Dear Friends,
In the summer of 2004 I was sitting in a fancy hotel lobby on the island of Maui. I struck up a conversation with a gentleman from Boston, Massachusetts. On the television screen above the bar area the New York Yankees were wildly celebrating a victory against his beloved Red Sox at Fenway Park. This was just the year after the Yankees had crushed the souls of Bostonians in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS when (now New York manager) Aaron Boone got absurdly lucky and hit a home run against Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield. I said, “That’s got to be painful, watching the Yankees celebrate like that.”
He shrugged. “Ah, Let ‘em celebrate. It’s nothing a ten-game winning streak won’t solve.”
It’s nothing a ten-game winning streak won’t solve. That sentence has stuck with me for twenty years now. You know what happened in 2004? The Boston Red Sox did have a ten-game winning streak, from August 24th to September 3rd. They got their rematch against the Yankees in the ALCS, and pulled off the greatest comeback in the history of sports. Down three games to zero in a best-of-seven contest, they clawed their way back. It is now the stuff of mythic legend. The Dave Roberts stolen base. David Ortiz. The bloody sock. Wow, that was thrilling.
My team, the Minnesota Twins, has only had one ten-game winning streak in any of those intervening twenty years. (It’s absurdly difficult to do.) But I find myself saying it every season: it’s nothing a ten-game winning streak won’t solve.
Two weeks ago my eldest daughter and I were ready to stop watching baseball. The Twins had been having the worst start to a season in memory—maybe ever. The futility was utterly mind-boggling. Completely unwatchable, but we watched anyway. In agony. Together. Night after night.
As I sit here typing away, the Twins are riding a nine-game winning streak, are suddenly three games above .500 and looking every bit like the team everyone expected to win the AL Central. True, we’ve done a lot of that against the Chicago White Sox, so we can’t get too excited (oof, are they bad). But it is still amazing what two weeks can do to a baseball team’s fortunes.
Matthew Barrett is a Southern Baptist theologian who publishes books prolifically. Too prolifically, one might argue. His most recent is the behemoth The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. I haven’t taken the time to read it yet, and I am not sure I will. While I’ve appreciated some of Barrett’s work (e.g., God’s Word Alone) and while I’m sure there’s plenty of value in this one, I’ve gotten the feeling that this book is rather agenda-laden, and it happens to be an agenda I don’t share—the cause célèbre of theological “retrieval.” I am just not that into Thomas Aquinas, see no reason to exaggerate the continuity between him and the Reformers, and I don’t think Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity is a test of orthodoxy. And that’s really the axe Barrett is grinding.
The folks at the London Lyceum have been publishing a series of critical reviews of the book and they are confirming my suspicions. I am generally skeptical of people who write a lot of would-be scholarly books on a wide variety of topics. Sure, every now and then a true polymath emerges, but it isn’t something you should expect to see often.
In Tom Ward’s review, he takes Barrett to task for his treatment of Duns Scotus and makes it pretty plain that he is in way over his head. The final paragraphs are brutal, but also brimming with academic wisdom that could be applied widely:
As should be clear by now, Barrett gets Scotus badly wrong. Of all the figures and themes Barrett addresses, Scotus is the one I know best. I focus on the thing I know best, however, not just to stay in position to nitpick authoritatively as the Scotus fanboy I am, but to make a broader methodological point about the sort of book Barrett has written. Is the historically sweeping massive tome possible to do responsibly? For Suarez, yes. Maybe for Barth. Not many others. Small-minded experts like me toil away on a few decades of theological thought. Our antennae are highly sensitive to falsehoods about what we know best. But now look: if twenty pages about the thing I know best are riddled with errors, how can I trust the remaining 850 pages about topics I know less well? I need to suspend judgment about anything Barrett has to say about someone, for example, like Zwingli, a major figure about whom I know embarrassingly little; I have no reason to assume that Barrett is a reliable guide on that topic. And so too for other topics I don’t know much about. But then, why read the book?
And if, convinced as he is that Scotus is one of the chief villains of Christian history, Barrett could barely be bothered to study Scotus’s own writings, why write the book? Notice: the Scotus stuff is not meant to be filler, on Barrett’s view. Showing up the supposed badness of Scotus (and Ockham and Biel) is ‘one hinge on which [the book’s] argument turns.’ Accordingly, it ‘is one of the most important chapters in this book.’
Here is a better way: gather a team of like-minded theologians who all buy in to the argument and who bring complementary areas of expertise to the table. They can co-author a massive tome that, unlike a typical edited volume, really does have a grand argumentative structure. Someone like Barrett could supply the editorial glue to keep the project orderly and cohesive. The final product would likely have fewer factual errors than a monograph. Readers would have good prima facie reason to trust all the chapters, given the range of expertise of its contributors, even the ones on topics they don’t know much about.
Of course, if any team like this included a Scotus expert, the argument of Barrett’s book could not be made. But it would be all the better for that!
Really big ambitious books require competence to match.
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