A Christian and a Scholar

Marc Cortez, Christological Anthropology In Historical Perspective: Ancient and Contemporary Approaches to Theological Anthropology

I’ve written repeatedly on this blog about my frustrations regarding how Christian authors seemingly write down to their audiences, keeping believers at primary-school levels. No wonder “no religion” has become America’s second-biggest religious label: our biggest religion has become boring. I’ve specifically criticised Phil Rehberg and Johnnie Moore, to name only two, for keeping intellectually ambitious Christians trapped at the Bible 101 level indefinitely.

Thus it heartens me to see Zondervan, a house mainly famous for publishing the New International Version (NIV) Bible, getting heavily into distributing Christian scholarship for mainstream audiences. Though owned by HarperCollins, and thus technically part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Zondervan remains operationally independent, and dedicated to Christianity over political ideology. And it’s demonstrated a welcoming attitude to theological debate, hard scholarship, and dedication to knowledgeable, informed Christian faith.

Wheaton University professor Marc Cortez has chosen, with this book, to address one of theology’s more arcane corners, the intersection of the study of humanity with the study of Christ. Rather than trying to create a truly encyclopedic umbrella of this discipline, which he admits early would be difficult, even futile, he chooses case studies of past writers. The result is interesting, deep reading for enthusiastic, scholarly-minded Christians.

Cortez sets himself an interesting set of parameters. He unpacks writings of seven religious scholars, from Gregory of Nyssa in the 3rd Century CE to the still-living James Cone, analyzing how they understand humanity through the lens of Christology. If that sounds obscure, it is: “Christology” is the academic study of Christ, understanding Him not through Jesus’ teachings or actions, but through Christ’s unique being.

Christology is so specialized that, of the four canonical Gospels, only John significantly addresses it. The Synoptic Gospels approach Christology head-on only through Peter’s confession and Jesus’ defense before Pilate. It also compounds understanding Cortez’s points, as it entails understanding humanity, monolithically, through the divine manifestation of Christ’s dyophysite nature. Functionally, Cortez places the key to understanding human outside humanity. You can imagine how fraught this makes his exegesis.

Nearly every chapter includes some disclaimer how, despite the superficial appearances, each respective author Cortez unpacks really has a truly Christological anthropology. This despite not only the seeming evidence, but even the criticisms his subjects levy on one another: throughout chapter 4, Cortex defends Friedrich Schleiermacher against Karl Barth, the subject of chapter 5. These theologians’ interpretations of both anthropology and Christology are deeply loaded, and sometimes contradictory.

It’s important to note that, when Cortez says “Anthropology,” he doesn’t mean what non-sectarian university Anthropology departments mean. The theologians Cortez considers seek the true definition of human nature prior to the circumstances of life, like upbringing and culture. Secularist anthropologists largely abandoned this pursuit in the 1960s, acknowledging life’s circumstances as defining, not accidental. Thus Cortez is initiating an intellectual pursuit that doesn’t travel outside strictly theological circles.

That’s especially compounded by the specific contexts each theologian writes from. In Cortez’s telling, Gregory of Nyssa spends considerable time parsing how necessary the biological body, especially sexuality, really is to human nature. Martin Luther expounds on how the righteous shall live (act) by faith (belief)—thus humans naturally translate knowledge into action. And James Cone, possibly America’s foremost Black Liberation Theologian, defines humans by race and relationship to power.

Thus, as with studying Scripture, more knowledge leads to less certainty, or anyway it should. The authors seemingly contradict one another; sometimes, as with especially prolific authors like Luther or Barth, they appear to contradict themselves. But arguably, this represents what we in the logic-chopping business call “an essentially contested debate”: that is, the positions gain definition from being contested. The point isn’t to win, but to test new ideas.

In that, Cortez succeeds. His case studies challenge audiences’ preconceptions, widen avenues of discussion, and introduce new ideas. Non-scholarly Christians probably won’t read Gregory of Nyssa or Karl Barth; most probably haven’t even heard of Friedrich Schleiermacher or John Zizioulas (I hadn’t). But Cortez makes their key ideas accessible, in plain English with ample footnotes. He invites us into the debate. And that, more than “winning,” truly matters.

This book joins Zondervan’s recent additions to challenging theology for non-seminarians. I’ve already reviewed Five Views on the Church and Politics, part of a series Zondervan publishes on today’s most important spiritual debates. Part-time Christians seeking vague affirmations or easy beach reading will find this volume imposing. But serious-minded believers seeking more intensive insights into their faith with find this book rich, as few mass-market Christian books are anymore.

In Defense of Books On Amazon

The Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, Kansas

This past weekend, I visited Lawrence, Kansas, and as I do whenever I’m in down, I swung by The Raven Bookstore. I picked up a book and a low-gloss literary magazine. Lawrence is fortunate enough to have three good-quality, locally owned bookstores within highly trafficked one block. While chatting with the clerk, she thanked me for purchasing there, rather than online. I smiled, returned her thanks, and said: “Shopping here is so much more of a sensory pleasure than Amazon or wherever.”

The words had hardly passed my lips before I realized the import. I permeate my blog with buying links to Amazon, who directly provides over half the books I review. I purchase from Amazon semi-regularly, more so since my town’s biggest bookstore basically retooled itself as a tchotchke outlet. Without Amazon’s recommendation features, I probably never would’ve discovered several books that have proven formative in my understanding of modern life.

But I also realize many good critics with unimpeachable reasoning have condemned Amazon for coarsening America’s publishing industry. Novelist/poet Ursula K. le Guin has characterized Amazon as “the BS Machine.” They’re regularly chastened for undercutting individual entrepreneurs, with good reason—though Wal-Mart has arguably done more in that direction, for far longer. Simply put, Amazon has narrowed the publisher-to-purchaser pipeline, at great social cost.

Still, I can’t bring myself to buy it.

Lawrence, Kansas, is wealthy, educated, and progressive-minded enough to have supported its historic downtown while neighboring communities rushed to build malls. This continuity proved foresighted, as malls and big-box retailers collapsed en masse during the Great Recession. Because malls involve massive buy-in costs, they’re prohibitively expensive for indie stores. Entrepreneurs and local owners absolutely require old buildings in classic communities, which don’t exist everywhere, to remain economically viable.

Amazon's first, highly controversial, brick-and-mortar store in Seattle, Washington

Before Amazon, high-minded critics blamed book superstores like Borders or Barnes & Noble for the then-current publishing environment. Before that, it was book racks at airports and drugstores. Or they blamed mall stores. This invariably overlooks one important point: such “downmarket” book-buying opportunities make reading, and literacy, available to people who are too geographically isolated, socially marginal, or poor to visit high-end indie retailers.

Such criticisms bespeak unquestioned economic privilege. As Naomi Klein put it over fifteen years ago, “media types tend to care more passionately about where they buy their books than where they buy their socks.” Some might immediately claim that Amazon sells socks and other staples; books have long-since receded from their retailing spotlight. But that’s consistent with Klein’s overall point, that retail consolidation has overwhelmed most Americans’ buying options.

Big-box discount stores amalgamated purchasing of life’s most important commodities several generations ago. I can enter any Wal-Mart SuperCenter at 2 a.m. and purchase food, electronics, clothing, car parts, and ammunition. Anything I can’t purchase at these stores could, charitably, be characterized as “luxury goods.” Poor Americans in particular, including those who work for Wal-Mart, can hardly afford to shop anywhere else. Amazon is an afterthought for such customers.

Nor is big-box buying exclusive to America’s poor. Levittown-style suburbanism, which made home ownership available to working-class citizens with GI Bill benefits after World War II, are deeply immune to localism, and lack downtowns like Lawrence. Despite empirical evidence that nobody wants new suburban developments anymore, developers keep building them, mainly because they’re cheap. But risky, independent-minded ventures, like the Raven, are priced out of suburbanism just like malls.

Interior of the Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, Kansas

Besides this, we must remember where the purchasing happens, not just by whom. The last indie bookstore in my area folded, priced out by a chain store, when Amazon was still a money-losing experimental venture. Once the chain store had absolute dominion over the local media goods market, it repurposed itself, making books marginal. My nearest large bookstore is an hour’s drive away; my nearest good bookstore, much further.

(In fairness, a new indie opened here later. However, it mainly sells remainders, salted with tables of bestsellers and local authors. It’s interesting, but unprepared to compete more widely.)

No, Amazon isn’t perfect: it uses monopsony power to squeeze publishers, and floods markets with cheap books. And it excludes those who can’t buy on plastic. Dedicated complainers have many populist grievances against Amazon’s business model.

But Amazon makes books available in rural, suburban, and poor areas in ways physical stores just can’t. Complaints about Amazon’s market domination, like complaints about mall stores a generation ago, reek of unexamined economic privilege. In an economy where books have become hard to find, it makes sure literacy is available. That’s something worth defending.

The Syria We Never Knew

Charles Glass, Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe

The conflict in Syria began when police arrested some youths for scattering anti-administration graffiti. When authorities detained and tortured the youths, locals began a peaceful protest, and police followed standard procedures: they attempted to disperse the crowd by opening fire. This usually works. For whatever reason, in 2011, outside forces distributed weapons to “defend” the protesters. Outside observers expected the Assad administration to collapse after mere weeks.

Charles Glass has written extensively on the Northern Levant, besides reporting for ABC News. During the Lebanese hostage crisis of the late 1980s, Glass was captured by militants, held for over two months. Among American journalists, few have more experience with Levantine history and politics. As the Syrian conflict approaches its sixth year, as over half the population has been displaced, either internally or internationally, he offers badly needed context.

Under the dominion of “President” Hafez al-Assad from 1970, and his son Bashar al-Assad from 2000, Syria knew levels of internal stability not necessarily enjoyed by other Middle Eastern nations. Minority populations of Alawite, Shiite, and Druze Muslims, alongside various Christian populations and even Jews, knew longtime peace. The administration was autocratic, certainly, but it secured durable sectarian harmony that translated into economic prosperity and political constancy.

The peaceful protesters, mostly secular and democratic, expected NATO forces to bolster them with air power like they did with Libya’s rebels; that support never came. The Assad administration expected to swiftly, efficiently quiet dissident protests, like they have time after time; outside forces kept the opposition alive. With each side believing victory imminent, they never prepared for a years-long sectarian conflict. The citizenry has grown openly weary of war.

Worse, the secularized protesters got supplanted by religious absolutists, who quickly coalesced into two factions. The Free Syrian Army is about as democratic as the LRA, and has attempted, without success, to rouse the nation’s Sunni majority into pogroms against minority populations. The al-Nusra Front became theocratic and intolerant, especially after it found allies in Iraq’s al-Qaeda subsidiary. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi folded the two groups together into the Islamic State.

Charles Glass

But Glass doesn’t limit himself to the current conflict. As with most uprisings and state-sponsored oppressions in the Middle East, the Syrian conflict has origins in history, some well outside living memory. Glass finds instructive background, sometimes only obliquely parallel, in three prior conflicts: the Lebanese Civil War, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, and Seferberlik, the Syrian rebellion against Ottoman oppression during World War I.

Glass’s most engaging, and longest, chapter addresses the Great Syrian Revolt. When Syrian emirs overthrew the Ottoman yoke, they expected liberty for what they called Greater Syria (which includes Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan). Their European allies had different goals. The region fell under French and British mandate, which drew unhistorical borders and attempted to force modernization on populations that didn’t particularly want Western-style governments. They rebelled, as colonized peoples do.

The Great Revolt, in Glass’s telling, doesn’t precisely mimic the current rebellion. It didn’t have the absolutist religious fervor the Islamic State brings, and it had more clearly defined personalities guiding the rebels. But in broad strokes, the similarities are unavoidable: a high-handed government, deaf to the people’s pleadings. The multiple rebel paths converging on Damascus. The complete failure to electrify popular support, leading to petty struggles for insignificant ground.

One other parallel remains important, the involvement of foreign proxies in tribal conflicts. Back then, France packed its native army with Alawites eager for opportunity, leading to today’s Alawite-dominated Assad regime. Today, Bashar al-Assad absolutely demands support from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, while the rebels enjoy support, sometimes under-the-table, from NATO, Turkey, and the theocracies of the Arabian Peninsula. Multinational balances of power turn on whatever outcome Syria eventually produces.

Like many journalists, Glass mostly avoids policy prescriptions through most of the book— which isn’t very long. Only in his afterword does he look toward future options available to stop the fighting. Outsiders will need to relinquish certain demands, especially that Assad abdicate; awful as he is, we’d prefer him to the other options currently available. But it wouldn’t take much to starve the FSA and Islamic State of materiel.

This book fills a much-needed gap in ongoing policy debates. Journalists run two-minute stories, while legislators seek the “good guys” and presidential candidates promise to “carpet-bomb the desert.” But Glass, whose career turns around Greater Syria, brings great detail. His history is thorough; his current events maintain exacting journalistic standards, answering questions even veteran news addicts haven’t understood. Until now.

Did Norman Spinrad Predict Donald Trump?

Norman Spinrad

Donald Trump’s run up America’s political ladder has baffled pundits, party insiders, and anybody who got a B or better in 11th-grade American Civics. He lacks a policy platform, speaks in generalizations so broad that even career politicians can’t understand him, and engages in a magnitude of undisguised race-baiting seldom seen since Barry Goldwater cratered in 1964. He shouldn’t succeed, and serious commentators remain baffled that he does.

I say Trump’s critics need to read more paperback science fiction.

Norman Spinrad has always courted controversy. One early novel, Bug Jack Barron, published by British editor Michael Moorcock, was so ahead-of-its-time, and so frank on politics, that he got condemned, by name, on the floor of the British Parliament. Though observers have noted a utopian impulse in Spinrad’s works, he maintains a broadly cynical attitude regarding the present and near future. Norman Spinrad generally believes things will get worse before they get better.

In 1985, Asimov’s Science Fiction published a lightly bowdlerized version of Spinrad’s novella “World War Last.” Three years later, Bantam bundled the uncensored story together with three other Spinrad novellas in the collection Other Americas. All four novellas feature some vision of America where economic inequality, political opportunism, and plain rot have conspired to reduce America to a ghost of itself. Long out of print, this collection has become available again thanks to Kindle publishing.

In “World War Last,” Samuel T. Carruthers has made his reputation as a used car salesman bu refusing to sell “Cheap Jap Junk.” His billboards, featuring himself dressed as Uncle Sam, make him iconic to Southern California’s reactionary nationalist segment, so a transition to politics seems natural. With Obama-like haste, and Donald Trump-like policy vagueness, he finds himself billed as America’s next President. Until he vanishes for several days, turning up gibbering weird, incoherent slogans.

Original paperback cover art

Across the globe, the Soviet Politburo is unable to elect a premier. (Note the scientific foresight, six years before the Soviet collapse. Sci-fi authors are perceptive, but not prophetic.) So the Party’s technocrats fit the former premier’s corpse with an artificial intelligence system that reads political sentiments, matches them to the premier’s speeches, and tells the Party what it wants to hear. The USSR is trapped in a death spiral of revisiting past, moribund policies.

Between these two puffed-up adversaries stands Hassan al Korami, despot of a tiny, oil-rich desert emirate. Korami has appointed himself caliph of all Islam; Muslims worldwide have responded with yawns. After all, Korami is all ambition, no authority. He has no air power, and is reduced to begging international arms dealers for rudimentary nuclear technology. But he has money and power enough to kidnap, drug, and brainwash America’s next President.

The parallels with current politics couldn’t be more direct or brutal. The American nationalist, the Russian demagogue, and the Middle Eastern would-be potentate constitute a tripod of international instability. None can gather their shit together to really challenge the others. But each has authority enough to enflame global sentiments. As two nuclear-armed opponents half-ass their way toward Armageddon, Korami sits back, prepared to claim Earth’s smoldering remains for his weird, self-serving version of Islam.

Desperate for resolution, “Uncle Sam” Carruthers invites the Soviet premier for a summit meeting. But addled on hash, sex, and self-made mythology, Carruthers picks Caesars Palace as the venue— and the Soviet AI agrees. Nothing could be worse for either. Carruthers would rather gamble and screw than conduct national affairs. The premier’s corpse, kept fresh by icy Moscow weather, begins rotting in the Nevada sun. The metaphors scream out Reagan-era political decay, on both sides.

Literary critic Joseph Anthony Wittreich (and not Mark Twain, as sometimes attributed) once wrote: “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme.” Here we see the themes of history, at least as perceived by Americans, echoing themselves in Spinrad’s writing. The very concerns that permeate this novella, including photogenic political fatuity, bad political ideas given zombie-like reanimation, and world powers playing into small operators’ fear machines, are playing themselves out on this year’s electoral stage.

Spinrad’s prose refines then-current issues into low comedy. High-minded topics like nuclear war and bad political maneuvering mingle with dick jokes and profane puns. But as with the best comedy, it uses broad laughs to make us think about the most profound and timely truths. If anything, “World War Last” more accurate to our time than to its own. Between Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and that demi-religious gasbag Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Norman Spinrad’s time has come around again.

We've Gone On Holiday By Mistake

Paul McGann (left) as "I." Richard E. Grant as "Withnail."

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Six
Bruce Robinson (writer-director), Withnail & I

One fog-shrouded afternoon in autumn 1969, two unemployable losers decide they’ve earned a vacation. A more mismatched pair you cannot imagine: a cynical burnout who directs his self-hatred outward, and a meek but promising youngster, terrified of earning his best friend’s contempt. Their story, a lightly fictionalized memoir, provides a hilarious window into a dun-tinged era when a starving artist could still survive in London.

Writer-director Bruce Robinson based this melancholy comedy, his debut in the big chair, on his experiences trying to break into acting in the late 1960s. He played Benvolio in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and claims the director ham-handedly tried to seduce him—an occurrence which this movie exaggerates to heights of cringe-inducing slapstick. In 1969, he shared a walk-up flat with Vivian MacKerrell, an actor primarily famous for drinking himself to death.

Richard E. Grant plays “Withnail,” a self-destructive tornado of malice who schedules his entire life around ways to maintain his alcohol flow. He lives in squalor, abuses his agent, drinks entire days into blackout oblivion, yet cannot understand why he cannot secure work. He reserves special disdain for his flatmate, “I,” played by Paul McGann. (Fan theories contend McGann’s character is actually named “Marwood,” only tangentially evidenced by the dialog.)

McGann’s character retains Swinging London’s fading optimism following the Hippie Era’s slow death. He still attends auditions, believing opportunities await the diligent. But he mistakes Withnail’s sodden monologues for philosophy, which he internalizes. “We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell,” he soliloquizes, “making an enemy of our own future.” Thus he arrives at the idea of taking a long-overdue holiday.

Withnail’s uncle, Monty, owns a cottage in the Cotswolds, which neither burnout has ever seen. So they dust off their best Sunday suits and pay a call. Uncle Monty is played by Richard Griffiths, who portrayed an equally repellent uncle in the Harry Potter films. Like the lads, Monty once dreamt of acting, but having money, never felt desperate enough to, y’know, audition. His aggressively swishy mannerisms threaten their sensibilities.

Richard Griffiths as Uncle Monty

Nevertheless, they get the cabin, for which they prove supremely underprepared. Without electricity or running water, they’re virtually isolated. They arrive during the rainy season, without food or clean clothes, their booze cache already severely depleted. Holiday-making proves even more work than actually working. All this before that fateful midnight when, without warning, Uncle Monty arrives unannounced. He has his own ambitions which, in 1969 Britain, are still technically illegal.

Robinson creates an expressive visual palette. His London is visually rich, from the ancient stone buildings to the sleek, modern Bakelite tables of the local diner. But the boys, in their substance-addled lifestyle, reduce their environment to undifferentiated grey. Withnail sits on a brightly lit bench in verdant Hyde Park, so wrapped in his misery that he can only notice his own colorless, vodka-soaked phlegm.

They likewise miss the wonder of the Cotswolds. From green grass to orange peat fires, dry-stone walls to rolling hills, the countryside offers constant visual wonders our lads miss, because they walk with their heads down, hands in their pockets. They wear grey flannel coats topped with their lank hair, a pair of shuffling sad sacks already moving through this life like ghosts immune to life, vitality, or humanist joy.

These characters’ bleak despair finds manifestation in their namelessness. By contrast, Uncle Monty has a first name, as does Danny, their sardonically hilarious dealer. Monty represents Britain’s past glamour, while Danny revels in transition, loving how London is shedding its staid, Christian, imperialist past. They stand at opposite poles, yet both are wholly alive, as our boys, in their present-centered despondency, aren’t. Past or future, they both live in hope.

Funding for this film came partly from Handmade Films, George Harrison’s hobby company that also bankrolled Monty Python’s classic Life of Brian. Harrison’s involvement greases a rich soundtrack that not every period film can afford. Hendrix, King Curtis, and the Beatles give this film a richly realized soundtrack that immerses audiences in the period. With Harrison’s help, this movie moves beyond mere period curiosity, into a glimpse of another era.

Released in 1987, this movie expresses nostalgia for pre-Thatcher innocence, probably fictional,  that characterized the late Eighties. But viewing it today, it offers another layer: a periscope into a time when artists could afford to starve. Like Manhattan or Frisco, London has moved beyond young strivers’ ambitions. But in this story, “I” suffers indignities until he overcomes. Because in the Sixties, ambitious contenders could still win.