“In Valley and in Plain”: A Job Market Theodicy

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academia, Academics, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Humanities, job market, john milton, Paradise Lost, PhD, Slate, theodicy

A recent Slate article entitled “Thesis Hatement” has sparked some discussion on this blog. As its subtitle proclaims, the article argues that “getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor” and traces the inevitable experience of a newly minted literature Ph.D. Told that if she works hard enough, she will finally land a tenure-track job, she finds this was a lie. She is a mouse trapped in a Kafkaesque maze with no way out—and a hungry cat. (The author, Rebecca Schuman, just finished a dissertation on Kafka.) The theme is familiar across the humanities: it is irresponsible for institutions to continue credentialing people for a career that is no longer available to the vast majority of graduates. It is quixotic for the students to undertake such a program. Don’t do it, and—if you really are “humane”—don’t counsel your students to do it either. Equally familiar are the articles on the other side, which point to the enduring value of the liberal arts in a time of economic trial and call for renewed interest in studying (and funding) them lest we suffer profound long-term consequences as a culture. Already Slate has published a counterpoint, by NYU journalism professor Katie Roiphe, who holds up the literature PhD as useful in many ways besides ensuring a tenure-track job “in a pretty leafy college town.” Foremost among these, says Roiphe, is the development of “a nurturing faith in your private preoccupations, a creative desire that is detached from questions of what other people care about.”

Both articles are depressing, though Roiphe’s is unintentionally so. I suspect that Schuman may not find her increased “faith in her private preoccupations” worth the sacrifices in job security and dignity outlined in her piece—nor is it certain that her newly nurtured faith will withstand the buffeting of market pressures and the ignominy of adjunct work. I want to take another tack, to answer Schuman not only as a fellow student of literature, but also as a fellow “sufferer” on the academic job market, something Roiphe is not.  As a fellow literature student, I am interested more in the narrative backdrop to Schuman’s argument than in trotting out facts and figures and anecdotes to determine how dire the situation is, really, or where humanities PhDs might go if not to tenure-track jobs. As a fellow “sufferer,” I want to avoid whining, on one side, and on the other, an unfeeling dismissal of Schuman’s complaints. While many groups down the ages have suffered a great deal more than humanities PhDs since 2008, there is truth in Schuman’s lament that warrants our attention, both as people committed to liberal arts education, and as people called to respond to suffering with faith, hope, and love.

In this spirit I want to suggest that Schuman’s first mistake was in studying Kafka. There is a nihilism in the picture she paints that goes far beyond the drudgery of a job that just pays the bills. The mouse in the maze, she points out, “wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse.” She admits that this is a subjective take on the matter, that nobody outside of academia can understand our desperate need for tenure-track jobs. But a desperate need we have. We cut the same heartbreaking figure as a woman who has become attached to a cold man, sacrificing more and more to win his love, willfully ignoring signs of his indifference because the alternative has become too terrifying to contemplate. Psychologically the same forces are at work: having been lured in by early praise and displays of interest on the part of professors and graduate programs, we invest an increasing amount of heart, with the stakes eventually becoming so high that perspective and reason are lost. Schuman’s answer: don’t start down that road. Do something else.

But I wonder whether any commitment, any investment of heart in a calling or a person, is free from this liability. I wonder, too, how much of the blame for this suffering rests with the sufferer. In a romantic relationship, one person can lead the other on, and no doubt professors and administrators need to think carefully about the ethics of encouraging young people to pursue humanities PhDs and mounting PhD programs. But I am peculiarly qualified to scrutinize Schuman’s side of the story because I share her struggles: we began our graduate careers the same year, and next year looks bleak for both of us, career-wise. We also seem to think alike, because I too approach personal and political problems at the level of literary backdrop (or, if you like, metanarrative). She starts with Kafka; I want to explore a framework here that might offer a more hopeful alternative.

Whose Fault?

If there’s one category into which every book I really love falls, that category would be “literary theodicy”: narrative texts that wrestle thoughtfully with the question of why things aren’t better. These run from the book of Job to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” Like an old Western, the literary theodicy builds to a face-off in which two main figures gird up their loins, so to speak, and say what has been on their minds the whole time. Unlike most Westerns, in literary theodicy, one of the two figures is God. Usually the argument is not philosophical, but—this is the “literary” part—arises from the story that has been building to that point: to understand why I am grieved, you had to be there and see how it happened. In the case of Job, God’s response is, effectively, “Exactly”: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Works outside the biblical canon, constrained not to speak for God for fear of blasphemy,[1] typically focus on the other figure, the self. “Here’s my story,” they say. “Am I guilty?” The answer is typically a resounding “yes”: Adam and Eve are responsible for the loss of Eden; Ruby Turpin is a wart hog from hell. This is unusual. Stories are usually told for purposes of self-justification; these, by contrast, are works of critical self-examination, even self-condemnation. They call into question the motives and activities of the characters whose stories they tell—and often, by extension, of their authors. An example that springs to mind is The Brothers Karamazov, in which Fyodor Dostoevsky gives the loathsome Karamazov father his own first name. How might the self-examining narrative of a recent literature PhD read?

Let me make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that humanities PhDs are responsible for our own grief because we should have known better than to study humanities, nor yet that some divine boom is being lowered on us because of our sin (an assumption of Job’s friends and not of the biblical narrator). Christians are convicted of guilt; establishing any clear relationship between particular offenses and particular suffering, though, is notoriously difficult. Here again narrative can shed light in ways philosophy can’t. In one of his stories, Garrison Keillor explores the question of guilt and suffering by inviting us into the mind of a man contemplating adultery. As this man, Jim Nordberg, waits for his romantic interest to pick him up and take him to Chicago, he reflects:

As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they are no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families—my infidelity would somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection and someone’s child will be injured. A sixth grade teacher will think, “What the hell,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell—I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday—it certainly can’t be any worse today.”

“Far from being hidden,” Keillor concludes, “each sin is another crack in the world.”[2] And what is true of John Milton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor, I find true of myself. Not that I’m a famous author; that I’m guilty too.

These are gloomy reflections for a narrative purporting to be hopeful, but it’s important to know where I stand before I assess my prospects for next year and beyond. Nor do I think that the reality of where I stand “goes without saying”: the point of liturgy is that this particular narrative never goes without saying. The story doesn’t make sense unless all the movements are there. But the liturgy doesn’t end with confession, and neither do these literary theodicies end with utter destruction. In fact, if Schuman’s piece were a true “Jeremiad” (her word), there would be lots of confession of sin and a ray of hope for the future. Jeremiah has much in common with the texts I’ve just been describing: the prophet squares off with God, and God responds convincingly that Israel is responsible for her own desolation. Jeremiah’s most searing question, though, comes after all this: “Hast thou utterly rejected Judah?” Everything hangs on that “utterly.” Many bloggers and analysts are already calling the current generation of humanities PhDs “lost.” Are we utterly lost?

Both Schuman and Roiphe’s accounts of the situation facing the humanities PhD miss the distance marked by “utterly.” Both conflate one chapter of the story with the whole story. Roiphe no less than Schuman assumes that fulfillment for me, now, is the intrinsic good toward which all our efforts tend: that gained, we have won; that lost, we have lost indeed. The climax of Roiphe’s optimistic argument is that you acquire in graduate school “a habit of intellectual isolation that is well, useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.” Presumably if you somehow come out of graduate school without this, or if it is beaten out of you by the job market, then Schuman’s maze still obtains. This is one way to understand the human condition, but it is not the only way.

In Medias Res

Books eleven and twelve of Paradise Lost always come as something of a surprise to first-time readers. Having plumbed the depths of hell and soared to the heights of heaven, having managed his ‘great argument’ of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace after casting an eye over the story of Satan’s failed rebellion, Milton takes us through hundreds of lines of reiterated biblical history in the form of a lesson sent to Adam through the archangel Michael. At first moving slowly through events recorded early in Genesis, Michael’s narrative picks up speed (and switches from visual to aural), covering not only the events leading up to Milton’s time but beyond, to the consummation of time itself. This move on Milton’s part has not been met with universal praise. C.S. Lewis, usually an ardent defender of the epic, famously called the archangel’s survey an “untransmuted lump of futurity,” and my students sometimes feel the same. It’s not that the two books are boring—it’s the catalogues of unfamiliar place names that are sometimes accused of that—they just seem somehow unnecessary for moving the plot along. In asking my students why, in light of this objection, Milton might have chosen to lump futurity onto the end of his epic, I sometimes zag over to The Lord of the Rings. “In Tolkien’s fiction,” I ask (now I have their full attention), “why does he call it ‘Middle Earth’?”

A teacher I love once remarked that Dostoevsky writes “conscious of the stories he’s not telling because he’s telling this one.” Tolkien is that and more: he sets his stories in Middle Earth because they only makes sense if the characters (and the reader) live and move in the knowledge that there is a bigger story that started before they got there and will continue after they leave, in which their own peregrinations play a part. So too does Milton place his narrative of the Fall in the shadow of those last two books. Adam and Eve were made to understand that their story was preceded by mighty events in heaven, and they must also understand that they will be succeeded by epochs of human faithlessness and divine faithfulness. Books eleven and twelve extend this sense of “middleness” to the reader, in whatever age she lives: Adam and Eve’s story is our own story, and not in a metaphorical way. Like Adam and Eve, we see only in part, but we see enough to know that bigger things are afoot, that we have a destiny. This consciousness is characteristic of every epic since Virgil, but in the Christian epic—with its imputation of guilt to the hero (Dante’s Comedia begins with a culpably lost pilgrim)—it takes on peculiar poignancy.

There is a theological word for the failure to see the larger story, and that word is “despair.” It is the condition of those in Dante’s hell, the gates of which say lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate—“leave behind every hope, you who enter.” Earlier when I described the need for affirmation from the academy (in the form of a respectable job) as “desperate,” drawing an analogy to a forlorn lover, I was trying to be very precise. The word means, literally, “without hope.” What I want to point out here is that both Schuman’s negative account and Roiphe’s positive one are equally hopeless, in terms of a larger story that might invest their own with meaning. The backdrop to both accounts is very like the backdrop that C.S. Lewis identifies in epic before Virgil, in which, Lewis says,

no one event is really very much more important than another. No achievement can be permanent: today we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed. An inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used for it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. . . . [Homer’s] greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux.[3]

Many humanities PhDs have reason to be melancholic. But in the Christian story, darkness is a condition through which one passes, not an abiding reality so comprehensive that the pilgrim doesn’t think to question it. Bunyan’s Christian is tempted to wallow in the Slough of Despond, but called to recognize the Slough for what it is and move forward in faith.

Conclusions

My labor here has been to step back and see the Slough, to assess how my story might be important for reasons beyond self-affirming originality no less than prestige and tenure. Possibly the insights I can draw for my own peregrination in higher learning can be inferred easily enough from the literary reflections above—but for my own sake let me take stock.

(1) If any life in the academy—however exalted—must be located in a larger story in order to have purpose, then any life so located—however lowly, wandering and broken—has purpose. In this world there may remain a need to call for justice, to apologize, to crunch numbers and lobby for change, to educate people young and old about the importance of the liberal arts and those who teach them, but ultimately the worth of those teachers does not hang on whether the world listens. Following from this,

(2) I am responsible to work against the scale of values that sets tenure-track faculty above other members of the community, in both my thoughts and my actions. Many academic Jeremiads focus on violence suffered by contingent faculty because of a lack of attention given them, in Simone Weil’s sense. The fault for this rests not only, or even primarily, on the people who write their paychecks: it rests on all of us. Here again Tolkien is instructive, for he gives particular attention to hobbits, a species not usually thought worthy of attention.[4] Who are the hobbits in the story of the modern academy? A species that stands out in my mind besides the much-bewailed adjunct is the student. Adjuncts are now responsible for a large percentage of the face-to-face instruction received by students in the United States. In behaving as though adjuncts have lost in the game of life, we imply that students are worthless. There are few sights in the academy more heartbreaking than that of a contingent faculty member who has come to accept this view himself, whose students suffer the consequences. I need to remember that if I am a contingent faculty member, either for a season or for the rest of my life, I am doing work of infinite value in caring for the souls in front of me; and

(3) A teacher of humanities who does not understand (1) and (2) should not be teaching in the humanities. We likely pursued our PhDs because we believe that there are things more important than “success” in terms of money and prestige. It’s not wrong to want security, comfort, attention and respect, but neither we nor our students will get as much as we want in the way of these things—so I pray that, if I am going to experience dearth and difficulty, I can at least bear witness to the fact that there are resources to sustain people who lack “success.” In fact, my experience of dearth and difficulty may allow me to testify to hope in ways I could not do otherwise. I am not saying that this potential good justifies the suffering of everyone who has been trampled down in the dehumanizing of the academy; I am saying that, if I let it, my own suffering can be translated into good, both for myself and for my students.

(4) Ultimately, that good can’t be held back by my circumstances. I want to end by turning once more to the end of Paradise Lost, to the moment when Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden. This thwarting of well-laid plans comes with ignominy, uncertainty, and difficulty of the direst sort. But Michael offers Adam these words, which follow us in our story too, at whatever stage in our lives and careers:

Yet doubt not but in valley, and in plain
God is, as here; and will be found alike
Present; and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine.

---

[1] An exception is William Paul Young’s The Shack, on which see Katherine Jeffrey’s review in the January 2010 issue of Books and Culture.

[2] Quoted in Ralph Wood, Contending for the Faith, pp. 151-52.

[3] A Preface to Paradise Lost, pp. 29-30.

[4] I’m grateful to Churl for this observation.

Introducing: Sing Me Hwæthwugu

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Anglo-Saxon, Poetry

A new addition to A Christian Thing; here is a taste of what it is about:

About: Toward a Justification of This Site.

Evangelical Conversion Narrative and the Elder of the Prodigal Brothers

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Age of Enlightenment, Christianity, Conversion, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Flannery O'Connor, God, Jesus, Joss Whedon, Parable of the Prodigal Son, Postmodern, Romanticism, Testimony

In this post I want to talk about the Evangelical conversion moment.  By this I mean the experience that has generally been a staple of Evangelical narrative since the beginning of the movement’s history. This is usually a moment of crisis, of turning 180 degrees from one’s own way to God’s – often it is accompanied by an emotional experience, something like what Wesley described as a strange warming of the heart.

To begin, I would like to give this moment and its importance in this narrative more due than it gets in some circles. In these circles, this experience gets dismissed as more or less an individualistic after effect of the Enlightenment; in this spirit, Archbishop Schori of the Episcopal church described personal salvation as part of the “great Western heresy” of individualism (for a balanced description of the exchange between Schori and Evangelical Anglicans, see this article, particularly the portion that quotes Radner). But Western though it may be (and even that is questionable), her assertion ludicrously puts all of Christendom under censure from St. Paul onward. Though she is not out of line in critiquing the individualistic bent of Evangelicalism, I would suggest the problem is the other way round; our faith in fact is not personal enough, insofar as we in modern Western society have lost a sense of the breadth and depth of meaning once attributed to personhood.

However, this is in fact not what I want to talk about, but rather it is a prefatory caveat to differentiate the following critique from those of Schori et al.  And there is need for a critique recognizing that while experiential conversion crises are not a mere recent innovation, they have in Evangelical circles come to eclipse other models of conversion that have been equally important in the history of Christianity, models that in fact may be necessary to speak powerfully into the current postmodern moment.

Indeed, the particular model I have in mind can be seen if we think about the genre of testimony in Evangelical circles, that is, the relation of one’s initial conversion experience. I think in prior generations, these might have seemed particularly compelling, precisely because these generations were shaped by an Enlightenment view of historical progress complete with watershed moments of change, and a romantic imagination shaped by the idea that something actually happens when one encounters the sublime. Conceiving of faith in these terms thus made sense to a generation that believed in change and progress; the problem now though is that in a postmodern generation that has largely abandoned the Enlightenment and Romanticism, these stories do not feel very compelling. By this I do not mean that there is nothing worth keeping in them, even as I do not mean there is nothing worth keeping in Enlightenment and Romantic thought – surely there is.  But in a society continually bombarded by language of change, innovation, and revolution, such things become tiresome and even those instances that do have substance beyond the shallow rhetoric get lost in the mix – our lives will be changed during worship in the evening service, and then changed again by the heart-smart cereal we eat for breakfast, and then changed again by the speed of our wireless internet.  Innovation becomes mundane routine, and with it the faith grounded in innovative experiences.  So how is one to think about such testimonies in light of this general cultural inoculation against them?  I suggest that part of the response must involve realizing the importance of some of the other ways of narrating faith that were eclipsed at the advent of the Enlightenment/Romanticism.

For myself, I know what resonates most powerfully are not those stories of dramatic life changes, but the often more quiet (if equally engaging for those with ears) stories of those who have stayed, particularly those who have stayed Christians even in the midst of feeling the effects of ecclesial frustration and politics.  This, I think, is the really radical testimony, for the mark of postmodern society is an inability to stay loyal or faithful for long.  To be sure, there is a deep hunger for such loyalty, as evidenced in the enduring popularity of Joss Whedon’s shows, which almost always have such loyalty as their core. But if this loyalty is the thing we fantasize about, it appears equally fantastic to us in our inability to enact it – increasingly, our response to personal suffering, discomfort, pain, and evil is to run away regardless of the other goods we might abandon in the process; many of my friends have walked away from their faith entirely, and I imagine they must think me a fool for staying, a partner in a relationship that justifies abuse under the guise of loyalty.  But this I think is why my conversion story can say something to these friends that I think the more traditional testimony form might not be able to. I’ll bet I could match them point for point in frustrations with God and His church – in fact, I think in some cases I could frame these complaints in even more compelling ways. But I have stayed, with eyes wide open, and this because I have known a love stronger than death.  Not a love that depends on warming of hearts or sentimental experiences or instantaneous changes, but the kind of love that Job experiences with God, that looks harsh and reprimanding and thankless on the outside to those who have not known the paradoxical tenderness of the whirlwind. Put another way, I feel that I know a little about why Job would have died for God both before and after a divine response that makes so little sense in modern terms.

But the way I know this is not via a dramatic conversion moment, but because I stayed – where others grew up in the church and walked away thinking God and faith were dead, I stuck around to see if there would be resurrection – and I found that there was. Indeed, I like to think of my story in terms of the prodigal son – but not the one you might think.

What I am about to say here is something that probably makes me a bad Christian, but I think it is not in fact counter to scripture because what we are talking about is a parable, a divine riddle: I have never felt a lot of kinship with the prodigal son.  I mean, who spends their inheritance on whores and wild living when there are books one might buy (or probably in his case manuscripts)?  And parties are noisy affairs at best, even with a fatted calf – I share Flannery O’Conner’s sentiment that her primary function at parties was covering the stain on her mother’s sofa. In some ways, I am not in fact sure that when the elder son takes issue with the profligate’s party it is because he would actually enjoy one himself – rather, it is the unfairness of seeing a brother with a devil-may-care attitude have everything come to him while one constantly wracked by anxiety and responsibility can never let his guard down and feels as if he is barely surviving with little recognition or fruit.

But there is a caveat in the story, and that is that we don’t in fact know what became of this son (in fact, we don’t know what became of either son); what we do know is that he is given something far more precious than a party: his Father tells him, “You are always with me and everything I have is yours,” and if this is not the very thing we long for God to tell us as Christians, I’m not sure what is.  What if in fact it is not the prodigal who is given the greatest gift at the end of the story, but the elder son?  This would not be to say that the elder son is less sinful or less in need of grace than the younger – it is a very dull imagination indeed that could imagine that his stability on his Father’s property somehow exempts him from this. But the reminder that he is with his father and is his father’s heir is in fact the grace applied to his sin in this situation.

The story never says what happens to this son, but if in fact he embraces what his father says, his “testimony” will be very different from that of the prodigal. His will not be a story of running away and then radically turning to discover the grace of God; rather, it will be a story of still discovering this grace miraculously in spite of his close proximity to it, a proximity that would be easy enough to take for granted. It is a story of someone who stayed, perhaps (like us all) from imperfect motivation and not always with a clear understanding of why, but nonetheless stayed.  It is a story of discovering, whether slowly or quickly,  that God’s grace is deep enough to love not only the archetypal prodigal, but also those who did not leave. The miracle is not only that He goes off to rescue the one sheep that wanders from the herd; it is also that He stays and rescues the ninety-nine left on the hillside.

Prophetic Awkwardness, The Common Riddle, and the Justification of the Academy

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academia, Academics, C.S. Lewis, Christ, Christian, Common good, God, Logres, PhD, Prophecy, Prophetic Critique, Socrates, That Hideous Strength, University

Chinglican is probably right in his response to my prior post; more or less, he took the conversation in the direction I alluded to and then left open when I said that these matters require a broader discussion of ends and means. And much of what he laid out is probably a good reason for doing academics. As he said of my research, it is most certainly not apolitical. And probably being prophetic and caring about the common good is a good idea. Indeed, had I been pressed, this probably would have been something of the direction I might have taken the conversation myself, and probably the way that many Christians would take the conversation. So why didn’t I do that in the first place?

To tell the truth, it is because I have to a certain degree become allergic to words and phrases like “the common good” and “prophetic critique.” What is meant at the root of them is surely important. But nowadays it seems like everyone and their dog is making “prophetic critiques” right, left, and centre; and I often feel that some who talk about the “common good” really mean something else, perhaps something more common than good. Put another way, Chinglican situates the university as a body independent of various institutions that can potentially abuse power, and therefore as a legitimate critic. The problem I have though is conceiving of a university context that is in fact independent; it is not after all as if the university structure hovers above the socioeconomic and religious reality like some worldly version of the church triumphant (as understood by Protestants), nor are those who run the university beyond the temptation of twisting power manipulatively. Universities may be watchmen, but who watches the watchmen?

So how would I put the matter differently? First off, I would say that, if we are using terms like “prophetic” and “common good,” the task for Christians (and any other well meaning people for that matter) is not simply to put them out there as justifications for the academy, but rather to live in such a way that they emerge from their quotation marks – that is, such that they actually become plausible options for believing in. Yes, it is true that my generation is cynical – indeed, very cynical – but I think it is a mistake to simply blame this on a fully deliberate choice or a pervasive nihilism. These things may indeed be there, but at the very bottom of cynicism is generally an experience of deep betrayal – indeed, I would suggest that, far from being the least hopeful of people, those who are cynical about things embody a very deep hope that has been crushed. Conversely, pragmatists are not those who are particularly optimistic about the world, but rather those not optimistic enough – they cannot be bothered to take a moment and mourn for what might have been. To talk plausibly about the “common good” and “prophetic critique” we will, I think, need to live in such a way that even the most cynical – to the degree that this cynicism is symptomatic and not chosen – can begin to believe that these words might have meaning.

Secondly, I suppose I would make a distinction between my vocation as an academic and what we might call the bodied effects of this – i. e. the job I have etc. A helpful way of looking at it perhaps is what C. S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength describes as the struggle between Logres and Britain that goes on throughout society. Here, we have not so much an independent body evaluating the behavior of other parts of society as much as we have a loose collective of people working – certainly for the common good – but in a very bodied, disparate, cross vocational, and often frustrating way. Indeed, in this book, the real prophetic critique and interest in the common good comes out of Logres, but the company most likely to use terms like these (and speak of independent knowledge) are their opponents – indeed, they have managed to produce a head independent of a body and other earthly props. This distinction allows me to both agree with Chinglican and what I said prior – I am not wedded to the academy, per se – but it may be the arena where I enact the thing that is in fact undeniably part of who I am, my vocation. The company of Logres exists regardless of where each member works.

So, given my pessimism about these words and phrases, what would I talk about instead of prophetic critique and the common good? I would talk about prophetic awkwardness and the common riddle. With regard to the former, it seems to me that the two greatest instances of what we might call “the prophetic voice” – Christ and Socrates – hardly garnered the kind of favor and “cool points” we think of when we think of radical and prophetic people. When you encounter a prophet, he or she may not make you feel like an oh-so-good-radical doing oh-so-good things for an oh-so-messed up world. Rather, encountering a prophet might make you distinctly uncomfortable. It may even make you feel murderous.

And what I mean by “the common riddle” is something like what Augustine means when he talks about the restlessness in our hearts. There is a tendency for people to approach the so-called common good in the so-called common square with ready-made solutions – we have seen the common problem and we have the common fix. But I would suggest that if we do not have some degree of uncertainty or tentativeness in our minds regarding this fix, it is probably in fact not one – it is rather a way of papering over problems we don’t want to see. What Augustine knew is that our hearts our restless until they find rest in God. And this means that restlessness and problems, rather than something to be covered over, are something to be pursued. I worry that too many people, in pursuit of the so-called common good, sacrifice common mystery, which is in fact this restlessness. And the irony of course is that in fact the only way to get a truly common good – a good for both city of God and city of man – is by following this restlessness to its proper end.

 

Academic Love and the Critical Space of Academia

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academia, Avery Dulles, Constantinianism, crisis, critique, fieldwork, governance, Jesuit, John Henry Newman, Judith Butler, medievalism, orientalism, PhD, public good, public sphere, radical, research

I want to write a quick response to Churl’s post yesterday on love in academia.  Like Churl, I too am a doctoral student. Like all doctoral students, my topic is fairly narrow: I study how Chinese Christians engage the public sphere. Like most topics, its narrowness is fairly expansive, encompassing fields I thought I’d never study.

Churl thinks that, unlike other people who seem to be doing more public service than him, academic work comes down to love. This is in the face of a shrinking academic job market, where tenure track jobs seem to be disappearing. Responding to only the latest apocalyptic statements in the higher education journalistic buzz, Churl argues that his job is to love his research subjects, to listen to them, and to stay in this metaphorical marriage though it really is doing him very little economic good.

I admit that I love my Chinese Christians too, more than they will ever know. I’d like to think that I listen to them closely. But God forbid, I hope I’m not married to them, or else my shifting postdoctoral research will be framed as a divorce. Moreover, as I once told my wife, “You are my love, not academia. That’s because while you love me back, academia will never love me back.”

Why do I stay, then?

To answer that question, we need to go back to what academia was originally for. John Henry Newman argues in The Idea of a University that the purpose of the university is to teach universal knowledge, including theology. I think Newman takes this a little bit too far, admittedly, to the point where he thinks that universities do not primarily produce research, but rather function as teaching centres. In his McGinley lectures on the relationship of church and state, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, has a more convincing answer. For Dulles, university theology is a gift to the Church because it isn’t produced under ecclesial governance, per se. As much as Stanley Hauerwas fulminates against the powers of the state over modern academia, neither is it governed by the state (or at least it’s not supposed to be). Teach-ins at the University of California, Berkeley, particularly by professors like Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, have also railed against a market takeover of the university with attempts to privatize the institution, which means that the market isn’t supposed to govern academia either. Instead, the university, while cognizant of the competing governing structures of church, state, and market, is supposed to govern itself as an independent space producing knowledge that is critical of each of these structures. Pace Newman, the university is supposed to teach universal knowledge, and pace Dulles, the university is supposed to produce universal knowledge, and all this not for knowledge’s sake, but to contribute that knowledge to a critique of where knowledge gets bent by governing structures to legitimize their claims to power.

That the university doesn’t actually operate that way right now is not cause for cynicism; it is cause for thoughtful public action. This isn’t the first crisis of the university–imagine, for example, if you told the student strikers of the 1960s, faculty operating under totalitarian regimes, or even Galileo himself that they weren’t going through a crisis of the university–and it is not going to be the last crisis. The university is arguably always in crisis because its critical independent space of contested, contingent, and challenging knowledges isn’t always conducive to the governing power of church, state, and market. Because of this, the powers will always try to co-opt the university. Oftentimes, the university allows itself to be co-opted. But this isn’t a case to be cynical about the university; it’s a call to liberate it. To the extent that we can’t liberate it from within, we might need to take jobs outside of the university, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in academia anymore. It’s that we will fight for its liberation from other vantage points because the existence of that critical independent space is crucial for the public good. After all, it makes sure that neither church nor state nor market has total domination over our knowledge production, but that their powers are relativized by constant independent, prophetic critique. (This, by the way, is why democracies must publicly fund universities. To the extent that they do not, their democracies themselves fall into crisis. To the extent that democracies fund projects only based on their supposed “relevance,” they undercut the university’s ability to produce the truly critical knowledges that make a democratic relativization of power work.)

To drive the point home that the university is an independent space that produces critical knowledge, let me suggest that Churl is himself deeply invested in this task. Referencing his studies in Old English, Churl often suggests that people think that his work is irrelevant to contemporary conversations. I beg to differ. Perhaps this is because I have spoken a lot with Churl, but in my understanding, one of Churl’s biggest pet peeves is something called medievalism. Just as racism is when you make stereotyping remarks that are often (but not always) derogatory about a race–and ditto for orientalism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.–medievalism, as far as I can understand from Churl, is when you do that sort of thing to medievals. It’s when you call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, or when you use the word medieval to mean backward and retrogressive, or when you posit that everyone who ever lived between the third and sixteenth centuries thought, lived, and acted the same way. Just like racism, sexism, orientalism, heterosexism, ageism, etc., medievalism is a modern construct, designed to legitimize modern power structures, underwrite policies ostensibly designed as egalitarian reversals of the Dark Ages, and undercut any appeal to tradition (despite the fact that anyone who has ever done an academic literature, legal, scientific, policy, etc. review is doing tradition).

So yes, of course, Churl loves his Old English research subjects by listening to them. But that love is not apolitical. By listening deeply to his Old English research subjects, Churl is challenging how our contemporary society is thoroughly underwritten by medievalism. Making that challenge in turn is a critical contribution of independent knowledge that not only isn’t governed by church, state, and market, but challenges some of the legs on which they stand. In other words, Churl is saying that medievalism is not a valid justification for any policy, political statement, public discourse, or poetic output. He knows better. It’s because his knowledge was produced in the independent critical space of the university.

I imagine, then and finally, that some readers of A Christian Thing may be aghast that I have lumped the church in with state and market governance. As Christians who believe in the holy catholic church and the communion of saints, wouldn’t we love nothing more than to be governed by the church? Yes, if only the ‘church’ were simply equivalent to the communion of saints at all times and in all places. With some degree of consensus, scholars of the late medieval period, especially those aligned with the theological school of radical orthodoxy, argue that the church began to consolidate its power as a bureaucratic institution, centralizing its hierarchy as a chain of top-down organizational command. To some extent, the rise of universities were a response to this new power consolidation, producing knowledges that were independent of this church governance and often in tension with it.

In other words, I’m suggesting that just as many have noted that monasteries were established as independent critical spaces after the advent of Constantinianism, universities became independent critical spaces after the church’s bureaucratic consolidation of power. Universities thus engage with these structures by producing truth independent of these systems of governance so that truth can’t be bent by power. Instead, scholars speak unvarnished truth to power. To the extent that the university has become complicit with the powers, then, we must work both within and without the university to return it to its prophetic character.

In short, it’s because we believe in the public good of prophetic critique that we are economically stupid enough to be doctoral students.

Why I Am a Doctoral Student: A Response to the Slate’s Thesis Hatement and Thesis Defense

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctorate, Facebook, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Donne, PhD, Slate, Thesis Defense, Thesis Hatement, Tolkien

According to the recent Slate article “trending” among academics on Facebook, we should resist the temptation of getting a PhD in literature. This for the reason that the job market for graduates is terrible. As a literature scholar who is quasi on the market myself, I have experienced enough of this, and I will no doubt experience much more. In response to this, another Slate article suggests that there are particular skills one gets from a Ph.D, even if one doesn’t get an academic job. But in my opinion, this response is in places a little one-sided; it kind of makes the lifestyle of the graduate student sound like that of a poor bohemian activist. You may not end up an academic for the rest of your life. But the skills you learn can be applied in a variety of professions. And you might as well enjoy “that brief, blissful time cultivating your Idea.” Or, as the article concludes, “The inefficient path has its joys and largesse.”

The interesting thing about both articles is that both seem to gauge the worth of a Doctorate by what it does for one’s self. They are in many ways self-focused, cost-benefit analyses, one concluding that the price is too steep, and the other concluding that, all things considered, the price is as reasonable as many other life choices. But here’s the question I have. What if you are not one of those students who thinks they are going to change the world? What if you are writing your dissertation knowing that there is a good chance that the most people will care about it is a few months before your defense, and that because it is part of their academic duty? What if what you say won’t change the world, even when all your peers are going around (allegedly) doing life altering things for {insert favorite special minority here}. What if it is fairly clear that you will probably not get a job in your field, and if you do you are lucky? And let’s raise the stakes. What if the work you are doing does not come easily? What if it is painstaking and mind-breaking, hardly the kind of romanticized flight of fancy that people imagine when they think of someone doing a degree in something as “useless” as literature. What if, to make matters worse, you have moderate levels of OCD and depression that complicate these things. The second article defending the PhD begins to look a little too romantic. And the other more pessimistic article begins to look like the only option – the only option, that is, if one factors out love.

By this I do not mean some sentimental attachment to things; and I am certainly not saying we need to study these things to save our country, or our generation, or Western civilization, or oppressed minorities, or whatever else wants saving. Some of these things are beyond saving; some have become not worth saving; and some should be left to the choices they have made, free will being what it is. In some cases, where saving needs to be done, it may not be our discipline or the academy entire that is the solution. I am not even here talking about self-love, unless in terms of the way that a Doctorate disabuses us of our pretensions about how much we matter. No, what I am talking about is that thing that at bottom that cannot be explained, the thing that draws us to care for certain things and people at the cost of great sacrifice over against the jeers and laughs of the rest of the world.

Of course, both of the articles I draw attention to are in some ways grounded in a kind of love. At their worst they may be grounded in selfish ambition, at their best, perhaps a love of humanity and progress, a sense that we can actually contribute something to the world around us, and that a Ph.D. may or may not further this. Neither author seems set against sacrifice – each just wants it to be pointed in the right direction. But neither explains the love. Neither explains why we feel the need to care for modern humanity, or progress, or success, or any of those things. They are cited as categorical goods, but I’m not sure what scale is being used to determine this.

Having said this, I am not in any way claiming that I will replace these unexplained assumptions with anything terribly clear. But knowing that they are unexplained assumptions does level the playing field a little. The modern person will make sacrifices and take pains to succeed in a system he or she does not know how to justify. And the doctoral student studying obscure works does something very similar. The real question, of course, is about the end and purpose of life, something we postmoderns are far too fashionably cynical to engage seriously. And for my money (or lack of it!), whatever the results, I guess that the reason I have done a Ph.D. is for love – not so much the “I feel in love with a poem and got all swoony” kind of love, but the John Donne “Batter my heart” kind of love, the love that costs. If my relationship with literature were a marriage of convenience, I would have walked away long ago.

At bottom it is very hard to explain. Why do I feel the need to love dead Old English people by listening carefully to them, trying to hear what they are saying and not what I want them to say? Why does it bother me when they are misrepresented and caricatured? Why have I been drawn to love a particular tract of the universe carved out by Anglo-Saxon sages and so unfashionable in an age that has lost its appreciation of wisdom? I know and I don’t know. There are myriad reasons, too many to count, in some ways. But there is also the mystery. This is something I have been given to do. No one promised that one would be able to justify the ways of one’s vocation.

Does this mean that I think that what I am doing will have no effect or implication for modern thought? Of course not. But it does give me a reason to keep going whether or not I see effects or implications. Some things that we think important will eventually be shown to be empty. And some things we think empty will eventually be shown to be important. And it is hard to tell at the moment which are which. Part of the problem is that I cannot make promises about how “revolutionary” my work will be. If I am doing proper research, I do not know how it will come out, and so I cannot say how it will affect the world.

Perhaps the best way to sum up how I feel about these things is to turn to J. R. R. Tolkien, a paradoxical figure because he had a degree as useless as mine and has probably done a good deal more for the modern world than most practically minded people. This, though, is not why I appeal to him, but rather because I like his model of love for little things that don’t matter. In his most popular work, Lord of the Rings, this is seen in Gandalf’s interest in Hobbits, the creatures so insignificant that they are generally not mentioned in the broader histories, and are certainly not the interest of those who care about things that matter, like Saruman. But Tolkien also explores such love in one of his lesser known but one of my favorite works, “Leaf by Niggle.” The story is basically about two neighbors who get on each other’s nerves and potter away at their respective interests; Parish like gardening, and Niggle, the main character, is a painter. The story is about how both characters end up in purgatory/heaven and learn to appreciate each other. Both of their earthly interests are seen to have been an anticipation and longing for a heavenly reality. But what I find most interesting is the fate of Niggle’s art at the end of the story. Though the love he shows in his painting is in fact good and perhaps even part of salvation, his painting is only mediocre, and its fate is to be destroyed except for a small piece that ends up as a misunderstood curiosity on a museum wall. His love mattered in a way that could not be gauged on this side of the world – much like the love one might put into the subject of one’s doctorate. I am not of course claiming that doing a Ph.D. is the only way to practice this kind of love, but it is one way, and a way that is simply not being acknowledged in the ongoing debates over the worth of higher education.

Doctor Who: Religion and the limits of human reason

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Christian, Christianity, doctor who, dr. who, Faith, impossible planet, mythology, religion, rings of akhaten, satan pit, science fiction

The Doctor confronts the old god in “The Rings of Akhaten.”

In case you haven’t heard, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who. As a fan, I’ve wanted to pay homage to the show for some time, planning to write a post discussing the good Doctor and religion. Now seems as good a time as any, given that the most recent episode “The Rings of Akhaten” is a story in which the Doctor comes face to face with a “god.”

It’s a common enough theme in science fiction: the self-proclaimed deity who is unmasked as a pretender (think Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country—“What does God need with a starship?”). Still, the Doctor’s confrontations with religious beings are a little different than those in other science fiction series. He is, after all, a semi-divine figure himself. All space and time is at his disposal. He can go anywhere and anywhen. He’s more Q than Picard, if you will.

The Doctor’s confrontations with religious beings is different than other science fiction. He is, after all, a semi-divine figure himself.

So when the Doctor comes up against a “god,” we know he’ll be able to expose it as a fraud. And it always is another a fraud. It might be a powerful being; it might be ancient. It might, as in the most recent episode, have existed for millenia, feeding on the offerings and worship of its followers. But whatever else it is, it is not truly divine. It is as much a part of the universe as anything else. It can always be explained. It can always be understood.

Except, perhaps, in one two-part story from the Tenth Doctor’s era. In this story, the Doctor again comes across someone professing godhood: he meets a being which claims to be the Beast, the devil himself. But the Doctor has faced many false gods in his day; they are all pretenders. “If you are the Beast,” he mocks, “then answer me this: Which one, hmm? Because the universe has been busy since you’ve been gone. There’s more religions than there are planets in the sky. There’s the Arkaphets, Christianity, Pash-Pash, New Judaism, San Claar, Church of the Tin Vagabond. Which devil are you?”

Only this time the devil is real. “Which devil are you?” the Doctor asks. “All of them,” the Beast replies. He is not lying.

Here the Doctor is confronted with something greater—and more terrifying—than he can imagine. Not merely because it is an unknown but instead because it is by its nature unknowable. When the Doctor asks the Beast when he came to be chained in the Pit, the latter answers, “Before time.” This answer makes no sense to the Doctor; he cannot conceive of a “before time.”

“What does ‘before time’ mean?” he asks.

“Before time and light and space and matter. Before the cataclysm. Before this universe was created.”

“You can’t have come from before the universe,” the Doctor responds incredulously. “That’s impossible.”

To which the Beast replies, “Is that your religion?”

The Doctor can only respond, “It’s a belief.”

The Beast scoffs, “You know nothing. All of you, so small.”

Here the Doctor, nigh on a deity himself, is confronted by something beyond him. Unknowable. Unthinkable. Impossible. He cannot conceive of existence before time and matter. His reason is too small; it cannot bend so far. He cannot comprehend it. He cannot measure it and test it. “If that thing had said it was from beyond the universe, I’d have believed it. But before? Impossible.”

So too did God question Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone?” (Job 38:4-6). The questions are, for Job, impossible to answer; they are beyond his understanding: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). But Job’s inability to answer God’s questions about creation—and the Doctor’s inability to comprehend of existence “before time”—does not change the fact of their existence.

So then: the Doctor finds himself opposed by a power he cannot even comprehend. He has no more ideas. He has no more options. Even the TARDIS—and, consequently, the only chance of escape—has been lost. All hope is at an end. The situation is utterly and completely beyond him.

The situation is utterly and completely beyond him. How fitting then, that the solution must also come from beyond him.

How fitting then, that the solution must also come from beyond him. It has, in fact, been prepared in advance by those who first imprisoned the devil. The Beast had been imprisoned “before time,” he tells us, when “the Disciples of the Light rose up against me and chained me in the pit for all eternity.”

The Doctor meets the Devil in “The Satan Pit.”

It is impossible to miss the reference to Scripture here. “And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray” (Revelation 12:7-9). And again: “The angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day” (Jude 6).

As in the biblical text, the devil was defeated and chained in the darkness (in the television series, the devil is quite literally chained imprisoned on an “impossible planet” fixed in space in the shadow of a black hole). But the Disciples of the Light seem to have foreseen both the Beast’s attempt to escape and the Doctor’s presence at the event. When all hope is lost, the Doctor finds the Disciples of Light have prepared a solution for him ahead of time—quite literally before time existed.

Having fallen into the Pit, the Doctor awakens to find he was “expected.” “I was given a safe landing and air,” he says to the Beast, asking why. Slowly it dawns on him: provision for his safe descent was not the devil’s doing; it was the work of the Disciples of Light. “That’s it!” he exclaims. “You didn’t give me air, your jailers did! They set this up. They need me alive, because if you’re escaping then I need to stop you!” The Doctor discovers what the Disciples of Light intend him to do, and he does it—knowing full well it will mean his own death.

Except it doesn’t. In a deus ex machina worthy of the name, the Doctor’s previously lost TARDIS is discovered to have also fallen into the Pit. In fact, it’s landed right where it needs to be, almost as if by plan. And perhaps it was by plan. That’s what’s so fascinating about this particular Doctor Who story: it leaves room for the possibility of something more—something beyond mortal comprehension, beyond even the super-human Doctor’s understanding. The Doctor lays down his life to defeat the devil, only to find his life restored to him in the end.

God out of the machine indeed.

———————

The two-part story under discussion here is “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit.”

Cross-posted at Captain Thin.

Lord, what can I do for this city?

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Breakthrough Youth Ministries, Breakthrough Youth Village, catholicity, Evangelical, expat, 金禧事件, 蘇恩佩, Golden Jubilee Incident, Josephine So Yan Pui, Justin Welby, Justin Wilford, labor rights, liberation theology, Lo Lung Kwong, missiology, Pope Francis, purpose-driven, seaman's strike

Qoholet in Ecclesiastes instructs us to let our words be few when making vows to God. When I agreed to this blog, I swore to myself and by myself alone that I would never bring my actual academic work to bear on my comments. The day has come to break that oath, and I am glad that it was not professed as a formal vow.

My friend, Sam, has written quite the rant on a separate blog fulminating against a newly planted expatriate church in Hong Kong. As he points out, even as Hong Kong dock workers’ wage inequities have culminated in a strike this week, the newly planted church proliferates a version of what Karl Marx would call the “opiate of the masses,” flying in their home American megachurch’s senior pastoral couple to call their congregation to reflect on spiritual happiness over against material prosperity, and by extension, immanent social justice. Sam writes an open letter to American missiologists who assume that they have more to contribute than to learn from their mission fields. He castigates their neocolonialism, protesting their continuation of colonial missionary practices and their orientalizing fantasy of reaching China for Christ through Hong Kong as a stepping stone. As Fuller missiologist William Dyrness points out in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology, evangelicals have long been better at speaking than listening. As Sam would say, using Hong Kong as a stepping stone to China is Exhibit A in these practices of bad listening.

Sam is likely more right than he knows. After all, evangelicals were also culprits in perpetuating colonial injustices in another dock workers’ struggle, the Seamen’s Strike of 1922. As Hong Kong historian W.K. Chan records, wealthy tycoon and openly evangelical Robert Ho Tung effectively broke the strike by negotiating terms with the seamen that he failed to keep. Not only is Sam right about the problem of expat evangelicals not listening to local conditions, but this repetition of history seems to indict evangelicalism itself for tending to side with the wealthy and the colonizers, not with the working colonized oppressed.

But this is where Hong Kong evangelicalism is so interesting: there is more than one strand of evangelicalism in Hong Kong. Indeed, before we use the case of Ho Tung and the Seaman’s Strike to call Hong Kong evangelicalism a bourgeois religion, we probably should contemplate the historical development of various forms of evangelicalism in Hong Kong.

The word on the street in Hong Kong is that in the 1950s, evangelical revivals broke out among Baptists and Evangelical Free youth, resulting in the formation of independent churches patterned after Brethren congregations, the development of student ministries linked to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and the expatriation of evangelical students to North America where they started Chinese churches. Many of these students returned to Hong Kong in the 1970s, having caught a vision in North America to reach China, particularly after what they saw as the political devastation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In effect, like the expat church in question, they were using Hong Kong as a stepping stone into China missions.

Be that as it may, however, an evangelical strand that developed among these expats was one centered on the city of Hong Kong itself. Realizing that they were unable to conduct missions into China in the 1970s, the returning students discovered that perhaps their vocation was not China after all. Perhaps it was to the city of Hong Kong itself. One of the returning students, journalist Josephine So Yan Pui, articulated this theological line in a letter that has now become iconic for her legacy, “Lord, what can I do for this city?”

Josephine So lamented that Hong Kong in the 1970s had become a city of violence, especially through gang warfare, frequent homicides, rampant theft, and the proliferation of pornographic material, and that the church was feeding this culture of death by holding to its regular routines of in-house Bible study, fellowship, and evangelism without addressing the needs of street youth. Together with expats and social work students at Hong Kong University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, So became one of the founders of the Breakthrough Movement in 1973, a media effort directed to Hong Kong youth to change their culture from one of violence to one of peace.

In many ways, the incipient stages of the Breakthrough Movement led to the development of an evangelical liberation theology. In 1977-78, female students and teachers at the Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School struck against unjust educational practices at their high school. Josephine So issued a statement in Breakthrough Magazine supporting them, and Breakthrough workers joined the strikes outside of the Catholic archbishop’s house, calling for justice and educational reform. As the Rev. Lo Lung Kwong, a Methodist minister influenced by Josephine So, remembers, the Golden Jubilee Incident catalyzed the work of mainline Protestants at the Hong Kong Christian Council (HKCC) to work for just policies for factory workers in the Chai Wan District. Together with evangelical pastors like the Rev. Chu Yiu Ming, they opposed the rise of bus fares, utility bills, and pornography while advocating for the construction of an Eastern Hospital in Chai Wan to service injured factory workers. Evangelicals also joined the Rev. Kwok Nai Wung when he departed from the HKCC to form the Hong Kong Christian Institute (HKCI), an educational initiative to help Christians in Hong Kong develop a theology that would interface with democracy and social justice in the face of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to Chinese sovereignty. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen incident, these various groups also built solidarity networks to protest the atrocities in Beijing, to develop an indigenous Hong Kong theology, and to work for a socially just democratic order in Hong Kong. Their work continues to be debated in the pages of The Christian Times.

To use Hong Kong as a stepping stone into China is to ignore this evangelical liberation theology and the complexity of the Hong Kong church’s interface with society altogether. Yet the trouble might be even deeper. In classic colonization theory, for colonialism to actually work, colonized elites have to collaborate and interface with the colonizers to legitimize colonial rule. Far be it from me, of course, to call expat churches colonizing institutions (does they, for example, explicitly represent the state interests of the United States?). However, what is of concern is the lingering colonizing practices that Sam sees here.

It seems, after all, that reaching China is about discovering one’s purpose in life. By “purpose,” the idea is that American suburbanites need to recapture a sense of the meaning of life, and the way to do that is to go on mission, both evangelistic and humanitarian. As geographer Justin Wilford brilliantly narrates in Sacred Subdivisions, American suburbanites are brought into a greater sense of their “purpose” as Christians to advance God’s kingdom in the world.  As Wilford shows, discovering purpose begins at home. Borrowing from South Korean pastor David Yonggi Cho’s cell group model, American suburban members are taught to reframe their mundane lives around “purpose” and what God is teaching them through their everyday lives. Mission, then, is about suburbanites discovering their individual purpose in life. As I also found in my research on Chinese evangelicals borrowing from these megachurch models, to be an “American evangelical” discovering “purpose” did not mean that one had to be white. Indeed, it probably meant that one was middle class.

To frame mission as such, though, especially in Hong Kong, is in effect to exclude Hong Kong from the discovery of purpose. To do this, of course, is to unwittingly repeat the mistakes of the 1970s, failing (as the returning students did then) to see that Hong Kong evangelicalism is not only about reaching China, but to ask, as Josephine So Yan Pui did, “What can I do for this city?”

The failure to see this might be attributed to a variety of factors. Perhaps this American church plant has been influenced by a narrow slice of evangelicals in Hong Kong who aren’t fans of the sort of evangelical liberation theology stemming from Josephine So. Perhaps they are articulating the original terms of the mission to China without any reference to the urban theology that has developed in Hong Kong since the 1970s. Or perhaps they are operating on dated, colonial-period versions of American evangelical missiology that is obsessed with the idea of Americans reaching China for Christ. Perhaps there is some combination of those options, or perhaps there are other reasons.

Whatever the reasons may be, the fact that this expat church’s actions seem to have little historical grounding in Hong Kong’s church scene and even less engagement with current socio-political realities in Hong Kong suggests that all might not be well here. The problem, as Sam suggests, is that the Gospel mandates some level of incarnation, some level of being present. As Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby have reminded us over the last few weeks, their episcopal jurisdiction and their proclamation of the Gospel is to their local dioceses–to the city of Rome, to the districts of Southern England–so that those churches may preside in charity over their respective communions. Rome and Canterbury are not any more stepping stones than Hong Kong, but the Gospel as preached and lived in the mundane, everyday lives of these cities is the source of a new evangelization that may well have global ramifications.

What this amounts to, then, is a failure of catholicity. The local situation that Sam talks about in his blog may revolve around workers’ rights, but those activities offer a window into a larger theological problem. The planting of this sort of expat church in Hong Kong betrays an ignorance of the incredibly diverse Christian church in Hong Kong. Stepping into the Hong Kong scene requires the church to engage those debates. This is a catholic duty, one that we all profess when we acknowledge our belonging to the “communion of saints” in the baptismal creed. The tragedy here is not just that these church plants are in effect devoid of any preferential option for the poor. It is that by failing to put their ear to the rich complexity of evangelical theological praxis in Hong Kong (and we haven’t included much of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism in this mix), these church plants are potentially schismatic, contributing little to the maturing communion of the Body of Christ in Hong Kong from which the missio Dei can actually proceed.

In other words, Sam’s blog is not a call for relevance. Neither is it him standing on a soapbox to proclaim a social gospel. It is rather a summons to understand that mission is only ever Christian by its sense of catholicity.