Brady Bowman

Richard John Neuhaus, warning of the dangers of preaching about controversial social issues (what he terms “the lust for contemporaneity”):

We should not ordinarily address them too directly or prescriptively, because that does not lead the hearer to the deeper controversy with the will of God. The preacher who presumes to declare from the pulpit what should be done about disarmament, or capital punishment, or teenage crime can be readily dismissed as “too conservative” or “too liberal,” depending on the taste of his hearers. In any case, his views on the subject are frequently not as interesting or as informed as what people might receive through magazines, or television, or books. Again, our goal in preaching is not relevance but engagement.

The connections with the contemporary emerge obliquely, suggestively, and troublingly from immersion in the text. The hearer is not so much challenged to come to terms with the preacher’s viewpoint as with the one who is rightly acknowledged as Christ our Contemporary. We are the more persuasive the more we make it clear that we have not confused our opinion with the Word of God. With respect to the particular answers to all problems, ancient and contemporary, we invite the hearer to join in the search for a divine will that always eludes our certain apprehension. This does not mean we end on a note of uncertainty; rather, we begin and end with the assurance of a hope that transcends our differing perceptions of what ought to be done.

Currently reading: Durable Trades by Rory Groves 📚

For whatever reason, this has been the track for summer 2023.

Thesis: The best cultural criticism is at least a decade old, and often a good bit older.

The reason this is so is because incisive cultural criticism penetrates beneath the ephemera to the deeper forces shaping society and human life. These forces, it turns out, have a complex history and, therefore, continue to exert influence even beyond technological innovations or surprising political realignments. The best cultural criticism brings these structural dynamics into view. But it’s difficult to discern a book’s prescience except with hindsight. That’s why Lasch and Bellah (and so on) are still quoted regularly. It’s why Taylor’s A Secular Age seems to be a bottomless well for writers to draw from. And it’s why much of the best tech criticism—e.g., Postman, Ellul, Illich, Borgmann—was published so long ago.

So, a proposal for testing my thesis. Let’s take Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which has been lauded as a brilliant work of intellectual history. Trueman’s narrative seems to offer a level of explanatory power for people trying to make sense of how Western culture has arrived at the place it’s at. To be clear, though I’ve not read the book, I fully expect that all the accolades are well deserved. Trueman is a top-notch historian and I assume his work is well-researched and tightly argued. My thesis would merely suggest that Rise and Triumph, if it is in fact the incisive work of commentary that we currently believe it to be, will be able to illuminate unforeseen circumstances in a decade or two. It’s ability to be uncannily relevant to a later time—where you check the copyright because it feels like it was written yesterday—that, to me at least, is the truest mark of a great work of cultural criticism.

Given how much I’ve enjoyed his Freedom for Ministry, I thought it wise to read a little more about Rev. Neuhaus. The son of a Lutheran minister, Neuhaus served with both the Missouri-Synod and the ELCA for roughly three decades before being received into the Catholic church in 1990. In “How I Became the Catholic I Was,” Neuhaus eloquently recounts his ecclesial pilgrimage, spelling out how his earliest intuitions about the Church—nurtured in St. John’s Lutheran Church in the Ottawa Valley of Canada—set him on a path that ultimately led to his embracing the Catholic faith. I find very intriguing his notion of becoming, even at a young age, an “ecclesial Christian.” Here’s how he puts it,

To be brought up a Lutheran, at least a Missouri Synod Lutheran, at least there and at least then, was to know oneself as an ecclesial Christian. Of course I did not put it that way as a young boy, nor was it put that way to me, but I would later see what had happened. An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.” In an important sense, every Christian, even the most individualistic, is an ecclesial Christian, since no one knows the gospel except from the Church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus—no salvation outside the Church—applies to all. For some, that truth is incidental; for the ecclesial Christian it is constitutive, it is at the very core, of faith and life.

A little further on, Neuhaus summarizes his experience this way,

I simply underscore the ways in which being brought up a Missouri Lutheran—at least then and at least there—produced an ecclesial Christian. One might also speak of a sacramental Christian or an incarnational Christian, but, whatever the terminology, the deepest-down conviction, the most irrepressible sensibility, is that of the touchability, the visibility, the palpability of what we might call “the Christian thing.” To use the language of old eucharistic controversies, finitum capax infiniti—the finite is capable of the infinite. Put differently, there is no access to the infinite except through the finite. Or yet again, God’s investment in the finite can be trusted infinitely. Although Lutheran theology discarded the phrase, it is the ex opere operato conviction evident in Luther’s ultimate defiance of Satan’s every temptation by playing the trump card, “I am baptized!” Ex opere operato is the sacramental enactment of sola gratia. It is uncompromisingly objective. By it morbid introspection, the delusions of religious enthusiasm, and the endlessly clever postulations of the theological imagination are called to order by truth that is answerable to no higher truth; for it is Christ, who is the Truth, who speaks in the voice of his Church—“I baptize you . . . ,” “I forgive you your sins . . . ,” “This is my body . . . ”

Much could be said in response to all this. I simply want to register how salutary it is to conceive of oneself as “an ecclesial Christian.” This seems to track with Brad East’s distinction between “biblicist” and “catholic” Christians. Give me catholic over biblicist any day. The question, however, that this raises for me: Is it possible to be an “ecclesial Christian”—a ‘catholic’ Christian—and a committed Protestant? Does Protestantism allow for this kind of vision? I believe it does, but it’s uncomfortable to know that many ecclesially-inclined Christians see conversion to Rome as the only viable option.