Washington, DC. -- From my window here in The Willard hotel I can see the morning light beginning to illumine the Lincoln Memorial.  I'm in DC for the 5th annual Q, a conference that has brought together over 700 practitioners and leaders from an array of cultural "channels"--entrepreneurs and artists alongside pastors and academics for a kind of Christian TED.  While TED is about "ideas worth spreading," Q is about "ideas for the common good."  

To give you a bit of an idea of how this looks, consider just a small sampling from my day yesterday: I began by interviewing David Brooks, NY Times columnist, for the Q website and then listened to his talk on humility. We heard from Andy Crouch speaking about his forthcoming book on power and Jonathan Merritt speaking from his brand new book, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars.  Sherry Turkle from MIT talked about the impact of social media on relationships and Chidi Achara, brand manager for a New York fashion house, unpacked the grammar and influence of fashion while Gideon Strauss made the Christian case for principled pluralism in the public square.  Amy Julia Becker gave a moving talk on limits and dependence and the need to protect those with Down Syndrome, and we learned of Jill's House, a respite community for children with intellectual disabilities (and their families).  We received a video greeting from President Obama while later in the day Pastor Joel Hunter explained why "Government is Not the Enemy."  I enjoyed a charming chat with Ross Douthat of the New York Times before Michael Cromartie interviewed him about his new book, Bad Religion, which I picked up from the portable incarnation of Byron Borger's Hearts & Minds Bookstore here at the conference.  We enjoyed an after-party on the deck at Google's DC headquarters where I got to meet to CRC church planters who gave me hope.  After that conversations spilled into the hotel bar; we turned in around 1:30am.  

And that was just a sampling of the day.

Q is the brainchild of Gabe Lyons, and the vision behind it is well-articulated in his book The Next Christians.  In many ways, the animus of Q will feel very familiar to Reformed folks.  Indeed, there's indirect influence: Gabe captured a vision of a holistic, culture-making, world-restoring Gospel through Chuck Colson's How Now Shall We Live?, which was itself a kind of evangelical translation of Abraham Kuyper (copies of the new Kuyper read, Wisdom and Wonder were in all of the participant swag bags).  In many ways, Q (and qideas.org) is fostering what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls "world-formative Christianity."  

We (i.e., we who count ourselves the heirs of Kuyper and the sort of denominational 'owners' of this vision) can respond in a couple of ways: We could be snooty and retort, "Been there, done that." Except we haven't.  Yes, perhaps the theological vision is something we have embraced for over a century.  But what it has tended to produce is enclaves and what James Davison Hunter calls "parallel institutions."  Those are all good and great and I've invested myself in them.  But the folks at Q are not interested in transforming Grand Rapids, MI or Orange City, IA.  They are at work as entrepreneurs and players in Manhattan and DC, the Bay Area and Seattle.  They're not building parallel institutions, they're inhabiting elite institutions and founding new ventures.  And it is just this energy that I find so enriching about this conversation.

So I think the alternative response is to resource this emerging conversation from the deep wells of Reformed and Kuyperian reflection.  Sure, maybe we've been thinking about this stuff for a century: well then, let's see this development as an answer to prayer, an opportunity for us to break out of our midwest parochial bubbles.  Let's join this conversation as theoretical servants and intellectual deacons, willing to come alonside and help while also learning from a new generation who knows not Dooyeweerd.  The common good is at stake.

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Editors’ Note
With this post, Jamie Smith concludes his run with The Twelve. We thank Jamie for his contributions in these early months of the blog. Watch for his upcoming book Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, a sequel to Desiring the Kingdom, due out from Baker Academic in November.

The Twelve is also pleased to announce our newest member, Jennifer Holberg, an English professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a contributing editor to Perspectives. Welcome, Jennifer! Watch for her first post in two weeks.

Which is why it's odd to find myself rather frustrated with some of his most recent work, particularly as articulated in How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels.  (If you've not yet read the book, you might watch Wright's presentation of the core argument of the book in his "January Series" lecture at Calvin College this past January.)

Actually, let me rephrase that: it's not the substance of the argument itself that frustrates me, it's the attendant tone and asides by which Wright frames his project.  The thesis of the book, to simplify in extremis, is that the core message of the Gospel is "political" in the sense that the Gospel announces the kingship of God over all of creation--that the proclamation "Jesus is Lord" is both the culmination of Israel's expectation AND a direct affront to the gospel of the empire ("Caesar is Lord").  This means that the Gospel is not the announcement of an escape pod from the world to a disembodied heaven but rather the reassertion of God's authority over heaven AND earth--the announcement that God is reclaiming the whole of his creation.  Jesus, we might say, comes to "occupy" creation.  

So far so good.  Indeed, I think this quickly and easily resonates with those of us in the Kuyperian stream of the Reformed tradition because, in some ways, this holistic, "kingdom-oriented" reading of Scripture is sort of old hat.  Granted, it didn't come with all of the backstory of Second Temple Judaism and such; nonetheless, with the resources of the canon and a theological frame for interpretation, the Reformed tradition of my teachers was sort of "Wrightian" before Wright.  When I hear Wright explain the Gospel as the announcement of "how God became king," I'm immediately reminded of everything I learned from Rich Mouw's When the Kings Come Marching In.  

This probably explains my frustration with how Wright pitches his argument and interpretation.  For example, notice the subtitle: Wright is offering us the "forgotten story of the Gospels."  This may be a publishers' ploy, but having heard Wright talk about this argument in several different contexts, he clearly affirms the claim: for hundreds and hundreds of years, we have not been able to properly read the Gospels.  And now Tom Wright has come along to give us what we lacked: the backstory of Second Temple Judaism, the historian's read of Israel's expectations, the secret keys we need to finally read the Gospels.  (This reminds me way too much of Brian McLaren's title, The Secret Message of Jesus--wherein the "secret" was that Jesus cared about poverty and oppression and injustice, which was only a "secret" if you were an a-political pietist or a right-wing fundamentalist.)  

There's another layer here that adds to my frustration: Wright regularly faults the catholic creedal tradition as the villain that tempted us to miss this "forgotten story."  Nicea and Chalcedon are blinders and screens that prevent us from seeing what Wright, "the historian," has uncovered.  The creedal tradition, on Wright's account, was fixated on ontological questions about divinity and humanity and thus missed the backstory of Israel's covenant which really makes sense of the Gospels.  And so when he frames his argument, even if he doesn't reject "Nicene Christianity," he certainly dismisses it and sees little if any value in it.  For those of us who have been struggling to get evangelical and Reformed folk to remember they are catholic, it is disconcerting to have yet another teacher come along and promise a new "secret key" to unlock the Bible.  Indeed, there is an odd kind of primitivism at work in Wright's framing of this account.  

This leads to one last layer of my frustration: Wright's dismissal of "canonical" readings of Scripture.  There is much more that needs to be said here, and I hope to unpack this further elsewhere, but let me just note: Wright is very dismissive of discussions about the "theological interpretation of Scripture" or "canonical" readings of Scripture or invocations of "the rule of faith" (per, say, Todd Billing's marvelous book, The Word of God for the People of God--or as I've tried to suggest in the new chapters of the new, revised edition of my book, The Fall of Interpretation).  This is because Wright has already functionally dismissed "the tradition" as more of an obfuscating "blinder" than illuminating light; more specifically, Wright's account hinges on the supposed illuminations of "history" as finally providing the extra-canonical resources we needed to be able to read the Gospels aright.  (This latter stance is fraught with issues; for a taste, consider Richard Hays' engaging contribution to a recent collection devoted to Wright's thought.)

But do we need this extra-canonical resource (a canon without the canon) to be able to read the Gospel as the announcement of God's kingship?  I don't think so.  Indeed, I think there's a Reformed tradition of biblical interpretation that found the resources for just such a reading right within the canon itself--and in concert with Nicene faith.  I'm not persuaded that the fruits of historical science have suddenly put us in a position superior to pre-modern interpreters.  Indeed, Reformed bliblical interpreters such as Vos and Ridderbos--though certainly with limitations--seemed to already be onto this sort of reading of the canon, without hooking it to extra-canonical evidences.  Rich Mouw taught me to read the sweep of the biblical narrative as the announcement of Christ's kingship with little more than an attuned theological sensibility that broke open the overarching narrative of the Bible.  That's not to say that many haven't "missed" it; but it does mean that the "secret" has perhaps been there within the canon all along.  

Zwart and I can certainly agree that disentangling ethnicity from theology "is never simple."  Indeed.  As for the rest: I'm not quite sure if Zwart is agreeing with me, or calling me to task.  It could go either way.  Never one to miss the opportunity for a fight, I'll assume he's trying to disagree!

When I suggest we "need a different paradigm" that refuses "the tendency to reduce Reformed identity to mere Dutch heritage," Zwart notes that I am "working against a very long and deep tradition of equating the two."  Yep, I'm aware.  That was kind of the point.  Moreover, my point is that both those who defend the equation and those who decry it are working with an inadequate model.  It's those who accept the elision of ethnicity and identity who are out to burn wooden shoes--either out of some weird self-loathing or out of a well-intentioned pursuit of "diversity."

I'd be the last one to advoate burning the wooden shoes!  While I am arguing that we need to "sift" Dutch identity from Reformed theology, that doesn't entail any sort of rejection or critique of this Dutch heritage.  To the contrary, I think we need to recognize that, in the providence of God, these faithful people from the lowlands were "carriers" of a theological tradition and heritage that is much bigger than their ethnic enclave.  The point isn't to rewrite history and pretend the "Dutch" and "Reformed" were not bound together; rather, the point is to continue writing the history in a way that is grateful and forward-looking.  And Zwart's suggestion for telling new stories is exactly right.  

In fact, that's what I'm trying to do: as a "Gentile," I'm grateful for the Dutch heritage of the institutions that buoy my Reformed faith.  Let's make it a light to the nations.

I have to admit, I wonder about the notion of God speaking through Metallica—or any other genre of popular music, for that matter. The power—and, I would argue, the beauty—of Metallica's music, and of heavy metal music in general, is that it represents a human response to a specific historical experience. Study the history of metal and you find that it developed in the economically depressed industrial areas of England during the late 1960s and early '70s. Look at any group of metal heads and you'll find young people pushing back against what they perceive to be a lack of control, a lack of freedom in the way they want to live their lives. What heavy metal does through the music and theatrics is rupture the cultural space, poking a finger in the panoptic eye, carving out a tiny spot these kids can call their own. I'm not sure this is God speaking through Metallica so much as it is Ulrich and Hetfield (Metallica's cofounders) speaking to the human condition. The last thing the church needs to do is try to take them to church.

Indeed.  A truly Reformed engagement with culture--and the arts--is not synonymous with evangelical strategies that, trying to overcome their past fundamentalism, eagerly baptize popular culture by "finding God" in every album and sitcom.  Elsewhere, in an essay on the poetry of Charles Wright, I echoed Jason's critique of such co-option and "theological instrumentalism."  Since it chimes in with Jason's argument, let me cite the beginning of it here:

Of late, a stream of Christian cultural criticism has encouraged conservative evangelicals to "look for God" in contemporary culture. Exhorting us to overcome a rather Manichean dissection of the world into holy and profane, this mode of cultural engagement encourages us to "find God" in contemporary music, Hollywood movies, and various forms of popular culture.

I'm not convinced this is the best hermeneutic frame for appreciating the arts. It still tends to instrumentalize the arts as a conduit for a Gospel "message" or "theistic" propositions. The result is too often a fixation on God-language in cultural artifacts or—worse—belaboured allegorical readings which see "Christ figures" everywhere.

We should expect art to be more oblique. And instead of asking artists to show us God, we should want them to reveal the world—to expand the world, to make worlds that expand creation with their gifts of co- and sub-creative power. The calling of painters and poets, sculptors and songwriters is not always and only to hymn the Creator but to also and often be at play in the fields of the Lord, mired and mucking about in the gifted immanence that is creation. With that rich creational mandate, a Christian affirmation of the arts refuses the instrumentalist justification that we "find God" in our plays and poetry. In a way that is provocatively close to the aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, such a creational framing of the arts grants license for art to be quite "useless" —to (almost) be art for its own sake, for the sake of delight and play, for the sheer wonder and mystery of creating. Some of our best artists show us corners of creation we wouldn't have seen otherwise—and often because they've just given birth to a possibility hitherto only latent in the womb of creation.

Unhooking the arts from a "theological" instrumentalism also grants space for the arts to reveal the brokenness of creation without being supervised by a banal moralism. A painting or a poem reveals the world with a harrowing attention that will sometimes bring us face-to-face with what we've managed to willfully ignore up to that point.

In sum, the arts can be a means of what we might call "horizontal" revelation without necessarily being connected to "vertical" revelation. Like the book of Esther, God might never show up. Nonetheless, the Creator might best be honoured when we face up to the puzzling, mysterious nuances of his creation.

Jason's article brings this point home in a missional way.  Be sure to read it.   

I'm less confident in this reading now.  I hope it's not a sign of the creeping fascism that comes with middle age, but I wonder more and more whether the Grand Inquisitor might not be gracious.  [That I'm entertaining such thoughts could be chalked up to the fact that I'm reading Augustine alongside Jonathan Edwards right now!]  And it seems to me I'm not alone in this regard.  Indeed, I think one could read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as its own ambivalent commmentary on whether "freedom" is all it's cracked up to be.  

But more immediately, I've been looping a Fleet Foxes song, "Helplessness Blues," which opens with these words (listen along with the video below):

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see.

And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be

A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.

I see a generation of young people for whom this could be something of an anthem.  And those of us who are working out our reactionary, liberatarian relationship to authority will have a hard time understanding the yearning to be bound, this longing to be "a functioning cog in some great machinery."  (Though note it's not just any old "machinery," but a system that serves "something beyond me.")  We're apt to read this as a ploy of the villainous Grand Inquisitor who would rob them of their freedom.  But what if they find quite a different freedom in being bound?  What if liberation looks like submission?  Can we imagine how authority can be a gift?  

I left BYU with an interest in continuing the sorts of conversations my friend Rich Mouw has had over the years.  I think there are especially reasons why Reformed folk might be able to foster Mormon-Evangelical Dialogue in unique ways.  Given that my familiarity with LDS theology and philosophy is in its infancy, I know I have a lot to learn.

However, I can't shake one impression that has stuck with me: Mormonism might just be the great American religion.  An indigenous religious product, Mormonism seems primed to make a religion of America, to enshrine "America" in ways that are perhaps more integral to the Book of Mormon than the Bible carried by evangelicals.  (Granted, there's been plenty of Protestant evangelical kitsch that would rival LDS painter Jon McNaughton's "One Nation Under God" above.)  

This came back to me last night while listening to Mitt Romney's victory speech in Florida--which, in turn, reminded me of a speech he gave 4 years ago, during the last Republican nomination contest.  The speech was entitled "Faith in America," and I was asked to comment on the speech for the PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly blog, "One Nation: Religion and Politics." It seems to me the ideas still have some legs, so I reproduce it here:

The God of Americanism

A lot can hang on a preposition. Mitt Romney first promised a speech about his faith, then backed off to offer a broader take on America’s religious landscape and its heritage of religious freedom. So rather than offering an apologetic for his own faith, Romney instead offered an account of “Faith in America.” But the speech has me wondering whether there’s a difference; more specifically, I wonder what’s at stake in that “in.” From where I sit, it looks like Romney’s “own” faith is faith in America. Americans needn’t worry about Romney’s Mormonism because, at the end of the day, the faith that trumps all others is “Americanism.”

Don’t get me wrong: this religion has a long and illustrious history (documented in David Gelertner’s recent book, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion). It is a noble faith that feeds off the blood of its martyrs—in particular “the greatest generation” to which Romney first appeals—who made the greatest sacrifice for the sake of the religion’s highest value: freedom (understood, I should note, in largely negative terms as freedom of choice). Indeed, “freedom” and “liberty” are the mantras of this faith, and Romney’s speech invokes these shibboleths no less than thirty times (God or “the Creator” or “divine author” comes in at a close second with 21 references). And Romney doesn’t fail to allude to the great artifacts of this religion. Americanism has its own sacred documents (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), its own saints (“the Founding Fathers”), and has even birthed its own cathedrals and grottos (just stroll the National Mall).

So if Mitt Romney was looking to quell concerns about his religion, I think he’s performed admirably! He has indicated, in no uncertain terms, that he is an “Americanist” like almost every other presidential candidate (from I don’t care which side of the aisle). He is an American before he is a Mormon. He is primarily interested in conserving America’s role as a hegemon (“preserving American leadership” is the guise under which he segues to talk about religion). And he enthusiastically adopts Sam Adams axiom that it’s not the specifics of piety that matters, but rather whether one is a “patriot.”

If conservatives were worried about his Mormonism, I think Romney has laid his cards on the table and said to them: “Look, don’t worry. Mormonism doesn’t prevent me from being an Americanist. We’re brothers in that cause.”

In a way, this is refreshingly honest theology. In fact, if one pays close attention to the actual theology at work here—that is, if one starts asking just which God is being invoked—one finds that it is a particular deity: “the divine ‘author of liberty.’” The god of the culture warriors has always been a generic god of theism (precisely like the god of the Founding Fathers): a “God who gave us liberty” (to do what we want). The “Creator” is a granter of inalienable rights and unregulated freedoms, a god who shares and ordains “American values.” If evangelical culture warriors had worries about Romney’s faith, his jeremiad today should confirm that he pledges allegiance to the same “God of liberty” that they do. We’re all Americanists now.

But I hope Mr. Romney and his culture warrior friends (whether on the Right or Left) won’t be surprised if some of us find it hard to believe in Americanism and its God of liberty. Some of us just can’t muster faith in the generic theism that is preached on the campaign trail, whether from the Right or Left. Some of us Christians have a hard time reconciling the Almighty, all-powerful, law-giving God of liberty with the crucified suffering servant born in a barn and executed at the hands of the elite. Some of us are trying to figure out what it means to be a people who follow one who relinquished his rights rather than asserted them, who considered submission a higher value than freedom. We serve a God-man who wasn’t concerned with “preserving leadership” and the hegemony of the empire’s gospel of freedom, but rather was crushed by its machinations for proclaiming and embodying another gospel.

We’re not out to win a culture war; we’re just trying to be witnesses. We’re not out to “transform” culture by marshaling the engine of the state; we’re trying to carve out little foretastes of a coming kingdom. And so we can’t share Mr. Romney’s evangelistic zeal for the god of Americanism.

There's something in the DNA of a Reformed "world- and life-view" that energizes tiny bands of upstart thinkers and writers and publishers to get the word out--to devote themselves to the largely thankless task of comment and criticism committed to print.  One can think of Groen van Prinsterer's anti-revolutionary daily, De Nederlander; or Kuyper's founding of De Standaard; or more proximately, the rich legacy of The Reformed Journal and its heir, Perspectives, as well as the glossy upstart, Comment.  Indeed, perhaps one can even see The Twelve blog as a digital expression of this same impulse.  

All of these publishing ventures exhibit an energetic commitment to small, good things (to invoke Raymond Carver).  And, as per my schtick here of late, this trend brings to mind another Jewish intellectual: Lionel Trilling.  I was recently re-reading Trilling's classic collection, The Liberal Imagination, and was reminded of his retrospective essay on the 10th anniversary of The Partisan Review.  In "The Function of the Little Magazine," first published as an introduction to a Partisan Review anthology (not unlike The Best of the Reformed Journal), Trilling notes an odd metric of success:

"The Partisan Reader may be thought of as an ambiguous monument.  It commemorates a victory--Partisan Review has survived for a decade, and has survived with a vitality of which the evidence may be found in the book which marks the anniversary.  Yet to celebrate the victory is to be at once aware of the larger circumstance of defeat in which it was gained.  For what we speak of as if it were a notable achievement is no more than this: that a magazine which has devoted itself to the publication of good writing of various kinds has been able to continue in existence for ten years and has so far established itself that its audience now numbers some six thousand readers."

While we bemoan the demise of a literate and literary public in our time, and look longingly back to the age of Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, in fact Trilling, in 1950, was already lamenting the same state of affairs: "the general lowering of the status of literature and of the interest in it."  Any proverbial golden age will have to be older than we thought.  However, this is the context in which Trilling praises "little magazines": it is in the face of such a deline that "the innumberable 'little magazines' have been a natural and heroic response."

Little magazines are positively heroic!  And this has nothing to do with the size of their circulation.  Indeed, Trilling suggests that we resist the temptation to find the elusive "general reader" or measure success by mass appeal.  The writer for the little magazine is writing for someone else:

"The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them.  He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie.  The writer serves his daemon and his subject."

Even, if need be, to a coterie.  Three cheers for Reformed coteries!--and to those ancestors who wrote for posterity, whose mimeographed notes I devoured in that back room, whose sequestered scribblings trickle down to us and are unsuspecting catalysts for new generations and unimagined audiences.  Who knows what heroic work our little magazines might be doing, their little lights shining, refusing to be busheled.  As Trilling closes, who knows what might happen without them?

"A magazine with six thousand readers cannot seem very powerful here, and yet to rest with this judgment would be to yield far too easily to the temptations of grossness and crudeness which appear whenever the question of power is raised.  We must take into account what would be our moral and politcal condition if the impulse which such a magazine represents did not exist, the impulse to make sure that the daemon and the subject are served..."

I have been honored to be a part of "little magazines" like Perspectives and Comment, and am deeply appreciative of the labor of love undertaken by their editors and publishers.  May their tribe increase! And may our little coterie rise to meet them. 

The kids are not all right.  That is the evidence-based, data-driven picture that is emerging from sociologist Christian Smith's National Study of Youth and Religion.  His account of the paucity of moral reasoning among twentysomethings can't be chalked up as mere grumpy-old-man harumphing about "those damn kids" or a reactionary conservative harangue about godless "secular" America.  Smith's longitudinal study provides a deeply worrisome snapshot of the state of spiritual maturity and moral reflection among millenials. Indded, I found the first chapter of his latest book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, to be positively harrowing in its account of how these young people are "morally adrift."  But as Smith is at pains to emphasize: the point isn't to demonize twentysomethings; the point is for the rest of us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we produced this generation.  

Earlier volumes (Soul Searching and Souls in Transition) did the same with respect to religious understanding and spiritual maturity.  While the study considers young people from various religions and those without any, the implications for Christian ministry were especially challenging (explored with verve and wisdom by Kenda Creasy Dean in Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teens is Telling the Church).  The "faith" that young Christians were learning (often from age-segmented youth ministries) was not trinitarian Christian faith but rather "moralistic therapuetic deism": a strange deity who embraces antimonies and paradox, who is both a legalist and a great big bubble gum machine in the sky--the perfect god for American civil religion, who judges premarital sex but is enough of a big teddy bear to also let it slide, because really, he just wants you to be happy.  The god of moralistic therapeutic deism is a lot like Oprah, it turns out.  

And if that's the god that our young people worship, we need to ask ourselves: What have we done?  As Dean puts it, this is an indictment of the church, not teenagers.  

This is why I think Bert Polman's upcoming seminar (June 18-22, 2012), "Singing What We Believe: Theology & Hymn Texts," is such an excellent, timely opportunity for a blend of scholars and practitioners to spend some time together thinking about these issues.  For maybe it's at least partly the case that young people have been sung into the moralistic therapeutic deistic faith.  Here's a description of the seminar:

Congregational songs have often been called the lay persons’ “handbook of theology” as “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” have a unique mix of doxa (worship) and logia (teaching) which shape and express the life of Christians.  This seminar will explore initially the theology of hymn texts, based on an analysis of some 250 classic hymn lyrics and a similar number of contemporary Praise-Worship texts. Then the seminar participants will discuss the relationship between the theological themes of such texts and the prevalence of what sociologists of religion (Christian Smith, et al) have termed “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  In other words, this interdisciplinary seminar will focus not only on doxa and logia but also onpraxis, and is expected to raise issues about current religious convictions and practices of Christians.

Do consider applying (by February 1)!