Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the link at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy all my offerings!
Dear Friends,
Life is so funny sometimes. A longtime subscriber sent a note last Saturday complaining (justifiably) that the previous day’s Friday edition of The Square Inch was “totally boring.”
You know the punchline, right? That issue, “When The Future Dries Up” is the most read, most shared, most commented upon, most subscriber-generating edition in the history of this publication. Which I certainly admit I did not see coming. But I have also learned that you cannot predict these things.
What a perfect opportunity to remind you all of something I wrote soon after taking The Square Inch to a paid subscription model:
You may not need to read a certain essay, but maybe that essay you are skipping this time around is exactly what somebody else really needs to read. See, it isn’t all about the individual subscriber. It’s about a community of like-minded people. So maybe that Off The Shelf didn’t do much for you, but it delighted and enriched someone else. Your subscription helps make that happen. I’d like to think subscribing is an act of loving yourself, but, failing that, think of it as loving your neighbor.
Think about it: The Square Inch is not a stable of multiple writers reaching different audiences. It’s just me. And as I say in just about every “intro,” I have a wide variety of interests. Sometimes what I write about won’t be of much interest to you; but even when that happens, your support is edifying other people. So I apparently wrote something that a lot of people really—I mean, based on my inbox, really—needed to hear, even if you might have found it dull.
So now I’m going to chase after all those new readers, right, and suddenly start lacing my every essay with obscure Latin terms and arcane theological debates? No way. I am just me, and I am going to continue on as always. I think that longtime readers of The Square Inch will attest that out of 115 Friday issues the one last week was most unusual. But even if it was outside your orbit, it was clearly very needed and appreciated in a lot of other circles.
Thank you, friends, for your indulgence and patience. One last note before moving on: I’m flattered by the number of Facebook friend requests I’ve received, and if you’ve sent one and not heard back I apologize. But I do not accept very many friend requests because I use Facebook as a way of keeping up with people I’ve actually met and know (with varying degrees of consistency). I’m not trying to be a jerk! I’m just keeping my circle small. (That would be a good topic for a future newsletter: various philosophies on how to use social media.)
Last week I mentioned to the paid subscribers that I am enrolled as a student in an 8-week class on how to read Anglo-Saxon, otherwise known as “Old English.” (Super-technically, I’m learning “West Saxon.”) The first week was excellent, and I am loving the educational philosophy. Skip all the charts, paradigms, and memorization; just start reading the text. The grammatical details will emerge and “click” by textual immersion. I guess that is a trendy new scientific approach in linguistic circles, and I love it! I once heard Peter Williams—a truly great linguist himself—say that if you want to read Greek, pick up the Greek New Testament and start reading. I thought that was encouraging and smart advice. I’m going to test it out on Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf.
After we’d learned the history of the language and learned how to pronounce the letters, our professor put a beautiful text on the screen and read through it. It was Matthew 7, a familiar passage to you and me, but I got the distinct impression that a few of my classmates (from all around the world) had never before encountered it. Jesus contrasts two men who build houses, one on a foundation of stone and the other on a foundation of sand. The rain and the winds assault each house, and one stands firm and the other falls with a “great crash.”
The professor made an off-the-cuff remark by way of summary: “The contrast is between one who hears and one who doesn’t hear.”
That struck me as an innocent inaccuracy. Jesus is not contrasting one who hears and one who does not hear. Both men hear Jesus’ words. The contrast is between the one who does them, who puts them into practice, and the one who does not. I’d go a bit further and argue that Jesus is claiming that his words are Torah—which was, for the Jew, a complete life orientation. Torah is that which you build your entire life around, the thing that shapes and forms our very innermost thoughts, emotions, and actions; and Jesus is making the astonishing claim that his words—doing them, putting them into practice, building with them—are the difference between wisdom and folly, rock and sand, standing or falling. No wonder the crowds were “astonished.” Just who does he think he is?
This metaphor or parable is far deeper than we usually imagine. In fact, I suspect—but probably cannot prove—that Jesus is alluding here to a particular house. The house. The Temple. I think this because of the added emphasis he places on the nature of the destruction of the foolish man’s house: “and great was its fall!” There is going to be a new people, a new “living” temple, based upon and oriented around the words of Jesus (cf., Matthew 28:20: “teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you”). Those who hear Jesus’ words—including the scribes and Pharisees and caretakers of the Temple in Jerusalem—but do not do them are foolish and their house rests on sand. And a catastrophe is coming and great will be its fall. Indeed, great was its fall!
All this led me to a few thoughts that are somewhat related to the subject of last week’s boring-but-shockingly-popular newsletter—I’ll make it brief and try not to bore you! When I was writing about Bonaventure’s break with Aquinas on theological method, I quoted somebody who perceptively observed that “building up” to theological truths by way of the scholastic method had the “effect of ‘bracketing’ Christian belief.” That is, such a method (arguably) pursues Christian truth by first setting it aside. We hope, of course, to get there in the end, but we’ve got to get there on other grounds first (reason? nature?). This is how many Christians—influenced to varying degrees, of course, by Aquinas—approach apologetics. We have to set aside our theological commitments first and then, using some form of universal or neutral procedure, argue our way up to our intended target. For Aquinas, that gets us as far as “God exists.” And then, once we get to that step of the ladder, we can appeal to special revelation which will then go on to teach us about the Trinity, the incarnation, and so forth—the things ordinary reason can’t reach.
It’s not just apologetics, but social theory and law and civics and politics, too. Many people maintain that in the context of the public square the Christian must formally set aside his or her commitment to the Bible and try to argue toward those commitments using other materials and methods.
I think those who have this frame of mind should be a bit more haunted than they are by Matthew 7. If we hear Jesus’ words and do not use them we are like a foolish person building on sand. I don’t think Jesus was just talking about our personal devotional life or how we live; he was talking about Torah—a whole-life foundational orientation that includes all our intellectual efforts. It includes the “loving God with our minds” part.
I think we ought to wholly reconsider any approach that involves “bracketing” or “setting aside” Jesus’ words (which encompasses the whole of Scripture, mind you) in our building of anything, whether it be an apologetic approach, a theological system, a moral or legal argument, a counseling philosophy, a marriage manual, a parenting guide, or whatever else. It is very popular to intentionally (really, stop and think on that) set aside the Bible while we make a case for something. And I grant that there are all the good intentions in the world to eventually wheel the Bible back in at the end of the process.
But it seems to me that Jesus says something very clear about the structural integrity of that kind of house.