Sarah Palin in 2012 would constitute “progress.”) So what constitutes good change as opposed to bad change? Traditionally, Christian thought (and the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy) would answer that good change is change that brings people and society into a closer approximation to the Good. The Good is objective reality, at the apex of which is (for Christians) the God who created the world according to his divine wisdom. So change that brings us closer to God and his will is good and that which takes us away from God is evil. Good and evil are knowable categories precisely because God has revealed both himself in Jesus Christ and his will in the Law and supremely in Jesus Christ. But for Rollins, we cannot know God or objective truth of any kind. So how do we evaluate whether we should join the revolution or oppose it, take up a given cause or ignore it, vote for this candidate or for that other one? In theory he has no way to decide; in practice he simply follows the politically correct crowd.

There are a couple of fundamental mistakes in the book that lead to great problems. One is on p. 14 where he mentions the Old Testament prohibitions against placing the divine into representational form and then, astonishingly, equating this with the idea that God can be revealed thorough the human logos. He completely ignores the fact that it was precisely the Word of God that came to the prophets that was the way that God communicated with Israel. The prophets denounced idolatry in words, which were the only fit way for the true God to be revealed. Then, when Jesus came, he was the Word of God made flesh. Rollins applies the Old Testament strictures against images of God to both Old and New Testament revelation through the Word. The baby (the Word of God) is thrown out with the bath water (idolatrous images of God).

Of course, there is truth in the big idea of the unknowability of God. All the great theologians of the Tradition have known that God is greater than any human words or concepts used to describe him. And this fact is precisely why we can only have true knowledge of God by means of God’s self-revelation culminating in Jesus Christ. The revealed word of God is the Bible’s answer to the dilemma of the human inability to know God by human reason or imagination. Through Christ and the Scriptures we can know God truly, though not exhaustively. What we know of God is certain because in Christ we have seen God. Throughout the book, Rollins attempts to imagine God, to think of God in human categories – doing exactly what he says should not and cannot be done. Yet, how could be otherwise once revelation has been rejected as it is in this book? I found no evidence that Rollins views Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of God in this book; if he believes it, he draws no implications from it.

Rollins explicitly disavows the teaching that the Church has Good News for the world: “In contrast to the view that evangelism is that which gives an answer for those who are asking, we must have faith to believe that those who seek will find for themselves. . . the job of the Church is not to provide an answer . . . but to help the religious question to arise.” (pp. 40-41) Rollins gives a good summary of his views in the sentence: “Christianity thus engages in a pragmatic discourse which intends towards the one who lies beyond all language.” (p. 41)

When pressed for specifics, Rollins defines this rather abstract concept of Christianity as being reducible to love. He interprets I John 4:7-16 as follows:

“Here John equates the existence of religious knowledge with the act of love. Knowledge of God (the Truth) as a set of propositions is utterly absent; instead he claims that those who exhibit a genuine love know God, regardless of their religious system.” (p. 57)

Rollins selectively quotes and misinterprets Scripture here for his own ends. In fact, the very chapter he quotes begins with a doctrinal test for how to tell a false prophet from a true one:

“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.” (I John 4:1-4)

Here we have just one example of the New Testament proposing a doctrinal test for false prophets. Against Docetism, John affirms the humanity of Christ. In I John 5:1-5, he also affirms the Messiahship (v. 1) and the deity of Jesus Christ (v. 5) as propositions to be believed. So the foundations of the two natures doctrine of Chalcedon are laid already in I John: one person who is fully God and fully man. We could also refer to I Cor. 15:1-2 or to Romans 10:9-10.

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” (Rom. 10:9-10)

The Apostle Paul fits Rollins’ definition of a fundamentalist. For all his talk about a postmodern critique of the modern idolatry of pure reason, the reality is that Rollins stands with the modern philosophers in their rejection of revelation and their Cartesian starting point of the autonomous self instead of the self-revealing God of Scripture. His real problem is not with modernity, but with Scripture itself and with the orthodox tradition of theology preached by the Church down through all ages beginning with the Apostles.

This book could only appear to be “new,” “profound,” a “third way beyond liberalism and fundamentalism” to those who are biblically illiterate and blissfully ignorant of history. There is nothing here that Bultmann and Tillich didn’t already say and the move to liberation as the content of salvation was already made in the 1960s by Gutierrez, Cone and Reuther. There is no Gospel here; only a dreary moralism and a free-flowing religiousity detached from historic Christianity. So why are young Evangelicals eating this stuff up? Why don’t they recognize it as modern, liberal heresy?

All the answers I can think of are depressing. But it is a fact that sound doctrine is seldom preached from the seeker sensitive churches and the megachurches and that much of Evangelicalism has sold its soul to pragmatic church growth techniques derived from the social sciences and has embraced experience as its authority just as much as liberal Protestantism has. So when its young people are lured into hoary, old, liberal Protestant heresies via the Emergent Church, it should look at itself in the mirror and ask some hard questions about the place of expository preaching and Christian education in the contemporary church. All Rollins has to offer is a temporary half-way house between Christianity and Spongism. Can we not offer something better?

So it begins . . .

The line is from The Return of the King (Gandalf on the walls of Minas Tirith, for anyone who does not readily recognize quotes from the greatest work of fiction in the 20th century).

In my predictions (the ink on which is scarcely dry - or whatever the digital equivalent of that old saying is), I predicted that in 2010 Evangelicals (among others) would begin the process of receiving the John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Four days into 2010, BIOLA graduate Matthew Lee Anderson announces on his blog Mere Christianity that he has just signed a contract to write a book for Bethany House called Body Matters: Overcoming the New Gnosticism of Young Evangelicals in which he states his intention to interact extensively with Roman Catholic moral theology and John Paul II's theology of the body in particular.

The influence of John Paul the Great on Dale Keuhne (Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship beyond an Age of Individualism - Baker, 2009) is obvious, although it is not referred to explicitly so far as I can see. And it is clear that the theology of the body is becoming known in a small circle of Evangelicals who have come to love the Great Tradition, but it is still only a cloud in the sky. If anyone knows of other works by Evangelicals that interact with the TOB, I would greatly appreciate it if you could let me know in the comments section.

And stay tuned for the revolt against the revolution - an undertaking as audacious and ridiculous as Aragorn and his companions riding up to the Black Gate and demanding the surrender of the Dark Lord. But like Aragorn and his friends, we well know that victory, if it should come, will not come by our power and strength.

The Theology of the Body #1: Teaching John Paul II to Evangelicals

One of my predictions for the new year was that appreciation for John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" would grow among Evangelicals, as well as among all conservative Christians including Eastern Orthodox, Confessional Protestants, etc. A couple of comments call for some further discussion of this prediction. I intend to post regularly throughout the year on the TOB, but I want to start off by recounting my experience this past semester.

I taught a new course, RLGS 3943 Marriage in Theological Perspective, this past semester and I had 23 students in the course. Seven were married and several were engaged and all were very interested in the course; it was a pure elective for most.

My working assumption was that we are all bombarded with the sexual revolution and the liberal view of sex, marriage and family every day and so the course content was to examine the only two serious alternatives to the liberal view, which is now the establishment view in the West, namely conservative Evangelicalism and the TOB. We used a book by Andreas Kostenberger called God, Marriage and Family for the first few weeks and then studied Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body by John Paul II. Each student also did a review of a different book and made presented a 10-15 minute presentation on the book to the class.

Here is a sample of the books we read:

1. Pornified - Pamela Pauls (a non-Christian journalist examines pornography in the Internet age)

2. Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student - by Miriam Grossman (originally published anonymously out of fear of reprisals)

3. You're Teaching My Child What? A Physican Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child by Miriam Grossman (a look at the philosophy of SIECUS and Planned Parenthood and how they are influencing public education)

4. The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It by Philip Longman (a counter intuitive, but convincing study using UN data)

5. Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (a glimpse into the long term agenda of the pansexual movement by a cross-dressing, lesbian English professor who started out as an Evangelical)

6. Return to Modesty and The Good Girl Revolution by Wendy Shalit (two books by a young, Jewish graduate of Wellsley who thinks the pendulum is about start swinging back)

7. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study by Judith Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee (one of the few studies of the longterm effects of divorce)

8. Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family by Lee Silver (a fascinating exercise in futurology by a Princeton bioethicist and molecular biologist)

But what I really wanted to stress in this post is how positive the students were toward John Paul II's book. They were mostly surprised to be reading a biblical-theological study by a Roman Catholic that seemed to them to be informed by a high view of Scriptural authority and a deep engagement with the text. They found him to be Evangelical in his view and very convincing.

By the end of the class about half were convinced that artificial contraception is wrong and most of the rest were very open to the idea of Natural Family Planning. All found John Paul II's arguments to be impressive and not to be dismissed lightly. In fact, I have arranged for a speaker from the Couple to Couple League to come to campus on Feb. 4 to make a presentation on the practical questions surrounding NFP.

My experience is that the problem is simply ignorance. Evangelicals and Roman Catholics live in "two solitudes" and communication is bad. Christopher West, who has devoted his life to spreading the message of TOB, was in Toronto for a conference in Nov. and I attended with about 8 of my current and former students. It was quite an experience to be in such a heavily Catholic environment. (We even attended the 8 am Mass with Archbishop Thomas Collins as homilist and main celebrant and, no, we did not communicate.)

But John Paul II is bigger than Roman Catholicism, if I might be permitted to put it that way. He represents the Tradition and he also represents the apostolic message of Scripture as the fount of that Tradition. I have a student doing an honours thesis this year on how John Paul II's TOB differs from the teaching of St. Augustine, which is a very interesting topic. The TOB is for the whole church. I believe it is a gift given by God now for the post-sexual revolution Church in the West and I agree with George Weigel's famous prediction that it is a time bomb set to go off some time in the third millennium with great blessings for the entire world.

Some of the topics I want to post on in the coming weeks include:

1. The TOB and Feminism
2. Sexual Complementarity and the Dignity of Women
3. The Center of the Biblical Revelation on the Meaning of Sexuality
4. Marriage as a Sacrament: A Proposal for Catholic-Protestant Agreement
5. The Song of Songs in Relation to Genesis, Isaiah and Ephesians
6. Evangelicals and the Contraceptive Mentality
7. Four Views of Marriage (Traditional, Revolutionary, Evangelical and TOB)

I know that not all Protestants are open to John Paul II's insights just because he is Catholic, but I think that the answer is to present his views as "the conservative and traditional view" of sex as grounded in Scripture. It will be necessary for most Evangelicals to encounter this teaching first in a book written by an Evangelical and I hope to write such a book eventually. But once most conservative Evangelicals get past their prejudice and actually encounter the content of the TOB, their response is almost guaranteed to be positive to one extent or another.

The Ambiguous Meaning of the Word "Socialism"

I frequently observe that the word "socialism" is being used in different ways with different meanings by those debating each other. Part of the reason for the ambiguity is that the word itself has a range of possible meanings which are closely related but not identical. Some of the reason for the difference in opinion lies in the similar but crucially different shades of meanings employed by different people.

Take the brief definition in the Oxford Dictionary: "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exhange." This is a highly ambiguous, but common enough definition. Let us list the ambiguities.

1. First, what is "community?" Is it the state? Or could it be guilds or private groups such as co-operatives? If a group of people jointly own property, machinery, etc. and work together to produce profits, would that be socialism or a variation of capitalism? Those who are against socialism often oppose it precisely insofar as and to the extent that it is statist. They prefer many centers of power in society distributed among private companies, publicly traded companies, regulatory boards, the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and so on. They fear the concentration of all economic and political power in a governing class of bureaucrats and their political masters. But they think that churches running hospitals, parents running charter schools, inter-generational family farms, and credit unions are all great. Are such people socialist, anti-socialist or anti-statist?

2. Second, it is still socialism if the government controls the means of exchange and distribution (through taxation) but leaves the means of production in private hands? This is how the welfare state works, which is a long way from pure capitalism but still not quite pure socialism. Many people fear a government monopoly on the control of the means of exchange and distribution as much as they fear outright government ownership of the means of production. Often government ownership of some of the means of production is enough to give government, in connection with its control of the means of exchange and distribution, effective control of industries without outright total ownership.

3. Third, every society is in a process of historical development and evolution in one direction or another. Twentieth century liberalism is perceived by conservatives (especially neo-conservatives) as moving in the direction of collectivism of some sort in a gradually reforming way. To speak of being "progressive" or of "reform" is, for many (most?) contemporary liberals to imply moving in the direction of socialism without any assumption that we will need to go "all the way" toward a purely socialist society. This means that liberalism is no longer historical liberalism, but merely a stalking horse for outright socialism; liberalism has become an ideology without content because the actual content of its teaching comes from socialism.

This sort of contemporary liberalism has embraced the teaching that economic equality is a prerequisite for personal liberty. Therefore, conservatives often tend to lump liberalism, fascism and socialism together as various forms of collectivism, all of which are opposed by the traditional Western emphasis on the liberty of individuals, churches, schools, businesses, cooperatives, guilds, parties and various other forms of voluntary associations - all of which together make up civil society. By eroding civil society, and especially the pre-political natural family, liberalism is destroying gradually by evolution what socialism destroys suddenly by revolution in order to clear the decks for an all-powerful state which can implement economic equality.

Conclusion
The word "socialist" is a barrier to clear communication and debate because of its inherent ambiguity. When some people speak of "the common good" in the context of Roman Catholic social thought, the idea is that charity will be shown to the needy rather than allowing a ruthless social Darwinism to rule. This is not necessarily socialism. This may simply be a respect for a widespread distribution of private property, private charity and/or a restrained welfare state. To the extent that anyone uses the word "socialism" to describe what Roman Catholic social thought calls for he is only confusing the debate.

What people sometimes mean by socialism, both in theory and practice, actually is better described as conservatism. The freedom of individuals and a prosperous community that aids the weak and vulnerable may be achieved best by a society made of of people who accept Christian principles of charity and concern for the poor along with free markets, strong family structures, strong churches and a thriving civil society. Real conservatives do not advocate monopoly capitalism, social Darwinism, the breakdown of civil society or the kind of individualism that ignores the claims of others on the individual, including the needs of the weak and vulnerable as well as the claims of family ties and religious duties. The liberal charge that the only alternative to 19th century robber baron capitalism is socialism is simply false.

One often hears rage against capitalism and condemnations of capitalism from moralistic people who want to blame all the ills of the world on the free market system of exchange and private ownership of the means of production. But this moralistic outrage is so extreme and one-sided that it substitutes for clear thinking. If undue concentration of economic power in a few multi-national corporations is a bad thing, the solution cannot be to concentrate all that power in the hands of one multi-national corporation: the state. That only makes the problem worse. To suggest that ordinary people control the socialist state by voting is more incredible than the suggestion that they control businesses by making rational economic choices as consumers. In reality, the main way citizens restrain the totalitarian power of the state is by setting up a system of the division of powers so that power is distributed in many hands. Once this division is eroded, democracy as mere voting procedure becomes ineffective.

Anti-capitalism is fashionable among intellectuals, academics, union leaders, leftist activists etc. but it really is just a form of covert socialism. The problem with it is that it demonizes capitalism in such a way as to make the Marxist mistake of locating the source of evil in an economic system instead of in human hearts. Nothing can restrain, moderate and mitigate capitalism except morality rooted in religious conviction; socialism is inadequate for the job. Why? Because sin is a matter of human will and not economic organization.

It seems to me that the word "socialism" is irredeemable because of its historical connections to statism and collectivism. Theologians and pastors who choose to use the label "socialism" to describe their own positions should therefore admit that they are opposing the mainstream of Christian teaching and the Western tradition and embracing a revolutionary doctrine in which the state becomes all powerful and civil society is eliminated either gradually or suddenly.

For this reason, the culture wars' focus on issues of human life and marriage are intricately bound up with the issue of socialism. Socialism cannot be implemented until the family is broken down and civil society crushed because only then can enough power be concentrated in the hands of the State for it to implement the full socialist agenda of equality. Socialism involves not only the nationalization of businesses, but also the destruction of the family and civil society. This explains why the Labour Party in the UK, the Socialist government currently in power in Spain, the left wing of the Democratic Party in the US and the NDP in Canada all put so much emphasis on liberal policies on abortion, marriage and other anti-human and anti-family positions. This is why policies that lead to the destruction of the family and civil society are now identified as "left wing." It is because the destruction of the family and civil society paves the way for the all-powerful State, which seeks to meet all the needs of individuals and thus assume a paternalistic oversight of the population that can only be described as "soft totalitarianism."

In the end, the danger inherent in the ambiguity of the word "socialism" is that "social justice," "concern for the poor" and "protection of the vulnerable" become pretexts for the rise of the all-powerful bureaucratic State. This goes on all the time in liberal Protestantism. The irony is that it is precisely the weak and vulnerable - unborn children, mothers, the sick, the elderly - who end up suffering at the hand of the bureaucratic State. So far as I can see, the only way to keep the debate from being hopelessly muddled is to restrict the meaning of the word "socialism" to the state controlling the means of production, distribution and exchange. Socialism of this sort must be opposed vigorously by Christians who take the biblical teachings on sin, anthropology and eschatology seriously.

My Predictions for 2010

Politics and the Economy
1. The Conservative Party in the UK will fumble a glorious opportunity to win a large majority in the Spring election and one of the smaller parties (either UKIP or the BNP) will make astonishing gains thus changing the electoral landscape radically, possibly even to the extent of holding the balance of power in a hung Parliament.

2. The Conservative Party of Canada will win an historic majority in a Fall election.

3. The Republicans will either gain, or nearly gain, control of the House and gain at least 4-5 seats in the Senate during the 2010 mid-term elections, which will be a referendum on Obama's fiscal, health care, environmental and abortion policies.

4. By late 2010 there will be fierce debate over the introduction of a European-style Value Added Tax and drastic cuts to military spending in the United States in response to a spiraling deficit.

5. By the end of 2010 polls will show Sarah Palin leading Barack Obama and there will be talk of Hilary Clinton challenging Obama for the nomination in 2012.

Religion
6. The Emergent Church movement will gradually fade, though it will take longer than a year for it to be absorbed completely into liberal Protestantism.

7. The Church of England will begin to splinter in 2010 as the Anglican Communion divides into the section that remains in communion with The Episcopal Church and the section that does not.

8. Pope Benedict XVI will succeed in bringing the Society of St. Pius X back into full communion with the rest of the Church. He will continue to be vilified by the liberal media and will continue to view that as a good sign that he is doing his job.

9. John Paul II's Theology of the Body will begin to be recognized by Evangelicals as the theoretical foundation of an alternative to the sexual revolution and will be increasingly embraced by conservative Christians of all stripes.

Culture
10. The debate over whether global warming is man-caused or part of the natural cycle of the planet's constantly changing environment will accelerate in 2010 and climate change alarmists will be increasingly placed on the defensive.

11. It will become widely recognized in 2010 that declining world population growth rates mean that a drop in population by mid-century could result in economic disaster.

12. There will be another major terrorist attack in the United States in 2010.

Doubt Everything Modern

A happy new year to all those who take the trouble to read this blog. Blogging has been light over the holidays but is due to pick up. Here are some of the things about which I'm thinking.

I look forward to blogging in the new year on John Paul II's "Theology of the Body," the morality of socialism and capitalism, and various issues that arise as we go along. I have neglected to write about the Manhattan Declaration so far and I intend to rectify that. I also plan to address The Shack, the emergent church book by Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, and various books on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien that I have been collecting, such as The Narnian by Alan Jacobs and Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians by Alison Milbank. I also plan to indulge my fascination with American politics and chronicle the fascinating rise in social, fiscal and traditional conservatism in response to the Obama administration and the implications thereof for the culture wars.

I hope to hear from many of you over this year as we cast a cynical eye over the landscape of contemporary society. A motto for the year: "Doubt everything modern."

Jonah Goldberg, (as Usual), Has A Point

End of the decade summaries are everywhere these days and Jonah Goldberg was listening to one on National Public Radio that slammed capitalism the cheap way.

"On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I’m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.”

I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done, particularly of late: reducing “capitalism” to its alleged sins.

And that’s the point. There are few areas of life where a thing responsible for so much good gets so little credit for it.

Imagine if I were to collect the most infamous deeds of African Americans over the last decade — say, Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal and O. J. Simpson’s most recent criminal exploit — and then put a bow on it with the phrase “the decade in black America.” What if I did the same thing with Jews? Bernie Madoff, the face of Jewish America! Do the scandals of Rod Blagojevich, Charlie Rangel, and John Edwards define the Democratic party from 2000 to 2010? Do Abu Ghraib and the balloon boy sum up America?"

Goldberg notes that NPR itself is a beneficiary of capitalism:

"Indeed, speaking of the decade in capitalism, National Public Radio failed to mention that Joan Kroc, widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, left more than $200 million to NPR in 2003. Mrs. Kroc’s generosity of spirit was her own, but the wampum is all capitalism’s, baby."

Capitalism allows for charity and charity is important, not only because it helps the needy but also because it helps donors:

"In a similar vein, the decade of capitalism saw one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett, pledge more than $30 billion to a foundation created by another offspring of capitalism, Bill Gates, for the purpose of aiding the world’s poor. Surely capitalism should get some of the credit, since the book on philanthropy in non-capitalist systems is shorter than the guide to cities without Starbucks.

Capitalism doesn’t just create generous wealthy people, but generous poor people, too. Americans give twice as much to charity as the most generous European nations, and the most generous Americans are, in fact, poor Americans."

But charity is not the only benefit of capitalism, Goldberg points out.

"But forget philanthropy. Since 2000, hundreds of millions of people in China and India — home to a plurality of the world’s poor — have lifted themselves out of poverty and illiteracy thanks to capitalism.

China started to embrace markets as a last resort in the late 1970s. And by last resort, I mean last resort. First they tried murdering tens of millions of their own people through collectivism and oppression. When that didn’t work, they embraced markets, and the poverty rate dropped from 64 percent to around 8 percent today."

Anti-Capitalism is just as much an ideology as Capitalism is and far less honest. Read the rest here.