Robert Jenson, a Cold Take on Josh Butler, Secular Sons, & Upcoming

Somebody let me on their podcast(!); the power of the pornographic; Ibram Kendi's evangelical roots; and other upcoming things/projects

Church Podmatics: “Christ as Culture”

(Jesus playing a fugue on the organ, in true Jensonian fashion. Image courtesy of Bing AI)

Listen to me join Church Podmatics’ Matt Wilcoxen and Matthew Mason to discuss Robert W. Jenson’s “Christ as Culture” lectures (1: Christ as Polity; 2: Christ as Art; 3: Christ as Drama). Surprisingly, even counting this newly minted episode, there are just a handful of podcast episodes on Jenson in existence. For a man who has been called “America’s most creative systematic theologian,” and whom Karl Barth named as the one theologian who truly understood him, that is a travesty!

This was incredibly fun for me, so if you are ever out a co-host on a podcast and need a pinch hitter, or just want a “special guest” to make fun of, feel free to reach out! I promise to cut down on my paper rustling sounds in the future!

Two big quotes for those who might otherwise not dive any deeper into Jenson:

On Politics:

“Christ is a political fact among and in competition with the polities of this world. The members of his body proclaim that he exists at the right hand of God, that is, that he is the world’s sovereign, and inform all earthly would-be sovereigns that they are merely his place-holders, his vicars, and that, moreover, they are extensively in rebellion. … Christ’s presence in this world is not a private phenomenon, an invisible interiority. It is, as Cardinal Bellarmine once famously said of the church… ‘as visible as the republic of Venice.’ … If we are in Christ we must expect to be involved in the political struggles of this world. In particular, we must expect other polities to make war against us, as China does and as most Islamic societies do, and as do the liberal democracies, in certain ways. … Short of the End, Christians are saddled with plural citizenship. This does not make for peaceful lives"; it means that the line between the polity of God and the polities of this world runs through each of us and through our community, and that we must expect to struggle in our own communal and individual lives with the conflicts between polities which in this age are inevitable.” — Christ as Culture 1

On Art:

“An artist is an experimenter with possible worlds. … Is there a world other than the multitude of possible worlds? Do artists simply create worlds, any one of which is as real as any other, there being, as it were, no standard world by which to judge them? … Christians and Jews… know there is God, and even what he is like. And so they know there is a standard world, the one he, as we uniquely say, ‘creates’. Or, looking from the other side, Christians and Jews know that artists are not creators, not even co-creators—whatever such beings might be. … [Yet] in my view postmodern theory is in so far right that we are not in position to access this standard directly. For if the standard world were immediately available to us, there would be no possibility of our making art. … The sign that art’s proliferating construals have indeed a standard, even though we do not access it directly, is that artistic production is work. … An artist must labor to construe his possible world[;] he cannot just decree it. … Were there no Creator and so no creation, no standard world, artists would need to do no work.” — Christ as Culture 2

For a little more on Jenson, check out Brad East’s wonderful obituary.

Talking About Sex in a Pornographic Culture

People seem seem to think that it is possible to subvert the pornographic with the pornographic. Outlets, including evangelicalism’s Christianity Today and the Jesuit Catholic magazine America, were positive that Don Jon (2013) had accomplished just this, calling the film Joseph Gordon-Levitt directed “a very moral movie” and insisting that “the literal last thing in the world that this movie does is glorify porn.”

I argue that this same misplaced confidence in our ability to subdue and tame the pornographic is present in Evangelical literature from Every Man’s Battle (2000) to Josh Butler’s Beautiful Union (2023).

Read the whole essay at Mere Orthodoxy here: "Talking About Sex in a Pornographic Culture." I kind of think of it as part two of a set of commentaries on recent articles at The Gospel Coalition, as the reaction to the Peeler article was wrapped up in the prior scandal around the Butler book preview. I wrote a little more about it in my last Substack.

PS: I wasn’t able to work this in, but I was scandalized to learn that at the time Stephen Arterburn published Every Man’s Battle, he was already on his way to his second divorce, and would not too long thereafter marry a woman he met at one of his purity seminars! This is why I’ve argued elsewhere that we need “self-help books whose authors’ own lives have proven divorce-proof.”

WORLD Article on Kendi

Unrelated to the recent news about the mass layoffs at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, my work colleagues were discussing a provocative quote of Kendi’s: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (How To Be An Antiracist).

Somehow, this reminded me of an interesting quirk in Kendi’s background: his parents met through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), which is an Evangelical parachurch ministry that serves college campuses (I was actively involved in the University of Virginia chapter). Kendi has not been coy about this: chapter one of his breakthrough book begins with this story, concluding: “my own still-ongoing journey toward being an antiracist began at Urbana ‘70 [IVCF’s triennial conference]… I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist.”

Perhaps because conservative Christians don’t often read books by proponents of “critical race theory” (or whatever you prefer to call it), the people who would find this origin story most fascinating are the least likely to have heard it. So I wrote about it for WORLD here: “The Secular Son of Progressive Christianity” You can also hear me read it aloud (if that’s what you’re into) for WORLD Radio here: "Ibram X. Kendi's Church Without Christ."

There’s only so much you can do with 800-words but these kinds of religious parents - secularist children stories fascinate me: e.g., you have the son of Ronald Reagan, Ron Reagan, an atheist advocating for strict separation of church and state; similar dynamics with the sons of Tony Campolo and John Piper; and then you have Walter Rauschenbusch, the leader of the Christian social gospel movement, whose grandson was Richard Rorty, a secular philosopher on the left, perhaps most famous today for his “Trump Prophecy.”

Upcoming

I have 4,000+ words in a forthcoming edition of National Affairs on one way that the sprawling coalition that is the Right (from libertarians, to fusionists, to social conservatives, to the New Right and beyond) might be able to work together to get important things done. Ronald Reagan’s legacy has taken a serious beating over the past decade, which is a shame because I think several underappreciated accomplishments from his administration contain the blueprint for a path forward.

Nancy Pearcey is coming to Church of the Resurrection to speak about her new book, The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes on Monday, October 30 at 7:00 p.m. You can register and find more details here (there will be food). I reviewed the book favorably here: “Jesus and John Winthrop: Alternatives to Toxic Masculinity” (TGC).

• EDIT: In the originally published version of this Substack, I made a Freudian slip and said Pearcey is coming to talk about her new book, Jesus and John Wayne. Pearcey, as I mention in my piece, not only did not write that book by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, she conspicuously avoids talking about it for the full length of her own. Thank you to Matthew Lee Anderson for catching this most grievous error (and who knew someone read these besides my mom)!

Robert Jenson and Stanley Hauerwas both published books addressing young children I’m working on something concerning the enormous importance and difficulty of this kind of theological exercise. Incidentally, Jenson’s interlocutor for his book is his granddaughter, Solveig, who two decades later would become the subject of a controversial New York Times piece, as well as a character in a New Yorker article on a monthly NYC meetup known as the “Gathering of Thought Criminals.”

If I can find the time, I will also try to pop out an essay for The Other Journal on parachurch ministry, the core of which will be questioning how the parachurch serves the church. If you’re interested in writing for TOJ, check out the latest call for papers on the church: https://theotherjournal.com/submissions/ I’ve had a great experience with all the editors I’ve worked with there. You should have seen how rough these pieces were when I submitted them…