A G K Y R A

When I read old-fashioned theologians like Kant and Schleiermacher [1], I always get very angry, though this eventually mellows into a resigned disappointment. They were so naïve, so foolish. Their starting points were wrong and it led them to all kinds of wrong conclusions. They capitulated to the “spirit of the age,” if you will, so easily. It would be better for me not to get angry with them, because they were actually not naïve by the standards of their own day. A lot has happened since then, and it’s easy for me to stand on the shoulders of those who have come since, look down at them so far below, and laugh. But, they were instrumental in my getting to where I am, because they helped to get my intellectual ancestors to where they were. So, I should try to appreciate them against the backdrop of their own day.

Their captivity to the spirit of their age is a lesson for contemporary theologians. They took on board too many of the faulty assumptions and preferences of their own contemporaries. This had the effect of greatly damaging their own theology, though it was novel and, happily, also good in some respects, and we can retain those good aspects today. We can appreciate the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment. We can agree with Kant that knowledge of the transcendent cannot be gained through sense experience (while disagreeing with him that it is not thereby rendered unknowable). But what is the spirit of this age that I am captive to, probably without realizing it? If I can figure that out, figure out what is good and corrective about my time in relation to the time that came before (the dead 1950s–60s?), then I can take that now, lay aside the rest, and move on to the next task.

The spirit of the age is hard to discern. There’s a very powerful social pressure that blinds us. Everyone just knows that Bush is an “idiot” and “should be impeached.” Everyone just knows that “all religions are equally valid.” Everyone just knows that “homosexuality is only a matter of different tastes (or maybe biology) and is not a moral question.” Everyone just knew that miracles were impossible, reason could perpetually improve man’s economic, social, and moral conditions, and so on. What kinds of cultural garbage have I taken on board?

[1]It gives me a certain amount of pleasure to refer to these types as “old-fashioned,” since I suspect they prided themselves on not being old-fashioned in their own day. [back]

I’m sometimes jealous of people who are really involved in certain things, insiders. For example, I was just reading about “The Crux Project” affiliated with the Fellowship of St. James. It’s a blog/magazine/podcast oriented toward young educated people, trying to challenge secularism. I’m jealous that people don’t want to read what I write, and that I’m not out there making a big difference in things. I’m jealous that I don’t have time to read literature, essays, or sophisticated and worldly magazines.

Jumping back in time a bit, my response to the proliferation of blogs has been “Who has time to read this stuff? Who has time to write it?” (a response to which is my writing this, for my own personal benefit—it cultivates a writing habit, takes relatively little time, will help me remember more details of my life, and is good stewardship of the ideas that spontaneously pop into my head and then evaporate never to appear again). I thought, “All this is just words. Who is out there actually doing something?” Then I thought again and realized that in this day, words are what matter. What we want to change about the world are first people’s beliefs and attitudes, and their behavior only as a consequence. Otherwise, we have some kind of coercion or totalitarianism. Words are the means of persuasion and the tools for changing beliefs.

I think I have a different role, though. Professional and serious amateur bloggers are communicators. They’re well educated but not usually research specialists, which is the doctor’s true calling. That gives them time to read widely and focus on communicating general truths to a broad audience of laypeople. In my vocation, I have to specialize, and this requires me to spend lots and lots of time mastering the details of a fairly narrow area. Less time for literature. Less time for figuring out how to communicate artfully with laypeople. Less time to read the papers and write culturally relevant commentary for mass dispersion. I’m the researcher, the expert, the teacher. My students may be the ones who will take these important truths and popularize them for the masses. I have to study. I don’t have time to be jealous.