A Phoropter for Faith and Other Such Things
A writing and reading roundup
At some point in the last year, I felt pretty sure pandemic life had broken my brain. Writing—which is my only marketable skill, to be honest—was regularly hard and sometimes impossible. (If you’ve subscribed for a while, you’ll notice the bi-weekly newsletter became and every-so-often newsletter.) My reading habits changed, too. For the first time in my remembrance, I’m reading several books at once. On the one hand, this has been fruitful. Reading multiple books at a time can be like having meandering conversation with several interesting people at once. That's one of my favorite things to do! On the other hand, this change in reading rhythms—like the change in writing rhythms—is evidence that my thoughts and attention are scattered and I’m still struggling to get them under control.
Maybe you can relate.
Fortunately a number of external deadlines are helping me find focus in writing. The reading rhythm is still a mess. This week’s little missive, then, is a roundup of sorts to share what I’ve been working on, what’s in the pipeline, and the stack of books I’m working through.
Trading Influence for Credibility
I’m always thinking about the relationship between culture and Christianity (I tend to think that relationship is much more complicated than it is often made out to be). I was honored, then, by the invitation to contribute a short essay for my friends at The Telos Collective on the topic of cultural engagement as sacred work. I found Rowan William’s article “The Authority of the Church” to be a helpful conversation partner as I reflected on this topic. Here’s a teaser and link to the rest of my article:
As Christian influence continues to wane in American society, we will be tempted to come up with new strategies for preserving it or regaining it. A better approach is to prioritize establishing credibility over exerting influence. We need to prove to the broader culture that Christians have something uniquely positive to offer the society we share.
Take the time to read the other three articles in that series. They are all very good. And watch The Telos Collective website for a roundtable conversation between the four authors. Coming soon.
A Phoropter for Faith
A few weeks ago I gave the keynote address (via Zoom) for the Evangelical Theological Society Eastern Meeting (details here) that allowed me to reflect on how my research and writing has evolved since Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. In the talk I compare Misreading Scripture to a pair of drugstore reading glasses:
pick it up and use it and your vision will almost certainly improve. You might see honor/shame dynamics in 2 Samuel 11, for example, and in the religious leaders’ public questioning of Jesus. You might begin to assume the second person pronoun is plural in Paul’s epistles, rather than singular—you might start hearing “y’all” instead of “you.” When you do, new interpretations may become self-evident, or at least may become possible. I continue to believe that this on its own is a valuable contribution.
Then I extend the metaphor to introduce a new framework I’ve been experimenting with, a way to understand the cultural influences that make up a “worldview.” Here’s a preview:
I’ve come to believe that instead of a simple set of corrective lenses that isolates one major cultural difference—Western v. nonwestern intellectual furniture—we need something like a phoropter for faith.
The phoropter is the contraption full of small round lenses that an optometrist sets astride your nose to test the unique refraction of each of your eyes—and how they work together—in order to determine your personalized prescription. While the goal is to identify just how much correction is necessary to restore your vision to perfect 20/20, the whole process is nevertheless highly subjective. The doctor asks you which lens makes your vision clearer—“1 or 2? 1 or 2? 1 or 2?”—and draws conclusions based on your answers in light of other administered tests.
To this end I propose the following framework to help make sense of the vast differences among American Christians (and possibly beyond). I propose that one’s inherited worldview consists of four “myths” and the various and often surprising ways they interact. They are:
Personal myth
Communal myth
National myth
Religious/Philosophical myth
Our bias and assumptions—our worldviews—are amalgamations of these four myths. Most Christians believe they operate from only a biblical or Christian worldview, when in fact what they think of as their “Christian worldview” is actually a combination of these several myths—a combination of multiple refractive lenses—only one of which is explicitly biblical or Christian.
You can listen to the whole presentation here. And stay tuned for a print version, as I hope to get all of this written up in a format I can share easily.
The “National Myth” and Religious Liberty
In the next two weeks I’ll put the finishing touches on a biographical chapter about Isaac Backus, an 18th century Baptist pastor and advocate for religious liberty (and the subject of my doctoral dissertation). This chapter is my contribution to a great big volume on Baptist political theology soon-to-be published by B&H Academic. My research was focused on Backus’s theological argument for religious liberty, which may seem entirely unrelated to everything else I’m working on. And, in a sense, it is. But in November I’ll present at the national ETS conference about how Backus illustrates the “four myths” framework above. Hopefully that’ll pull all the threads together. (Check out this book about Backus to learn more.)
Current Stack of Books
I’m slowly making my way through Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries and Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. The two books could not be more different in most ways, but they have this in common: they both engage sources and ideas that are new to me, and so I have to read them slowly and carefully in order to keep up.
I’m about halfway through Andrew Delbanco’s The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War. It’s a well-researched and well-written account of the inter-war period that centers the role runaway slaves played in the formation of the Constitution and westward expansion, and forced America to wrestle with issues like states rights.
Finally, I’m working through The Gospel Coalition’s new book Before you Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church. I’ll be honest—I expected more. I talk to a lot of people who have deep questions about the Christian faith and the church’s role in historical injustices, etc. and I hoped this book would be a resource I could recommend to them. So far, it’s not. Standby for a review sometime in the near future.
If you made it this far, may your tribe increase. As always, I’m grateful for the gift of your time.