The Word Became Flesh
No.138: December 16, 2022
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 button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
I am aware that I quite often brush aside various controversies as unimportant or passing fads—Wednesday’s Quarter Inch was another edition of that sort of thing. But I do want you to know that I don’t do that simply to cast an “above it all” pose. It’s just that interpreting and understanding the times takes time, wisdom, and reflection, which happen to be the first things to vanish once you step into the online arena of daily outrages. I mean, if you live, move, and have your being on Twitter, you’re a captive to each and every single moment and all moments are dialed up to “11.”
I know that many other wise people prioritize or “triage” things differently than I do, and I am okay with that. God gifts his people with many different skills and interests and perspectives. I’m just one guy. But I do want you to know that I don’t think every controversy is unimportant or a passing fad. There are things that need addressing.
I am thinking about this because three unrelated episodes over the past 18 months have “stuck” with me as having a great deal of significance. And there is, as I see it, a single thread running through them.
James (“Jamie”) K.A. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids. He is a very intelligent and prolific author. I have met him on a few occasions and even shared a stage with him—I would say that we are friendly. I have benefitted from a number of his books, which are always thought-provoking to me.
One thing I have always marveled at, watching Jamie’s career: how is it, I have thought, that Jamie has managed to escape all controversy regarding biblical sexuality? To my knowledge, nobody has ever pinned him down in a Q&A or interview on questions surrounding the LGBT agenda. It has been extraordinary. In a day and age when nobody is allowed private thoughts on that subject—Tim Keller, for example, was repeatedly put on the spot—Jamie, to my knowledge, has never said a word about the subject. Puzzling.
And then one day, out of the blue, a Tweet.
Was it out of the blue? Or was I not paying close enough attention? Have I been too generous in my benefits of the doubt?
And then last week, another Tweet:
That’s a painting of Senator Raphael Warnock. Whether he is a Christian or not is a debatable matter (he wrote, and then deleted, a Tweet that appeared to cast doubt on the resurrection of Jesus), but to my mind he doesn’t qualify as much of an “exemplary” anything—politician or theologian. I mean, perhaps Jamie mistook that for a painting of Cornel West, which might have been defensible, but that doesn’t seem possible because, well, that is impossible.
What is going on here? What have I missed? Is there something in Jamie’s theology or philosophy that would lead him in these “progressive” directions that I have naïvely overlooked? I think probably so. I won’t apologize for my patience—that is, my not going all “heresy hunter,” starting a “discernment blog,” jumping the gun, or claiming to have known all along what he really thinks. And just so I am not misunderstood, my objection is not to loving or welcoming all students to college; singling out and celebrating sexual deviancy is another matter, which is what I think that Tweet does.
Jamie’s work has always been a kind of “bottom up” philosophy, a kind of “phenomenology,” and it seems to me the downsides to that are emerging. He is interested in “lived experience,” rituals, practices, and, most of all, liturgies. His emphasis has always been on embodied rather than so-called “abstract” truth. He certainly has never hid his appreciation for the postmodern “turn,” particularly its emphasis on the “situatedness” of knowledge. What seems missing is God’s transcendent Word. Smith doesn’t neglect the Bible, exactly, but it seems in retrospect that his tendency has been to subordinate (or perhaps “domesticate”) the Word to liturgies and practices. If I understand him (and perhaps I don’t), the Word doesn’t seem to have power and authority outside and independent of particular communal experience in the church. The Word can only be refracted through its situational application: it is liturgy, lived experience, that primarily shapes and forms us. Put another way, the Word is “buffered.” It is a step removed, an unreachable step removed from our concrete experience—which is ironic because Jamie was the one who first taught me about Charles Taylor’s critique of modernity as involving the “buffered self”—buffered, that is, from transcendence. Once that move has been made, it is difficult to see how the Word critiques our “liturgies” and practices. The Word can be, to some degree, set at arm’s length, just far enough away that texts like Romans 1 don’t burn us.
After seeing that Tweet from Jamie about LGBT students, I remember responding something like: “Beware the cultural liturgies you perform; they will shape you.” That selfie was, in fact, a performance of the purest of postmodern secular liturgies, and it does seem to have shaped him—or at least something else shaped him to perform it.
You might recall last year a major dustup when a couple of Presbyterian pastors, Greg Thompson and Duke Kwon, published a book endorsing paying reparations for America’s participation in the slave trade. The real controversy didn’t get going until after Kevin DeYoung published his review of the book. Thompson and Kwon wrote a long reply, the gist of which was that they wouldn’t bother answering DeYoung’s many appeals to the Bible because, they maintained, DeYoung is too captive to “whiteness” to make that a profitable exercise.
The pattern was crystal clear: first, one must be awakened to the hidden injustices and oppressions of white hegemony, and then we can talk about the Bible. As in, when you learn to read the Bible as we do, then we can have a debate. Heads, I win; tails, you lose!
I had a lot to say about that, and you can read it in the newest edition of Westminster Magazine (which isn’t up online yet, but should be released any moment now—UPDATE: Here it is). Alternatively, that essay also appears in my new book. (Man, I am so bad at self-promotion. Did you know I published a new book?)
What stuck with me about that episode is the marginalization of the Word of God. In that case, it wasn’t liturgies “buffering” us from the authority of the divine Word; rather, Critical Theory was a more basic prerequisite for truth than the Bible. It was Critical Theory that brings the kind of “regeneration” needed to hear and attend to God’s Word. The Holy Spirit no longer works in and through the Word; he works in and through Critical Race Theory, and only then the Word.
And then there was the latest unpleasantness. A book on Christian Nationalism in which the Bible is nowhere to be found, not considered remotely relevant to the discipline of political and social theory. In that case, there was a pretty misguided theological framework behind it: “special” revelation is for “heavenly” mysteries like how one can be saved and go to heaven. “Natural” revelation—or, rather, our intuitions and reasoning about nature—are the proper criteria for “earthly” matters like politics.
Again, the Word of God is “buffered,” kept at arm’s length, held in abeyance until we first do our intellectual spade work. That was literally the method. If the Bible is anything, it is mere supplement, ornamentation, a kind of baptizing “pixie dust” to affirmatively sprinkle on truths we’ve arrived at by other—autonomous—means.
Friends, there is no buffer. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. Holding God’s Word at arm’s length is to hold Jesus Christ at arm’s length. I know you might want some input on my little intellectual, social, or experimental project here, King Jesus, but you’ll have to wait until I’ve finished it first.
I do not believe that is how King Jesus operates. When Jesus moves in and makes a dwelling place for himself, there are no rooms off-limits for him. Not the one marked, “Liturgy,” not the one marked “Race Theory,” and not the one marked “Political Theory.” I love how C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
In sum, I believe that one of the foremost problems Christians are experiencing is a problem we have always faced to varying degrees: our eroding sense of the power, presence, and authority of the written Word of God—which is the written Word of our incarnate King, the Word who was in the beginning with God, and was God, who became flesh and made his dwelling among us. I am certain these examples could be multiplied exponentially, but these are episodes that have made an impact on me in the past year.
When we sing, “Let earth receive her King!” we must mean it. He is the king of heaven and earth, and that means he’s king of everything. Of every single square inch.
Thank you for reading and subscribing to The Square Inch. Have a blessed weekend as we continue through the Advent season!
Thankful for you and your clear writing, especially after reading some Bavinck and seeing his emphasis on revelation as the bedrock of all truth.
Your article in the WTS magazine was brilliant and brilliantly written. Much appreciated. Blessings to you this season.