I co-edited a new book entitled Human Flourishing: Economic Wisdom for a Fruitful Christian Vision of the Good Life. It’s a collection of essays by leading theological scholars across the disciplines on how faith, hope and love can be embodied in economic life. And it’s out in paperback at a reasonable price, not the usual $150 academic price to gouge libraries. So pick up a copy today!
From the introduction:
This book is a step forward for an urgent conversation in theology. In our time, there is a growing consensus that theological knowledge ought to help cultivate authentic human flourishing in the church and, through the church’s participation in the cultural structures of the nations, in the world as well. The natural next step is for theological scholars to explore how their knowledge in its particularity – knowledge about such topics as what Proverbs and Paul say about poverty, Karl Barth’s encounters with capitalism and socialism, or how the gospel relates theologically to the cultural mandate – could contribute to the real-life flourishing of truck drivers, administrative assistants, stay-at-home parents or leaders in business and government as each of these carries out their daily tasks in a pluralistic and fragmented world.
In the past generation, the theological disciplines have been struggling to overcome the dismissive perception that they are just historical and technical studies. To do this, they must show that they provide knowledge – real insight – into the deep structures of reality. Through the works of Mirsolav Volf and Matthew Croasmun, Kevin Vanhoozer, Jonathan Pennington and many others, theological scholars are increasingly recognizing that in order to show that theology is knowledge, they must show how it can help cultivate human flourishing. That is the tangible test of whether the ideas produced by the theological disciplines really provide knowledge about reality. If theological knowledge is knowledge at all, it must be useful – though of course it has other value as well.
Since today is my day to catch up on links I failed to post in a timely manner, I was honored to be included in TGC’s symposium on money.
Like the other participants, I was invited to give my theology of money in 200 words or less. But don’t worry! I actually gave it to them in 200 words or fewer.
I opened with: “For seven years, I helped a billionaire give away money. One of the wisest things he said to me was…”
Earlier this summer, I published an essay on Al Mohler’s book The Gathering Storm. This week, Mohler published a reply, but not a response.
As a reminder, here was the thesis statement of my essay:
The inherent difficulty I see in Mohler’s attempt to position contemporary evangelical social activism as an across-the-board opposition to secularism is not in the substance of his positions on these issues. I love Western civilization, for all its warts, and I give ground to nobody in my militancy for the historic evangelical positions on all these issues. The problem I see is twofold. In the short run, evangelical social activism that defines its agenda solely in terms that serve the political Right lacks the spiritual credibility it would need to stand as a real alternative to secularization, and Gathering Storm moves it in the wrong direction on this front. In the long run, evangelicals have not seriously confronted the hard theological questions that any Reconquista from secularization would demand, and Gathering Storm helps them avoid doing so.
Mohler is not, of course, obligated to reply to me or anyone else. We are all very busy these days – seminary presidents especially, in this tumultuous moment for educational institutions. And, lest I position myself as judge of my own case, I dare not rule out the possibility that my charges against Mohler are not even worth replying to in the first place.
But if he does choose to reply, one would love to hope that Mohler would feel obligated to include in his reply a response to what is in the essay.
Mohler is free to repeat “unchecked secularism will destroy us!” until he is blue in the face – I said the same thing, as I have consistently over a twenty-year writing career – but what good is that if our current approach to fighting secularism is, as I charge, not only incapable of success but actually a major factor reinforcing secularism?
While I continue to await a response, I contemplate afresh my essay’s closing thought:
You would never guess this from his prolific political commentary, but Mohler punches his timecard every Monday morning as the president of one of America’s biggest and best seminaries. His school trains thousands of church leaders whose tireless and unglamorous work holds back the collapse of the liberal social order—not by prosecuting a culture war, but by shoring up the social conditions of individual moral virtue, institutional integrity, and community solidarity as shepherds of their congregations. That never-ending rearguard action of holding back the tides of decay needs to become a constructive mission of building a new culture of neighbor-love.
But seminaries are in big trouble these days. Even before the current public-health emergency, they have struggled to respond to huge changes in their economic landscape. Judging from results, and recognizing the imperfection of all our endeavors, it looks to me like Mohler must be doing something right at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I doubt it has much to do with political commentary. I’d love to know what it is.
I hope Mohler’s next book ends with an appendix on seminaries, not courts, as the vital-but-vulnerable institutions that desperately need to be saved from destruction for the sake of both the church and civilization—Western, or any other kind.
It’s not on the way out, it’s on the way over – to Asia.
Here, we seem determined to learn the hard way, through suffering rather than through wisdom or tradition, that there are no viable alternatives to classical liberalism. We may learn the lesson in time, and live, or we may learn it only by dying. But whatever happens here, it remains the case that there are no viable alternatives to classical liberalism, because only classical liberalism is actually willing to face the question that matters: How can we share a civil community – a home in the fullest sense – given that we do not agree, and are not going to agree, about the things that matter most in life?
And there are still plenty of classical liberals. They happen to live in Asia. Perhaps a generation from now we’ll be talking about the Korean experiment or even the Taiwanese experiment.
An entire continent, not least the oppressed Chinese people themselves, now grapples with the totalitarian monstrosity of communism as represented by the Beijing regime. The fighting spirit of the amazing people of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, India, Japan and many other places is astonishing to behold. We, alas, are not doing much to help them – our moral spirit sapped by our own failure to grapple with the Great Question of how to live together.
Their spirit draws on many sources, of course. But among these, only one offers a serious theoretical justification: Lockean liberalism.
In the current emergency, Tsai Ing-wen, the president of the Republic of China – known as “Taiwan” to the uninitiated, and “the rightful government of all China” to the wise – has thrown open the doors of her land to the oppressed people of Hong Kong. Truly this is the new “Golden Door,” a title we have forfeited by our failure to find a common good without a common god. Meanwhile, the Republic of China has become the Tom Doniphon of Asia.
When Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo died, Tsai challenged Beijing to commit to peaceful reform, “so that the Chinese can enjoy the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.”
Hong Kong protesters have even been so gauche and unwoke as to fly American flags. With all its rips and tears, the Stars and Stripes is still the international symbol for “the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.”
Perhaps not for long. John Quincy Adams wisely warned that America was a friend of freedom everywhere, but the custodian only of her own. That is right, so long as both sides of the formula are given due weight. Our national character, the essence of the American experiment, demands that we must be the friend of freedom everywhere, or we are not who we are. And friendship comes with moral obligations.
In 1989, an earlier generation of Chinese protesters crafted a statue in Tienanmen Square modeled after Lady Liberty – the “goddess of democracy.” We were then, as we are now, the international symbol for “the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.”
We failed the Chinese freedom fighters then, too. Heed the closing comment of Allan Bloom’s Harvard address on The Closing of the American Mind, which, like the book itself, is a modern masterpiece of wit and wisdom:
Much greater events occurring outside the United States, however, demonstrate the urgency of our task. Those events are epitomized by the Statue of Liberty erected by the Chinese students in Tienanmen Square. Apparently, after some discussion about whether it should be altered to have Chinese rather than Eurocentric features, there was a consensus that it did not make any difference.
The terror in China continues, and we cannot yet know what will become of those courageous young persons. But we do know the justice of their cause; and although there is no assurance that it will ultimately triumph, their oppressors have won the universal execration of mankind. With Marxist ideology a wretched shambles everywhere, nobody believes any longer in communist legitimacy. Everywhere in the communist world what is wanted is rational liberal democracy that recognizes men’s natural freedom and equality and the rights dependent on them. The people of that world need and want education in democracy and the institutions that actualize it. That education is one of the greatest services the democracies can offer to the people who live under communist tyrannies and long for liberty. The example of the United States is what has impressed them most, and their rulers have been unable to stem the infection.
Our example, though, requires explanations, the kind the Founders gave to the world. And this is where we are failing: the dominant schools in American universities can tell the Chinese students only that they should avoid Eurocentrism, that rationalism has failed, that they should study non-Western cultures, and that bourgeois liberalism is the most despicable of regimes. Stanford has replaced John Locke, the philosopher of liberalism, with Frantz Fanon, an ephemeral writer once promoted by Sartre because of his murderous hatred of Europeans and his occasional espousal of terrorism.
However, this is not what the Chinese need. They have Deng Xiaoping to deconstruct their Statue of Liberty. We owe them something much better.
The only thing that has changed since those words were spoken is that the execration of communist brutality is no longer universal. Because Marxist theory collapsed so long ago, communist tyranny is somehow no longer felt to be “really” communist (there is general agreement among hoity-toity respectable persons that the Bejing regime is actually capitalist), and therefore it is not a tyranny. Besides, China was victimized by colonialism, therefore we have no right to speak out for the million Chinese Uighurs currently awaiting execution in concentration camps, or for their wives who are being systemically raped and sterilized.
The American experiment can fail. That it is an experiment entails this. The Riddle of the Sphinx was not solved by the very first intrepid soul to dare it – whoever that was, for no one remembers his name.
But if we fail, the Riddle will still be there: “How can we share a civil community – a home in the fullest sense – given that we do not agree, and are not going to agree, about the things that matter most in life?” The incentives to solve it will still be there. And, unlike Oedipus, the next intrepid soul can face it having learned lessons by observing our failed attempt.
How arrogant would we have to be to think that the Riddle can’t be solved if we can’t solve it – that the science can’t go on if our own lab happens to blow up?
In “No Country for Old Men,” an aging lawman on the brink of retirement feels guilty for society’s slide into chaos. If he and the other lawmen of his generation could only live up to the standard set by their forefathers, he feels, the world wouldn’t be falling apart. After agonizing silently about this for most of the movie, he finally confesses his sense of guilt to an even older, long-retired lawman who had been a colleague of his father’s.
This seems like an opportune moment to remind people that one of the main points of Robert Bork’s masterpiece The Tempting of America was that the politicization of the law can’t be remedied (or not much) by appointing better judges, because the problem is systemic. The Constitution simply assumes the law will not be politicized, an assumption that had a basis in 1789, but not in 2020.
Bork’s particular policy solutions may not be the right ones, but the larger point is very much worth revisiting.
Another opportune moment to remind people of this fact was 2016. Nobody listened to me then, either.
