Religion: Fuse It, or Lose It

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The following excerpt is taken from Marilynne Robinson’s* preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics volume, John Calvin, Steward of God’s Covenant, Selected Writings. Robinson’s preface serves not only to introduce Calvin to the reader, but also as a brief apologia for Protestantism and the Reformation.

As a Protestant who is wont to visit Catholic blogs, both to observe how the “other side” lives, and to defend the Christian brand under the aegis of which I was baptized and made my Confirmation, my positions have frequently been subject to the very criticism against which Robinson here defends Luther and Calvin:

To assume that objectivity can be looked for in matters of religion, as critics of the Reformers often do, when it is not naïve, is a pure statement of faith. Tradition is simply the accumulated subjectivities of individuals—Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi. That these are authoritative figures only underscores the fact that subjectivity is in itself nothing to be dismissed out of hand. If tradition sets these men apart on the grounds that God, so to speak, acted upon them directly, those who revere Luther and Calvin feel that they also were instruments of God. The Reformers’ sola Scriptura is often treated as literalism or bibliomancy, in either case as an evasion of discipline and reason. But such a view is by no means consistent with the acute critical attention both of them, but Calvin especially, brought to bear on the text.

This all seems so patently obvious that one is tempted simply to go, “Well, d’uh!” and move on to more challenging subjects. Ah, would that it were that easy. Would that Christian disunity--in an age when the Jihadists are off the rez and streaming across every Western frontier, bearing a law so harsh, yet so stark, that Father Abraham would have found little fault in it--did not render the decadent West so vulnerable in its collective hubris.

The potential site of that crucially-needed healing is an open Communion.
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*Marilynne Robinson is the author of the award-winning novels Housekeeping and Gilead, both of which I have read and recommend without reservation, and of The Death of Adam, a nonfiction book which I have also read and likewise recommend.


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Interlude: Cuttin' Ron

I am being urged elsewhere to turn my audio-visual attention to YouTube clips of that malt shop cowboy, Ronald Reagan. Sorry, boys. Been there. Done that. Wouldn’t be prudent. Not gunna do it. It’s a nightmare best forgotten, though I vaguely remember a kind of greenish-orange pompadour, floating like a greasy cloud above an empty suit. In my nightmare, there were mobs of large, grinning men in tobacco-stained bib overalls and John Deere baseball caps, stomping their big, flat, shit-caked feet and making crude sounds like the bellowing of barnyard animals, as a mellow, reassuring voice carefully enunciated “There you go again…” You could almost smell the manure. Off in the distance, to the south, a repetitive cha-ching! cha-ching! drowned out the heart-wrenching screams of dying nuns. To the east, in the direction of Mecca, bearded Ayatollahs passed out their windfall Yanqui dollars to terrorist chieftains, while back down in Banana-land, strutting bean-fed and tassel-festooned colonels deployed jackbooted death squads to do the bidding of Grandees with lifetime passes to the White House. No-no-no-no. YouTube. Me no Tube. Homey don't play dat.

On a more positive note, I’m reading a collection of essays entitled Faith and Philosophy, edited by Alvin Plantinga. The one I’m currently working my way through is “The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards”, authored by Henry Stob. The name Jonathan Edwards has formerly brought to mind brilliant sermons of the hellfire and brimstone variety. I knew, of course, that he was a Puritan preacher—the greatest sermonizer that America ever produced. What I hadn’t realized is that Jonathan Edwards was also a world-class theologian whose writings on religious philosophy rival anything produced in Europe. This essay on Edwards has also taught me something about the role of Calvinism in the genesis of that characteristic optimism for which America is famous, and of which the play-acting piety of Cowboy Ron was but a Thespian echo. Here’s Stob on Edwards:

Behind the human society Edwards discerned the divine. Existing unchangeable in the eternal heavens he saw a goodness of which every earthly good was but the shadow and witness. Behind the society of men stood God, the absolute standard for all relationships between beings. The rules of right, the laws of conduct, and the principles of spiritual intercourse are not, he saw, provincialisms of this planet. They reign beyond the stars. Their seat and fountain is in God himself. Here lies the root of optimism. Whatever else the Puritan philosophy of life may have been it was neither petty nor pessimistic. The Puritan strode two worlds like a Colossus. He lived under the controlling conviction that the moral life had its source and issue in the eternal, and he was unafraid.

Yeah. That’s the real deal.