Forget Tim Challies

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Arden Cho, Arius, Catholic, Cee Lo Green, forget, New Calvinist, Protestant, Tim Challies

There are two versions of Cee Lo Green’s instant classic, that is, his imprecatory lament that his lover has left him because ‘the change in [his] pocket wasn’t enough.’ One uses an expletive. The other is said to be toned down. I have posted the Korean American Disney version.

I’m posting because New Calvinist blogger Tim Challies has been ‘drivin’ round town’ with the church I love calling Pope Francis a ‘false teacher.’ I suppose I’m late to the party, and to be fair, he’s got so many other false teachers condemned from Arius to Muhammad to Norman Peale that I’m beginning to think that his office is busier than the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). When Cardinal Ratzinger was head of the CDF, he frequently complained that his small office of 37 staff was not enough to handle all of the doctrinal errors and sexual abuse cases that came across his desk. But since February 16, the Challies magisterium has issued no fewer than eleven condemnations, and the figurative bodies are still piling up. While I am sure Challies would not appreciate being lumped together with what Ratzinger called ‘radical feminists,’ certainly what Ratzinger would call the ‘alternate magisterium’ works harder than the magisterium itself – likely because unlike the Italian Catholics in the CDF, Challies’s doctrine office operates with a Protestant ethic!

As an aside, with the unilateral condemnation of Muhammad, it goes without saying that ain’t no common word between us and you happenin’. The surprise is that Challies didn’t get a Regensburg response. That he did not supports the argument I will develop. Read on.

In any case, I apologize for being late to the party. I do not work at the CDF, and I am not interested in forming an alternate magisterium. Therefore, the nature of the material that comes across my desk is prioritized differently, and I am only getting to this now.

I must admit that when I saw Challies’s post, the original version of Cee Lo Green’s imprecation was the first thing that popped into my head. But as an Anglican who is overly influenced by the Jesuits, I examined my own thoughts, for thoughtful action can only happen with sustained reflection first. I then came to the conclusion that though it has been said by another New Calvinist in a post that has been sovereignly removed (remember this?) that a man having sex ‘penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,’ my lusts are not oriented that way toward Tim Challies.

My desire is, in fact, that he be forgotten.

After all, given his Wikipedia caricature of Pope Francis and some ungrounded (and dare I say, unhinged) version of the Roman Catholic Church drawn from a dual misreading (or non-reading) of the Reformers’ polemics and Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults, the grade ‘F’ that he should receive stands not merely for ‘failure,’ but for ‘forgettable.’

After all, why should we take the time to listen to someone whose condemnation of the Catholic Church’s ‘works-based salvation’ is completely ignorant of Lumen fidei or Evangelii gaudium? Why should we give the time of day to anti-Catholic polemic that is unaware of the performativity of faith described in Spe salvi? Who really cares about an evangelical whose gospel is so truncated to a justification by faith alone narrower than Luther’s and has no social or political implications like those described in Rerum novarum, Gaudium et spes, or Redemptor Hominis?

What is regrettable, then, is that Challies is given the time of day by an audience that is informed by him that it is perfectly fine to caricature and to source from Wikipedia. Seeking to ‘Inform the Reformed,’ Challies is really given a read by those whose comments laud him for boldly speaking the truth in an age of whatever. Quoting one clause from Trent condemning the ‘alone’ in justification, Challies is able to inform the Reformed that the battles of the sixteenth century are still ours today, that to be faithful means to forget the ecumene of church history, that war is the modus operandi of the Protestant Christian life. If such is the case — if indeed the primary mode of existence that Challies endorses is one governed by relations of contestation — then none less than John Milbank would call him a heterodox pagan who has twisted the ontology of harmonious communion that is the hallmark of the city of God into a spatial tool of governance aimed at taking over the kingdom of God by force. Indeed, while the Spirit has been moving to place ecumenists like Francis, Justin Cantuar, and Tawadros II at the top of the church catholic, these unnecessary polemics demonstrate who the true schismatics are and what ontologies they in fact inhabit.

And yet, I said earlier that Challies’s Muhammad post failed to provoke a Regensburg response. This was purposeful. What i meant is that Challies is not important enough to be a heretic. Unlike, say, Arius, whose songs hailing the sub-divinity of Christ were said to have captured the hearts of churches across North Africa, Challies’s content is completely forgettable, and his alternate magisterium is yet to gain a hearing in circles that actually matter enough to provoke political violence. It is thus not worth a response. It should instead be forgotten.

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Noah: A Theological Review

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Allegory, Bible, Christian, film, Gregory the Great, Interpretation, Noah, Typology

The question of whether you like the recent Noah film will depend on what you are expecting. If you are expecting only to see what you find in Genesis – which is after all not very much – you will be disappointed. If you are hoping for something so “literal” it misses the point of the story – like the so many Jesus films that turn Christ into a saccharine idol – you will be disappointed. Yet I would suggest if you are looking for something that is thoroughly Biblical, you will find it here, in spite of the cries of the film’s many Christian critics. But all this hangs on what I mean by Biblical, and this in turn goes back to a difference between premodern and modern Biblical interpretation.

The best way I know of describing premodern Biblical interpretation is via Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job. Does Gregory believe in the historical meaning of the text? Yes. But that is not what he is most interested in. What he is most interested in rather is the way the book of Job communicates within the matrix of Biblical and Christian tradition. At the end of the day, the book of Job is not really about the story of Job at all – the book becomes a touchstone whereby one enters via figural means the entirety of Christianity, understood in terms of Scripture and Tradition. For Gregory, the most interesting thing about the book of Job is the way it associates with all the other stories caught up in the narrative of Christianity.

And this, I argue, is precisely what the Noah film is doing. It is of course not as overtly Christian as Gregory’s Moralia, but then the original story of Noah is not overtly Christian either – it is Jewish first and Christian second. And though it does certainly supplement the story in various ways, the key to the genius of the film is the way it does this. Whereas some other attempts at capturing such stories on film try to simply write modern culture over the story – use it as a skeleton for a piece of modern art – Noah does roughly the same kind of thing that Gregory does. The film is not so much interested in a mimetic relation of the Biblical story as in the question of how that story can become a touchstone whereby we enter the polyphony of Biblical narrative.

How does this work? As one of my friends put it, it does this by cramming most of the span of the Genesis narrative into the tight space of the Noah story. We see the creation and the Fall. We see the Cain and Abel story. We encounter a scene resembling the horrible events described when the angels visit Lot in Sodom. Humans have the technology – and pride – of Nimrod, the hunter who is traditionally thought to have built Babel. The miraculous birth narrative, so present throughout the Old Testament and finding completion in the narrative of Mary, is here as well, and so is the Abraham and Isaac story. Pedantic details are not missed. I once had a Sunday school teacher who bothered to figure out all the ages of the people in the Bible, and who were contemporaries etc., and he discovered that in the narrative of Genesis, Methuselah dies at the time of the flood. This too is not missed. Even imaginative details have roots in some of the more cryptic of Biblical passages. To be sure, the partially fallen angels, the watchers, are apocryphal (from the book of Enoch) rather than Biblical, but stories from Genesis have always spawned mythical offspring who, if done right, may not be there literally but do represent the spirit of the text. Milton, for instance, peoples the first chapters of Genesis with many characters who do not appear in the Bible, and Beowulf imagines Grendel and his mother as descendants of Cain (or Ham, if you follow a certain line of interpretation). And though the watchers are more like these latter than Milton’s former, with an obscure metaphysics leaving more questions than answers, they are perhaps no more puzzling and distracting than Genesis’ own iteration of the mysterious Nephilim, who would seem to be the offspring of a union between humans and angelic creatures. This, then, is the technique of the film – not to represent the story of Noah, per se, but to use the narrative as a framework for entry into the broader Biblical narrative as a whole. The question then becomes one of gauging how the film conceives of this narrative, and I would suggest (as I argue below) that it does a decent job of this.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Perhaps the best way of getting at how the film works is to begin with the thing that worried me for the first third of the film: the problem of the absence animal sacrifice. This I considered a problem because I was worried that the film was simply going to divide humanity into a set of evil meat eaters and innocent vegetarians who escape on a boat. This all looked too hippy for me – not because I dislike hippies per se, but because their explanation of sin and salvation from it is too simplistic. The idea that we can so easily sail away from our sin, whether corporate or personal, greatly underestimates the power of sin. And this is precisely where the Old Testament sacrifice comes in. The point of this was to remind us that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. Salvation is not cheap. And this is highlighted in the original Noah story, not only by the animal sacrifices made by Noah himself, but also by the fact that Abel’s animal sacrifice was pleasing to God whereas Cain’s sacrifice of vegetables was not. That the first murderer is associated with vegetables and the first victim associated with the slaughter of animals makes things slightly complicated for the film’s conception of a world where evil meat eaters are pitted against vegetarian protagonists. And the reason I harp on this is because it does remove one of the typological footholds whereby the Noah story is understood in relation to the sacrifice of Christ – where there are no sacrificial lambs, it is that much harder to conceive of THE Sacrificial Lamb.

Had this been the extent of the film – simply turning the story into PETA propaganda– I would not have been happy, but fortunately what the story takes away with one hand it gives back with the other. It does this in the form of an alteration to the story whereby Noah expects the human line to end with his family, and is faced with the discernment of whether God wills him to complete the destruction of humanity by killing his granddaughters, or to allow humanity to continue, sinful as it is. And it is in this dilemma that everything taken away by the absence of blood sacrifice is brought back – because the choice Noah faces is the conundrum that haunts humanity. It is clear enough in the film that dealing with evil is not simply a matter of easily shutting oneself up in a boat, and the figure of Tubal-Cain, who will be dismissed by some Christian critics as an unnecessary addition, is merely a type of the Original Sin that Biblically speaking is indeed carried through the flood and into the brand new world – righteous though Noah may be, there will always be those like Tubal-Cain and Ham – righteous though Noah may be, there will always be a part of him that participates in the sins of these characters. And the only way of ensuring the complete and utter destruction of sin is through the complete and utter destruction of humanity. Indeed, the scenario is very like the conclusion of Paradise Lost, when Eve proposes suicide – if the human race is fallen, why go forth and multiply, when this simply makes one a breeder of sinners?

The answer to this comes in the form of a mystery: it is only through such propagation and fruitfulness that humanity can be saved. The motif of miraculous childbirths out of situations of barrenness and complication permeates the Old Testament, pointing back toward God’s promise to Eve of salvation through a child who will crush the serpent, and pointing forward to Mary’s unconditional fiat. And all of these characters are collated in the figure of Illa, played quite perfectly by Emma Watson. Here, there is miraculous conception, the birth of twins (reminiscent of Jacob and Esau), and the looming threat of death faced by so many children in the Bible, particularly Moses and Christ. In this segment of the film, Noah’s character gestures toward all the figures that threaten children throughout Biblical history, whether protagonists such as Abraham, villains such as Pharaoh and Herod, or figures of ambiguity such as Jephthah. Noah finally chooses life, and eventually receives divine confirmation in this choice, but the problem – sin – survives along with the human race.

This, then, brings us back to the puzzle that animal sacrifice is meant to bring up – if sin is to die, humans also must die, and hence this is taken care of, if imperfectly and only provisionally, by the vicarious sacrifice of animals. But I would argue that, though this line of the story is not literally present, the puzzle it proposes is palpable in the film– as Milton memorably puts it concerning man, “die he, or justice must.” And, Biblically speaking, it turns out that Justice in fact must die – on a cross. The one who is the very embodiment of Justice steps in in some mysterious way beyond our imagination and does what Noah cannot – in Him, humanity dies, and in Him, it rises again, this time without sin. And this ultimately is what I like about the Noah film.

There are many little things to praise, including typological gestures toward creation ex nihilo, and a visual that evokes the Spirit of God hovering over the waters in the form of a dove; it also is perhaps one of the best filmic representations of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body – the union of the unitive and procreative purposes of sex – that we are likely to see in a very long time. Similarly, there are many things one might nitpick about, and I won’t go into them here because I’m sure there are all too many other Christian critics happy to pick up slack in this matter. However, I, for one, am most glad that, through creative treatment, the story in the main “got” the most important point of the Noah story. This point is that sin is a problem; mass destruction is only a temporary fix, and salvation is not as simple as walling oneself up in a ship and riding out the storm. Something else is needed, and is answered in words conveying that mystery even deeper than sin: “To us a child is born…”

Why Evangelicals Are No More Evangelical Than When They Call for the Abandonment of Evangelicalism

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Evangelicalism, Evangelicalism Abandoned, We Need New Wineskins

There is an article trending on the need to abandon Evangelicalism. Evangelicalism, this article goes, has lost its way – has lost touch with the heart of the gospel – and become all sorts of other things only tangentially related to Christianity, if at all. We need to get back to the real message of Jesus, the article suggests, and return Christianity to its proper focus on love of people. Evangelicalism is an old wineskin – too cracked and petrified to bear the spirit of a new Christian generation – and we now need a new wineskin. Sound familiar? It should. Because Evangelicalism is no more Evangelical than when it calls for the abandonment of its roots. Ironically, this radical new call to abandon Evangelicalism is so very Evangelical it is almost a cliché.

What do I mean by this? What I mean is that Evangelicalism, far from being about people and relationships, is in fact about a certain kind of rebellion and rejection of the gift of history. The modus operandi of Evangelicalism is to parasitically poach theology from an old tradition for its own undefined ends (masked beneath a language of persons and relationships, and often actually defined by the free market) even while pretending to reject the tradition it depends on for its theology. Evangelical theology – because it is based on socially mobilizing a particular predetermined kind of theology – lets other Christians do the heavy, messy, and historically contingent work that its own representatives are too “pure” to do, and then poaches this theology, pretending it was formed in a vacuum and condemning those so stupid as to involve themselves with development of theology in history.

This of course means that it is at the end of the day an oxymoron to speak of Evangelical history, precisely because Evangelicals, if they are being consistent, must disavow their history. This trending article is a perfect example of this – we have reached a point in time where there is too much history behind Evangelicalism, and so, in the same way it needed to break off from all the corrupt institutional mainline and Catholic denominations – all that history – Evangelicals need to make their own history the corrupt past against which to measure their own allegedly radical and loving present existence. This indeed is why history – as demonstrated in the work of Mark Noll – is exactly the where the scandal of the Evangelical mind is going to be revealed. If you scratch history as an Evangelical, you will begin to have problems.

So what am I suggesting? Among other things, I am suggesting that it is about time to call out the rhetorics of revival, radical rediscovery of faith, and a salvific iconoclasm that has no use for old forms. I have taken this fairly far – to the point of insisting on nothing less than a 2000 year old church – but I think a good start would be inviting Evangelicals to abandon Evangelicalism not by finding “new wineskins,” but paradoxically by embracing their history. I do not say that they must always agree with those representatives of this history. But the people and histories we are so ready and willing to drop are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, and spirit of our spirit, and to simply drop these people and histories in the interest of an equation of love and “progress” is an act of calling our brothers “Raca,” and therefore puts us in danger of the fires of hell.

How do we do this? My own humble suggestion is to read more Flannery O’Connor. What is beautiful about O’Connor is that she models very well what love for our Christian brothers and sisters looks like even when these brothers and sisters can appear much crazier than we are comfortable with. The beauty of O’Connor is that there is as much place in her heaven for the freaks – the circus sideshow hermaphrodites – as there is for proud Catholics, charismatic fanatics, and patronizing old women who are embarrassing in their lack of political correctness. What is beautiful about O’Connor is that she finds a way to love these people even while keeping in reserve the fullness of Christianity, such that, while these people may not be exemplars of faith (from Flannery’s perspective very few are), they are certainly caught up in God’s grace and love, and therefore are the neighbors we are called to love. I can’t help feeling that a desire to abandon Evangelicalism – to throw out the old wineskins – channels the worst hatred implicit in a culture of disposable goods, and will only end up once more reenacting exactly the worst elements of the Evangelicalism it pretends to escape.