There is a sense in which the Scriptures are the word of God dehydrated, with all the originating context removed – living voices, city sounds, camels carrying spices from Seba and gold from Ophir snorting down in the bazaar, fragrance from lentil stew simmering in the kitchen – all now reduced to marks on thin onion-skin paper. We make an effort at rehydrating them; we take these Scriptures and spend an hour or so in Bible study with friends or alone in prayerful reading. But five minutes later, on our way to work, plunged into the tasks of the day for which they had seemed to promise sustenance, there’s not much left of them – only ink on india paper. We find that we are left with the words of the Bible but without the world of the Bible. Not that there is anything wrong with the words as such, it is just that without the biblical world – the intertwined stories, the echoing poetry and prayers, Isaiah’s artful thunder and John’s extravagant visions – the words, like those seeds in Jesus’ parable that land on pavement or in gravel or among weeds, haven’t take root in our lives.

Lectio divina is the strenuous effort that the Christian community gives (Austin Farrer’s “formidable discipline”!) to rehydrating the Scriptures so that they are capable of holding their own original force and shape in the heat of the day, maintaining their context long enough to get fused with or assimilated into our context, the world we inhabit, the clamor of voices in the daily weather and work in which we live. But it takes more than an hour in the bucket to accomplish what is needed. Lectio divina is a way of life that develops “according to the Scriptures.” It is not just a skill that we exercise when we have a Bible open before us but a life congruent with the Word made flesh to which the Scriptures give witness. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that the word of God originated when “long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. . . . Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard . . .” (Heb. 1:1-2; 2:1; emphasis added). These are spoken words delivered to us by “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1) and now written in our Holy Scriptures. It is the task of lectio divina to get those words heard and listened to, words written in ink now rewritten in blood.

– Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (pp. 88-89)

It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectual challenge it gives, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and not in any way have to deal with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you.

Or to put it in the terms in which we started out: It is possible to read the Bible from a number of different angles and for various purposes without dealing with God as God has revealed himself, without setting ourselves under the authority of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who is alive and present in everything we are and do.

To put it bluntly, not everyone who gets interested in the Bible and even gets excited about the Bible wants to get involved with God.

But God is what the book is about. C. S. Lewis, in the last book he wrote, talked about two kinds of reading, the reading in which we use the book for our own purposes and the reading in which we receive the author’s purposes. The first ensures only bad reading; the second opens the possibility to good reading:

When we “receive” it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we “use” it we treat it as assistance for our own activities . . . . “Using” is inferior to “reception” because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

That is why an awareness of what the church has formulated as the Holy Trinity is so important as we come to this book, the Bible. We read in order to get in on the revelation of God, who is so emphatically personal; we read the Bible the way it comes to us, not in the way we come to it; we submit ourselves to the various and complementary operations of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; we receive these words so that we can be formed now and for eternity to the glory of God.

– Eat This Book: A Conversation on the Art of Spiritual Reading (pp. 30-31)

My pastor Ben calls these sorts of experiences “moments of contemplation.” They’re moments of contentment, wholeness and an unstained delight. I’ve known others: driving home from East High on a perfect spring day, listening to a jam band as the breeze blew in through the open window, grasping the depth of covenantal theology for the first time and immediately making myself a cup of tea and drinking it by the living room window, sitting and listening to a L’Abri friend play Eva Cassidy’s cover of Sting’s Fields of Gold. More recently, standing on the back deck of a local church’s property, smoking cloves and drinking a beer at my bachelor party with several of my Benne brothers. (That was moments before one friend, imitating Binny Hinn, reached out to “heal” another friend. The healee jerked his head away, causing his glasses to fly off and plummet 30 feet into the neighbor’s yard. We spent the next 45 minutes searching for them without success, a process that ended when one of us said, “I’ve never regretted the existence of Binny Hinn more than I do right now.”) Moments of contemplation I know. I know what it is to be content, to feel completed in a moment. Quoting from one of my favorite writers, “I think I know what it is… to be transported above and beyond myself into a world of ultimate reality with the angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven.”

Yet that last quote highlights a certain tension I’ve always felt. When Stott spoke those marvelous words, he was describing his experience of public worship with other Christians. My holy moments have almost never had such explicitly Christian overtones. Indeed, for most of my life attending church has either had no impact whatsoever on my spiritual health or has had a deleterious one. The same goes for regular private devotional practices such as Bible reading and private prayer. The church problem has been resolved in some small way: Grace Chapel. The Bible reading difficulty has proven more difficult.

During my youth, I spent seven years in the AWANA program, a midweek Bible-memorization program for kids from pre-kindergarten through middle school or high school. My best friend and I were always the insufferable youth group super heroes who memorized more verses and did so with greater alacrity than anyone else. And a big part of the satisfaction I drew from it consisted not only of the approval I gained from adults (bad enough) but from the awards given for memorizing verses. I loved filling up my uniform with crowns, badges, and pins quicker than anyone else. I loved the status of it, the superiority of it. (A recipe for a healthy relationship between myself and the Bible, this is not.) Adding to the baggage was a disproportionate emphasis on the importance of “quiet times” amongst youth group leaders and pastors. The unspoken message was that as long as you read your Bible every day, you were basically OK. You could be an asshole for Jesus (several of us were) but if you read your Bible you were good. Indeed, the more you read the Bible the more likely your priggishness was to be counted as “youthful zeal.” (How followers of Jesus could arrive at such a conclusion boggles the mind. But such is the nature of self-deception, I suppose.)

All of these factors have come together, producing a very deep struggle with the idea of regular personal devotions or even with feeling safe around people who thrive on such times. One of the more painful experiences I’ve had in Christian community came when, as a member of a small group, the group leader asked us what we felt would be best for our group to do the following spring. Before I could say, “Honestly, I don’t know any of you and if I’m going to feel safe with you, I need to know you. Can we have an unscheduled time of dinner or snacks where we just talk and get to know each other?” another person in the group began a line that any church burnout will recognize: “Honestly, I just really feel like I need more time in the Word. That’s such a struggle for me… if I could just have some accountability with that from the small group that’d be awesome. Maybe we should read a book of the Bible together.” Everyone in the room voiced their agreement with this person, leaving me feeling like the balding, fat 50 something dude at a meeting of 20-something super models talking about their struggles with anorexia. (And yes, there’s something cynical in my description of the event, that’s a fair observation. But it’s a cynicism learned over years of seeing people who practice regular “devotional” times but whose lives reek of sulphur. After seeing such things for the entirety of my Christian life, some cynicism seems inevitable. And yes, I know, read Dick Keyes’ book. I will. Promise.)

Yet for all this frustration and, admittedly, bitterness, I can still recognize the necessity of the Bible for the Christian life, which inevitably leads to the necessity of some sort of private Bible reading habit. I see in my other pastor, Mike, a remarkable ability to call to mind various texts and passages and apply them to specific situations. Part of that is Mike’s unique gift, of course, but part of it is also the product of long years of study and careful thought. I also remember the experience of seeing a group of Christians from rural Zambia receiving copies of the Bible for the first time. Some of them wept, nearly all hugged their Bibles tightly to their chests. I don’t love the book that way and yet we both worship the same God and belong to the same church. So why am I so cold toward the Bible? Partly, no doubt, I just explained why. But I suspect part of it also goes back to deeply immature parts of my spiritual life. (To be clear here, I don’t mean “religious” when I use the word “spiritual.” I mean the inner life, the realm of appetite and desire, longing and searching. The realm that masters like Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and Andrew Murray have written of in such stirring terms.) So in search of a healthy – or perhaps functional would be nearer the mark – relationship with the Bible, I’m giving myself a couple measurable goals: First, I’m going to read the book of Acts. Second, I’m going to read Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book. And, because I’m me, I’ll probably write about it. In my past encounters with Peterson I’ve found him to be a wise, careful, profound exegete of Scripture as well as an enormously gifted pastor. His Long Obedience in the Same Direction is a marvelous and important book I’d commend to anyone. Eat This Book is his book about “spiritual reading.” I’m trying my best to not approach the book as a kind of magic bullet, but simply as a useful guide which will, I hope, help me begin to move toward a healthier relationship with regular Bible reading. And even if the movement is slow and halting (it almost certainly will be), it’s positive movement, for which I’m grateful.

As a result of these convictions, Bucer was generally the most ecumenically-minded of the reformers. His emphasis on love and dialogue made him an ideal “champion for protestant unity,” and motivated him to work tirelessly to unify the evangelical movement as a whole. His ecumenism also led him to work to unify with more Erasmian-minded Catholics in hopes of creating a state-wide German church, much like the Anglican church in terms of its relation to the state, but more evangelical in its doctrine. This ecumenical bent also manifested itself in a more irenic disposition toward those with whom he disagreed. This side of him will be seen as we now examine the nature and handling of his disagreements with the Roman church, with Luther himself, and with the Anabaptists.

As a young man hailing from Selestat and steeped in Erasmian humanism, it should be no surprise that Bucer was critical of the institutional abuses of the church. Yet as he grew, his polemics directed at the church in Rome heightened, becoming far more severe than anything ever used by Erasmus or any of his teachers in Selestat. While “antichrist” was his preferred epithet, he elsewhere called the church a, “mob of priests,” “the religion of the pope,” and “the false church.”[1] What were the grounds for Bucer’s break? Much of it can be traced back to his understanding of the Christian faith as in essence a simple matter of faith in Christ and love for others. While his emphasis on love of others sometimes distanced him from Luther’s unapologetic emphasis on grace alone with no place for works, Bucer was still an evangelical at the end of the day. And he saw many of the late medieval rituals of Catholicism as an undermining of the simplicity of Christian faith granted by the Holy Spirit.

Moreover, the laity was often steamrolled by the church’s emphasis on external ritualistic piety. “The Roman clergy had trampled on the rights of the laity, deceived and patronized and seduced them. It encouraged a false piety based on externals, dressing up stone and wooden images in costly garments while the living members of Christ suffered hunger and poverty.”[2] Thus, not only did late medieval piety undermine the nature of saving faith by encouraging people to trust their salvation to the church, it also caused the church to lose sight of Christianity’s most basic teaching, that “everyone should live not for himself but for others.”[3] In this way, the late medieval church came to undermine Christianity in its most essential form, making unity impossible.

This is where Bucer’s ecumenism must be distinguished from that of Erasmus, who was also a strong voice for reconciliation in the German church at this time. Erasmus’ critique of the church was focused purely on externals and did not have the complexity of Bucer’s, causing Erasmus to see unification as a possibility. But Bucer could not agree with him on this. While it was true that the church’s problems were largely external in Bucer’s eyes, the nature of those external problems cut at the very foundation of the Christian faith. In light of this, “Erasmus’ increasingly desperate calls for moderation and tolerance and unity at the end of the 1520s were based on a total misreading of a crisis.”[4] For Bucer, the larger issue at stake was the Gospel, and tangential to that the question of authority in the church.

Implicit in Bucer’s argument that the Roman church had abandoned the Gospel was the idea that Scripture stood alone as the supreme authority in the church. Of course, Bucer was not alone in advancing this argument. The question of authority in the church was foundational to the Reformation itself. Indeed, one of the most oft-quoted speeches of the Reformation is Martin Luther’s “Here I Stand” speech given at Worms in which Luther explained why he could not recant.

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason—for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves—I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.”[5]

This speech accurately captures the Protestant understanding of church authority, an understanding just as fundamental to Bucer’s theology (and eventual departure from the Roman church ) as it was to Luther’s. The Bible was the final authority on questions of Christian teaching. While Bucer respected the church fathers, he did not consider them to be equally authoritative. More interesting, this was an issue on which Bucer’s opinion would remain generally unchanged for the duration of his career. In the early 1540s when he began working for reform in Cologne he and the Catholic theologian Johannes Gropper the fundamental point of disagreement was still the question of authority. Though Bucer presented his view in different form – he allowed for the authority of “apostolic” traditions – at the end of the day he still essentially affirmed sola scriptura, “For a tradition to be accepted it must truly stem from the apostles… and in every case the legitimacy of those traditions had to be confirmed by referring them back to Scripture.”[6] While it may be a more sophisticated way of saying it than Luther’s relatively black and white declaration at Worms, at the end of the day, he and Luther are still very much in agreement on this point.

Further complicating matters was Bucer’s slightly different understanding of the relation between love of God and love of others. The understanding espoused by Aquinas, the greatest Dominican theologian, had been that love of others was the only appropriate response to the love God has for man. Bucer agreed. Where they conflicted was that Thomas held that love of others and acceptance of self was a form of loving God. Bucer was not comfortable with this statement because he felt that it neglected the issue of human sinfulness. Bucer instead said that humans must be forgetful of self because their sinfulness meant they would invariably pervert self-love.[7] While this may seem a small point, it was an issue where Bucer disagreed with the greatest Dominican theologian, and at a time when religious conflict was already brewing in Germany, that was no small thing. For all those reasons, Bucer’s theology compelled him to break from the Roman church.

Where Bucer would differ slightly from Erasmus is that in his emphasis on the simplicity of the Christian faith centered around faith and love, Bucer would come to see that love as inescapably public in nature. However, Bucer’s ethical religion should be distinguished from the external religion of the late medieval church. Bucer’s ethical Christianity was about loving neighbors and treating them well – a completely different emphasis from the externalized religion of the late medieval church that emphasized the ceremonial. The public nature of Bucer’s basic theology will also become a defining aspect of his theology. Bucer’s first and last published works were both dedicated to addressing the question of how Christian faith applies to relations with other people, something which by nature will define how Christian faith relates to the public sphere.

In his first book, Instructions in Christian Love published in 1523 he writes, “The most perfect and blessed condition on earth is that in which a man can most usefully and profitably serve his neighbor.”[1] Though much changed in the next 27 years of Bucer’s life, his fundamental conviction that the Christian life was inescapably public did not. In his final book, De Regno Christi, published in 1550, he emphasized the centrality of the Kingdom, and by implication the public consequences of Christian confession, in the preface. In explaining why he wrote the text he says, “Thus it may be better understood how salutary and necessary it is both for Your Majesty and all classes of men in his realm, thoughtfully, consistently, carefully, and tenaciously to work toward this goal, that Christ’s Kingdom may as fully as possible be accepted and hold sway over us.”[2]

As an outworking of this emphasis, Bucer saw not only the church as a central means of advancing the kingdom, but also the state. Bucer saw both church and state as working toward the end of enacting the Kingdom of Christ. This conviction came from both practical and theological reasoning. On a purely practical level, the reformation was never formally established in a city until the magistrate there banned the Catholic Mass. Therefore, on a very real level, the reformation’s effectiveness was limited by the state’s willingness to support it. Steven Ozment sums it up well, “The first and most important measure of a reform’s success is its ability to become law… To enshrine reform in law obviously requires political support.”[3] As a result, Bucer “struggled, out of profound theological conviction, for a harmonization, as far-reaching as possible, of the Christian and civil communities.”[4] In another text, Bucer describes his understanding of the relationship between the church and the civil community in no uncertain terms.

“The civil authorities, who exercise the sword and the highest outward power, are servants of God; they ought, therefore, to direct all their abilities, as God in his law has commanded and as the Spirit of Christ himself teaches and urges in all whom he leads, to the end that through their subjects God’s name be hallowed, his kingdom extended and his will fulfilled – so far as they can serve thereto by virtue of their office alone.”[5]

In Bucer’s understanding of the Christian life as inescapably public, the church was entrusted to care for the spiritual well-being of its subjects, through the preaching of the Gospel, giving of the sacrament, and through church discipline. Meanwhile, the state was responsible for governing in a way that enacted Christian principles in the public sphere. Indeed, if the state failed in this, then the spread of the gospel was hindered. It was for this reason that Bucer was able to later support the banishing of certain Anabaptist leaders from Strasbourg. Also factoring into Bucer’s understanding of the state’s role in advancing the Kingdom of Christ was Bucer’s understanding of God’s law as being, “implanted in all creation as the order of all being.”[6] Bucer understood the law as a rough statement of the Gospel in that it explained to people how the Christian life was to be lived, which of course was a central concern of Bucer’s. Bucer understood God’s law as giving Christians instructions in how to love others. Therefore, this understanding of the law was central to Bucer’s Christian theology.

Finally, because the center of Bucer’s theology is love for others, all other theological questions must take place within that context. This led to his theology becoming dialogical, meaning it was not crafted solely in isolated study, as was often the case with other reformers, but rather it was molded through conversation with other Christians, especially his fellow Strasbourg pastors Matthew Zell and Wolfgang Capito as well as the Wittenberg reformer Philip Melanchthon and the Genevan reformer, John Calvin, who was mentored by Bucer for three years in Strasbourg. Greschat captures the dialogical nature of Bucer’s theology well, saying “Dialogue played a central role in Bucer’s thought and work, not only as a literary form but almost as a principle: in this way, the rights and the elements of truth in different positions, groups and convictions within the church, and also in society in general, could find appropriate expression.”[7]

Over the next week or two, I’m going to publish the paper I wrote for her in installments. I’m going to begin today by publishing the introduction, which will begin below the jump.

The Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer has been called many names throughout history. Martin Luther once labeled him a “chatterbox,”[1] while some of his opponents called him, “a false Christian, a sophist, a hypocrite and an insincere scribe.”[2] Paradoxically however, the most recurring labels for Bucer throughout history have centered around his tireless work for church unity. Biographer Martin Greschat refers to him as a “champion for Protestant unity,” and historian James Kittelson has called him a, “fanatic for unity.”[3] Peter Matheson, another historian, called him an “ecumaniac.”[4] Indeed, given Bucer’s remarkable work as a unifier, leading the effort to resolve the first eucharistic controversy and his attempt to unify the German church, such titles are understandable.

The difficulty facing historians in understanding Bucer’s ecumenical efforts, however, is to portray him rightly. While it may be easy to caricature a leader known for unifying diverse groups as a weak-kneed milquetoast politician devoid of conviction, such an image could not be further from the truth in the case of Martin Bucer. Bucer’s convictions were strong and thoroughly evangelical, sometimes pushing him toward greater unity and sometimes pushing him toward division. What distinguished Bucer from the other early reformers was two-fold: First, his understanding of Christianity as centering around faith in Christ and love for others naturally led to ecumenical tendencies. Second, his theology centered around his understanding that Christianity was inescapably a public faith. Bucer was quite willing to have strong, robust disagreement, and even at times to divide from other Christians when the issue at hand struck at the heart of his theology. Bucer did not lack conviction. Rather, Martin Bucer was a convinced evangelical with a theology that necessitated Christian unity, but who was quite willing to divide when the issue at hand struck at the vitals of his theology. To prove this, we will examine his break with the Roman church, his relationship with Luther, and his frequent disputations with the Anabaptists of Strasbourg.

Before we can examine how Bucer’s theology shaped his interactions with the three groups mentioned above, we need to define Bucer’s theology broadly speaking and his ecclesiology specifically. Bucer’s theology was simple, publicly-oriented, and dialogical. For those reasons – and particularly the final two – the social aspects of Christianity was at the center of Bucer’s theology in much the same way that personal assurance of salvation was at the center of Luther’s theology.

The simplicity of Bucer’s theology is largely a product of his humanistic background, both in his hometown of Selestat and in his extensive study of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Selestat, an Alsatian city in the southwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire, was known for producing two things – wine and humanists. It was home to a major Latin school where Bucer studied until he turned 15 in 1506. During his time there he would have learned Latin and been introduced to a uniquely Selestatian humanism that combined humanistic learning with a conservative sort of piety that was fiercely loyal to the Catholic church.

Though his time at the Latin school came to an end in 1507 when he joined the Dominican order, his interest in and indebtedness to the humanist movement would continue. He continued to read the Paris humanist Jacque Lefevre d’Etaples, as well as Scholastic texts, such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences which was the de facto textbook of medieval scholasticism. A catalog Bucer kept of his own books indicates that he also read extensively in Erasmus and began to study Greek and Hebrew at this time as well.[5]

When he moved to Heidelberg to continue his education, he was immersed in two very distinct authors. First, he became well-versed in Aquinas, the preeminent theologian of the Dominican tradition who would help Bucer formulate his understanding of the centrality of love of others to the Christian life. Second, he became increasingly fascinated with the writings of Erasmus. Erasmus presented the ideal blending of robust intellectualism with devout Christian piety. Indeed, it was a blending similar to what Bucer witnessed while growing up in Selestat. Erasmus also emphasized the simplicity of the Christian faith, advocating the philosophia Christi that emphasized faith and love, while deemphasizing external behaviors. Bucer adopted this simplicity in his own theology and it actually became one of his cornerstones. Indeed, he later wrote in a dialogue, “What is there that is useful or necessary for the Christian person to know that Erasmus Roterodamus did not fully teach almost excessively long before Luther?”[6] Moreover, in the 1510s and 20s, Erasmus was one of the foremost champions of church unity, making him a wonderful example for the future “fanatic for unity.”

Agrarian conservatives are charmingly anachronistic and mostly harmless since even they don’t take their ideas too seriously. (When the agrarian professors give up their tenure at Ivy League U, move back to the farm, and teach at Wendell Berry Community College, I’ll believe they mean what they say).

In a follow-up post he called it “poking gentle fun,” although none of the people being poked seemed to take it that way. Carter chalked it up to their humorlessness. This charge aimed at people who write for a site that posts Jason Peters’ essays – like this one titled “In Praise of Smartassery” – every week.

In any place, his post provoked Jerry Salyer to say, amongst other things, that:

Carter’s attack makes clear why I find it increasingly difficult to sympathize with conservative defenders of liberalism, who praise mass culture yet fret over socialism, who worry about relativism for a living yet dismiss concerns about uglification as reflecting the mere opinions of elitist aesthetes.  A conservative liberal is somebody who encourages the prevailing progressive view that the past was benighted and is best forgotten, but then demands respect for the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — and to boot casually drops ten-dollar words like “polis” with unintended irony.

In response, Carter said:

For example, one professor (they were almost all professors) presented his localist bona fides by explaining how he bought his vegetables from a local food co-op. He was very proud of the fact that he paid a higher price to support a local farmer—despite the fact that the same vegetables from the same local farmer could be bought at Whole Foods. For most agrarians throughout history, food was considered fuel for survival and cheap food has made it possible for populations to grow and thrive. For the tenured agrarians, though, food is a totem, a symbol of how they are not only making the “right” consumption choices but how they are supporting the environment and the community in the process (a debatable assumption). The professor’s underlying message—though admittedly presented rather winsomely—was that if you bought bananas at Wegmans rather than whatever was in season from your local farmer, you were part of the problem.

Finally, FPR’s Mark Mitchell fired back with:

As I said before, we are all products of liberalism and to probe liberalism is to throw into question many basic assumptions about human flourishing and this translates into questioning many of the life-style decisions we ourselves have made. But “moving back to the farm” as Carter glibly puts it, is not much of an option if there is no farm to move back to. Even going home is not an option for many, for our parents are as mobile as we are and a hometown doesn’t exist. Thus, we are left doing the best we can in the places we inhabit whether that be a small town in Kansas, a college town in Illinois, or a suburb of Washington D.C. Moving again to recover some nostalgic sense of place isn’t necessarily the answer. Committing to a place and staying put is, perhaps, no simple ideal in a world where mobility is associated with success, but Carter should at least see that as a legitimate way of addressing a real problem.

(It’s worth reading all the posts in full, as well as the comments below where, it should be noted, a whole team of Porchers gangs up on Carter.)

Given the many different charges, it seems impossible to reduce a reaction piece down into a single point, so I’m not going to try. Instead, a la Wendell Berry (see, I’m already tipping my hand), a bullet point essay response:

1) I stand by my comment that the line in the sand has been drawn between the two sites. The annoying part is that I don’t think it needed to be. A significant number of writers on either side of the divide have strong sympathies with their opposites. But for all their ideological sympathy, both sides seem a bit prickly and prone to an unhelpful sort of snark that exacerbates differences instead of finding points of agreement. This isn’t to say we all ought to do our best impression of Rodney King, plaintively asking if we can all just get along. I’m a firm believer in Hitchen’s quip about sharp rhetoric: “We know as a law of physics that heat is the chief, if not the only source of light. Reducing the sun to room temperature would decrease light to nothing at all, as well as generating a definite chill.” Snark isn’t just fun, it’s essential to advancing the debate. That said, even in their snark, writers have an obligation to speak accurately of their antagonist. Derisively calling the FT crowd liberals or dismissing the FPR crowd as a bunch of poseurs doesn’t serve any purpose save massaging the ego of the speaker.

2) The greatest weakness of First Things – and the larger project of Christian conservatism that First Things represents – is their failure to attend to material and economic factors in shaping culture. The materialist theory of history (when articulated by more capable proponents, such as Terry Eagleton) has a great deal of truth to it. Put simply, material causes don’t determine the events of history, but they constrain the possible outcomes of an event. The Hundred Years War was not resolved when Henry V nuked Paris – and the world is considerably different than it would be if he had. Not coincidentally, this is one of the things that Front Porch Republic understands best.

The feeling one often gets while reading First Things is not dissimilar from the main takeaway of many Dickens’ novels: If people would simply behave decently the world would be a better place. That’s quite true and we neglect that point to our own peril. But if our critique stops there we end up trapped in a hopelessly-individualistic narrative that fails to account for the ways that material factors shape ethical behavior. The FT writers often come off as modern-day versions of Scrooge’s ghosts, using various arguments and images to try and provoke their viewer to extravagant generosity. Of course, it’s easier to be extravagantly generous (in the sense that it’s possible to be) when you’re extravagantly wealthy, like Scrooge. It’s more difficult when you’re a six year old boy working as a chimney sweep. In that case, your generosity will be extremely limited and could come at the expense of feeding your family or yourself.

Point being, its easy to speak of virtue as if it’s something hanging in the air that anyone can grab onto with an equal degree of ease. And there’s a significant truth to that. Indeed, the truth of that idea sits near the center of Christian faith. There’s a reason Jesus says that bit about the camel and the needle. There are psychological reasons that generosity is very difficult for the wealthy man. I don’t deny that. I just want it to be noted that there are material reasons that generosity is difficult for the poor man. What First Things says about virtue and ethics is usually good, so far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough.

3) That said, FPR also has feet of clay: The dirty little secret behind a lot of counter-cultural localism is the strong yuppie streak running down its back. Localism, just like any other ism, lends itself to packaging and faddishness and FPR seldom addresses this issue. As Carter rightly notes, many of FPR’s contributors are professors who can embrace localism more fully because of their professional situations. Though he’s one of their academics, this is why I think Jason Peters’ private localism is one of FPR’s greatest triumphs: Peters walks to work every day, he grows his own food, he does everything he can to get students at his school farming and cultivating the best kind of self-sufficiency, etc.. This is localism on a budget, which is a concern often neglected by the FPR crowd.

One of the biggest struggles Joie and I have had living in Lincoln has, ironically, been with finding affordable local food. We don’t have a ton of money so shopping at a boutique grocery store specializing in organic food isn’t an option for us. We purchased a membership at the local coop and have found that if we watch for coupons, shop there once a month (when we can use our 10% member discount), and avoid buying a lot of their pre-packaged foods we can make it work. Plus the membership gives us 10 percent off every time at several other places we frequent, so that helps. That said, it’s tight. Adding to the problem is that Lincoln’s farmer’s market scene is very different from what we knew in the Twin Cities. In Minnesota, the farmer’s market functions as a regular grocery store for many every summer. In Lincoln, farmer’s markets function as more of a gathering point for the yuppies of southeast Nebraska. Obviously the farmers that come aren’t yuppies, but the way they price their produce… it either costs them a lot more to grow it here than it does in Minnesota or they know their clientele and price their wares accordingly.

All this is to say that localism often becomes a trendy shibboleth embraced by people whose lives are enabled by everything a good localist ought to hate. Carter is right to point this out and, frankly, I found the glib response of some Porchers a bit distressing (and I say this as someone whose feet are planted firmly on the Front Porch).

4) That said, it’s easy to champion the purity of one’s lifestyle when the hub of your intellectual project is virtue: Don’t do objectionable behavior x and you’re good. But if you’re a social conservative and you aren’t having extra-marital sex or looking at porn, it’s hard to charge you with hypocrisy in any major way. When you’re concerned more with material causes such purity is much more elusive. As some of the FPR writers have noted, “You can’t go back to the farm when there wasn’t one there to begin with.” This is especially true for generation x onward, I think. Even if Joie and I wanted to, we couldn’t pull a Wendell and Tanya Berry and move back to our family’s farm in Kentucky. The best we could do was move back to the city we both love best and resolve to preserve and improve the city wherever we’re able. But life in that sort of materialist world is far more ambiguous than in the rarefied air of academic discourse regarding topics of virtue and ethics. This doesn’t excuse Porchers from inconsistency, of course. We ought to strive to be as consistent as we are able, but it ought to contextualize our efforts a bit. After all, we have to start somewhere. And “somewhere” might be the simple step of purchasing organic in bulk at your local chainstore super market instead of buying the latest round of pre-packaged food like substances rolled out by General Mills.

Example, do I shop at Wal-mart? Hell no. It’s a predatory corporation that destroys the best kinds of jobs, replaces them with mindless drone work, threatens the stability of the domestic economy, and encourages a consumerist mentality toward the world. That said, do Joie and I sometimes shop at Target? Yeah. We try not to shop there a ton, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Do I like that? Not really. I wish I could buy clothes from local companies, buy kitchenware from local artists (something Joie and I do plan on doing one day, budget permitting) and grow our food in a garden. But we aren’t perfect. Consistent localism is a more ambiguous, long-term goal. And in the meantime, when our hand is forced we have to pick the lesser of two evils.

(It should also be noted, briefly, that the hypocrisies of Porchers will generally be more apparent than the hypocrisies of the First Things crowd. It’s not hard to find out if a Porcher is being consistent. A brief perusal of their kitchen or even, in some cases, a look at their address will tell you all you need to know. Being a hypocritical First Things reader is easier. Your browsing history isn’t a matter of public knowledge. You can affirm all the right conservative platforms and be doing all sorts of things on the side that are decidedly opposite your principles. But unless you’re a prominent politician or televangelist, you’ll probably get away with it. That’s a cynical note, admittedly, but it’s something worth keeping in mind. Porchers live in glass houses, so it’s much easier to throw stones.)

5) A final point, both sides do a disservice to the other when they exaggerate one of the other side’s views to the most extreme degree possible and then criticize that. The FPR crowd doesn’t want to abolish modern medicine. They’ve never said they do and a more charitable reading of their writers would’ve picked up on that. (It’s worth nothing that FPR’s patron saint, Wendell Berry, is not as extreme as he’s sometimes made out to be either. Reading his novels and short stories reveals a more pragmatic side to his thinking that those who read only his essays might miss.) Likewise, First Things isn’t just a group of big government liberals who happen to hold a couple socially conservative views. (That’s Rick Santorum you’re thinking of.) At the end of the day, these two sites hold to very similar values. The difference is in their primary concern: FPR is interested in more materialistic issues and decentralization. FT is interested in recovering virtue. The two projects go hand-in-hand and, I think, need each other. A movement toward decentralization and a smaller scale of life will help toward recovering virtue and recovering virtue will help the movement toward decentralization and a smaller scale of life. The two sites don’t need to be at odds. That’s the most frustrating thing for any politically-independent conservative looking for some signs of life in the movement.

One of the many things that J.K. Rowling gets right in her Harry Potter books is the idea that physical objects have memories. Wands remember previous spells that have been cast and, in some cases, the people struck by those spells. Picture frames house the souls (for lack of a better descriptor) of those pictured and sometimes are even able to communicate with their viewers. The physical objects of Rowling’s world are never simply objects, they carry with them something of their previous owner or whoever else has possessed them or interacted with them in some way. So it is in our own world as well.

The beer bottles, in other words, aren’t just beer bottles. They’re anchors that connect me to my past, that remind of me previous gifts I’ve enjoyed and, sometimes, give me strength to do whatever needs to be done. My favorite bottle up there is a Rochefort Trappists 8. It was the first beer I had after turning 21. On December 27th, 2008 I had attended a friend’s wedding whose reception, conveniently enough, took place one floor beneath and about forty feet east of my apartment. When the reception finished, I went up a flight of stairs and was home to rejoin a couple good friends who were likely watching a Woody Allan movie or debating some pedantic philosophical issue. (I don’t remember exactly what they were doing but those are pretty safe guesses.) Around 11:55 that night we left the apartment and walked down to a liquor store four blocks away and at midnight I bought a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish Whiskey for around $27. We walked back to the apartment, up our four flights of stairs, made Tom Collinses and sat down to watch Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. After we finished our cocktails, we opened the Bushmills and passed the rest of the night quoting the peasant sketch, singing the songs, laughing at the killer bunny, and enjoying our whiskey.

The next morning we got up for church, sung some of our favorite hymns, received the eucharist and a benediction. We then went to one of our favorite restaurants – and a must-visit for anyone passing through Lincoln – Yiayias, which has the best beer list in town and some damn fine pizza. The Northern and Local are especially good. And my friend KJ bought me that bottle of Trappist 8. (They had Trappist 12 as well but, alas, KJ was a seminarian.) We went back to the table and I poured the bottle into the glass, noticing all the yeast swirling around the bottom of the bottle. Moments later, our pastors from Grace arrived, dismayed to find that they were too late to buy me my “first” beer. They settled, instead, for paying for my pizza. After Yiayias, I spent some time at home with my parents before grabbing dinner at another Lincoln staple, Lazlos. Then I met up with friends at Docs for cocktails (I had a Tom Collins, a Harvey Wallbanger and some whiskey). The night ended with KJ, Micah and myself walking back to The Flat, our beloved apartment in the Federal Building in downtown Lincoln.

I should note that the day wasn’t perfect, lest you think I’m romanticizing it at all. In fact, I met a girl at Doc’s that I ended up dating very briefly and who eventually broke it off, plunging me into a two week haze of drinking too much whiskey and smoking too many cigarettes and doing little else. I joke with friends that it was my attempt at imitating Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s post-Summer binge in 500 Days of Summer. There’s an absolutely brilliant scene after the breakup that begins with him lying in bed. It cuts to him grabbing a bottle of cheap whiskey and taking a drink. It cuts again, showing an empty bottle and JGL staggering out of the house in pajamas and slippers. Cut. Now he’s entering a convenience store and buying more whiskey, orange juice, and twinkies. Cut. Now he’s back in bed, the bottles of orange juice and whiskey are lying on the night stand, both empty. Surrounding the bed are the (now-empty) twinkie wrappers. For two solid weeks of the 2009 spring semester, that was me. I spent the rest of the semester playing catch up since I was taking five classes in English and History as well as editing the Daily Nebraskan Opinion section. It turns out that two weeks of depression characterized by drinking, skipping class and not doing homework is a bad idea. On the plus side, those two weeks made it that much easier for me to accept Chesterton’s rules for drinking when I came upon them a couple years later: First and foremost, “Never drink when you know you need it.” Anyone who has violated this rule should see the wisdom in it.

Despite that binge, I treasure my memory of December 28, 2008, all the same. At the risk of over-generalizing, I think we grow up hoping to find good friends and a safe place. Everything else, as the cliche goes, is gravy. My 21st birthday was a day where I knew beyond all doubt that I’d found each of those things. And I reveled in it, thanking God for such friends and such moments. They were a great mercy to me – and one that gives me strength to this day. Now, that bottle of Trappist 8 rests on our bookcase, between Joie’s old bottle of New Belgium Trippel and my bottle of He’brew Messiah Bold (not a very good beer, but it was a gift from my dad so I kept the bottle). And when I’m sitting in my recliner, doing some writing or reading, I occasionally look up and see it – and it never fails to make me smile.

For this post, I’ll be leaning more heavily on Oden’s How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind because I think that book is necessary background for The African Memory of Mark. The basic conceit of the book is easy enough to predict: That Christianity has deep roots in the African continent and that, were those roots subtracted, the contemporary shape of Christianity would change dramatically.

A few examples of these roots include the predominance of Africans amongst the early church fathers. Tertullian, one of the first church historians as well as the coiner of the term “trinity” to describe the divine nature came from northeast Africa. St. Augustine of Hippo, likely the most influential theologian in all of church history, was a Berber from modern-day Algeria. Athanasius, a long-time bishop of Alexandria who upheld the divinity of Christ during the Arian controversy, came from Nubia and was nicknamed “the black dwarf,” by his contemporaries (that was one of the nicer nicknames, in fact).

In other words, take away those three African thinkers and you’re taking away the man who found language for perhaps the most distinctive belief of Christianity, the man who shaped Christian theology more than anyone else in our history, and the man who defended orthodoxy against greater odds than anyone in our history has known. You could also add to the list one of the church’s most famous martyrs, Perpetua of Carthage, and perhaps the second most famous mother in Christian history after Mary, Monica the mother of Augustine. Additionally, Oden also argues that the scholastic tradition of the church owes a great debt to the libraries of Alexandria.

All of these points are true and are exceedingly important in as much as they form an undeniable refutation of the classic western conception of Africa as a benighted, dark continent bereft of civilization (this understanding still lingers, as heard in the deplorable “TIA” line used in movies like Blood Diamond). It’s important that westerners and Africans alike be reminded that Christianity’s roots in Africa are just as ancient as its roots in Europe.

What’s more, Christianity became established in Africa far more rapidly than in Europe. Most of those institutions were destroyed by Muslims between the 10th and 13th century, but Christianity dug in deeply in Africa centuries before its rise in Europe. These are significant points that unintentionally-imperialistic western missionaries ought to keep in mind when visiting Africa. Speaking as a westerner, our debt to them is as great as their debt to us, in theological terms. (Of course, if you add a note or two about the raping of their continent and people by white Christians in the 19th century, I’d say the ledger stands firmly in Africa’s favor.)

I hope that by this point my credentials as a proponent of African Christianity have been well-established. With all that being said, there’s a central danger here: At times Oden’s thought seems to stray into the territory of the less illustrious traditions of liberation theologies. Reading Oden one almost suspects that he believes that these great advances in Christian thought which happened to take place in Africa couldn’t have happened elsewhere. Further, it can seem that Africa’s influence is disproportionately greater than Europe’s. Oden never explicitly says anything of the kind, of course, but there’s an earnest cheer-leading tone to his work that ought to be reined in.

While it’s true – and needs to be said – that the Christian church has deep roots in African soil, we need to avoid the danger of fetishizing Africa, making it out to be some sort of promised land or uniquely Christian continent. After all, while it’s true that St. Augustine lived most of his life in Africa and came from an African family, his formative years were largely spent in Italy. It’s where he studied rhetoric and where he became a Christian and was baptized by Ambrose of Milan. Further, in his intellectual habits, Augustine most closely resembled the classical Greeks and Romans. This doesn’t negate his Africanness, of course, but it should give us pause in our rhapsodizing about the centrality of Africa in Christian history. In fact, much of the intellectual culture in north Africa during the days of Augustine had deeper roots in southern Europe than anything we’d today recognize as “African.” In reality, if the church hadn’t made the advances it did in Africa, it likely would’ve made them someplace else. But in the providence of God and the coincidental happenings of history, Africa came first. That’s a significant point, but not the world-changing point that Oden sometimes makes it out to be. Christians owe Africa a great debt – but in terms of history we also owe a great debt to Europe, Asia and North America. It’s a key point to keep in the back of one’s mind while reading Oden. More to come.