Thanks so much for this advice. I came across your substack via the Three Things Newsletter and I'm so glad I did. I am not theologically trained, but have grown up in the church as a PK, and have drifted between all kinds of traditions. My current bugbear with both woke pop culture and what you call the doctrine of “experiential expressivism” is that they both seem to practise an ethics indistinguishable from narcissism (quite possibly also got this phrase from Three Things, can't remember but its lodged in my mind as a truth since I read it). Privileging one's own experience and calling it truth thereby supposedly closing it off from debate (and deconstruction) seems to me to be the opposite of what we are called to as Christians *and* what postmodern scholars would require of deconstruction proper. It is so wildly frustrating that those who should be most robust in a debate - believers and those that challenge the status quo - seem to be so quick to shut debate down in the name of emotion and experience. Anyway, I'm just echoing your sentiment and will try at every turn to say I’m not sure that’s true, two things can be true at the same time, and what story does this tell about God? Thanks. Hannah in South Africa.
This is great, thanks! You should pick up a copy of the Nature of Doctrine, the George Lindbeck book I am writing about), it is not "easy" but it is also not "hard", and I'd be happy to answer any questions that came up as you read!
Re deconstruction, I think you are right. Personal experience might remain what I call "irreducibly particular", but there is this instinct to make a system out of a collection of experiences and so wield it/them as a cudgel. I'm not sure how this happened.
Those really are helpful tools/lenses/questions for reading (particularly online). Getting to the truth of a matter and also to the nature of God should be priority, and I want to practice doing it more.
I was just writing about this. I’ve been doing a deep dive into uprooting the negative aspects of my evangelical charismatic upbringing but hated using the word deconstruction. I posed this thought to my husband and he put it like you said here that many are creating a narrative that fits their “controlled” worldview which essentially means they may be compounded in sin and just wanted to cultivate a new faith around it to keep it. Meanwhile, their new narrative easily fits into the blame God and He really didn’t mean He is love but love is love fashioned reality.
I am so glad you are giving so much thought to this. There are most certainly things that need to be "uprooted"- that's called growth! As we grow and encounter suffering and trials, our pictures of God also grow. The saints knew these trials, too, and often tested God in them and found Him faithful. Think of Job- he didn't get a tidy answer, but he did get God. It's not a comfortable process but it is a necessary one.
Amen. I read through Job for the first time last year. Such revelation in just that one book. As Tim Keller once said, “One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.”
I find interestingly that the deconstruction crowd, while rejecting the doctrines of evangelicalism that they deem problematic have retained the individualistic and experiential ways of thinking and engaging with religion that in part led to some of those problematic doctrines in the first place. We need something more solid than our own emotional whims to hang onto. These questions point us in that direction. Thank you.
Yes, I have been doing a deep dive of some writing of yours I missed over the years, but one was relevant because I'm going through MacIntyre's After Virtue and needed some help. At Mere O. you wrote:
"We are miming traditions and moral judgments but doing so out of context- not only do we not know what such things mean, but we cannot even understand the fragments we hold. What has been lost in the catastrophe of his metaphor is the traditions that give an account of the good life and how to live virtuously within them."
It tracks with your observations and advice here.
"...traditions are well equipped themselves to deal with religious change and to rid themselves of religious error, but only if they are functioning as normative religious communities. If they are simply therapeutic engagements, they lack this potential. They become merely figments of our imaginations."
Need to sit with this more.
And, at the risk of being a go-girl comment, you practice advice #1 really well even from a distance online. I don't want to read or engage soley with ideas that simply confirm what my knee-jerk thoughts are. We need people to ask good questions and bring us closer to the truth. I suppose that's why you teach. :)
the Macintrye remains very instructive, but I am a bit concerned that its utility is limited becuase "tradition" is, if not obsolete, quite fragmented. what I see in evangelicalism is that the emotive emphasis has been transmitted, but not the communal norms. That means that a religious "tradition" can become "engaging in a weekly therapeutic practice", or something like this. this will not sustain a moral life.
It seems the transmission of coherent, historical, and communal norms are what many are after these days in their experience of religion. I empathize with the draw to the Orthodox and Catholic traditions for this reason (flaws and all) as someone else pointed out, but I would hope they don't have a monopoly on a robust and rooted Christian faith.
The EE school Lindbeck is criticizing was largely catholic theologians. Bishop Barron just wrote about what a large part of the tradition that was during his formation. My thought is they are quickly turning CP instead of going CL.
Thank you for this. I wish I knew where the "functioning normative communities” are and who belongs to them. It seems to me that the Christian Community, particularly the evangelical community, is so fragmented into esoteric subgroups that there is no such thing as normative. No creed. No Didache. No catechism. We are adrift in experiential expressivism because that is all we have.
I will.
Thanks so much for this advice. I came across your substack via the Three Things Newsletter and I'm so glad I did. I am not theologically trained, but have grown up in the church as a PK, and have drifted between all kinds of traditions. My current bugbear with both woke pop culture and what you call the doctrine of “experiential expressivism” is that they both seem to practise an ethics indistinguishable from narcissism (quite possibly also got this phrase from Three Things, can't remember but its lodged in my mind as a truth since I read it). Privileging one's own experience and calling it truth thereby supposedly closing it off from debate (and deconstruction) seems to me to be the opposite of what we are called to as Christians *and* what postmodern scholars would require of deconstruction proper. It is so wildly frustrating that those who should be most robust in a debate - believers and those that challenge the status quo - seem to be so quick to shut debate down in the name of emotion and experience. Anyway, I'm just echoing your sentiment and will try at every turn to say I’m not sure that’s true, two things can be true at the same time, and what story does this tell about God? Thanks. Hannah in South Africa.
This is great, thanks! You should pick up a copy of the Nature of Doctrine, the George Lindbeck book I am writing about), it is not "easy" but it is also not "hard", and I'd be happy to answer any questions that came up as you read!
Re deconstruction, I think you are right. Personal experience might remain what I call "irreducibly particular", but there is this instinct to make a system out of a collection of experiences and so wield it/them as a cudgel. I'm not sure how this happened.
I’m going to try find a copy and read along. Thanks!
Those really are helpful tools/lenses/questions for reading (particularly online). Getting to the truth of a matter and also to the nature of God should be priority, and I want to practice doing it more.
Kirsten, I hope and pray you’ll tell me, when necessary, “I’m not sure that’s true.”
It seems to me without needing to read deep between the lines that Kirsten has already said that.
It’s a gift when she tells you this.
she's working on her tone ;-)
I was just writing about this. I’ve been doing a deep dive into uprooting the negative aspects of my evangelical charismatic upbringing but hated using the word deconstruction. I posed this thought to my husband and he put it like you said here that many are creating a narrative that fits their “controlled” worldview which essentially means they may be compounded in sin and just wanted to cultivate a new faith around it to keep it. Meanwhile, their new narrative easily fits into the blame God and He really didn’t mean He is love but love is love fashioned reality.
I am so glad you are giving so much thought to this. There are most certainly things that need to be "uprooted"- that's called growth! As we grow and encounter suffering and trials, our pictures of God also grow. The saints knew these trials, too, and often tested God in them and found Him faithful. Think of Job- he didn't get a tidy answer, but he did get God. It's not a comfortable process but it is a necessary one.
Amen. I read through Job for the first time last year. Such revelation in just that one book. As Tim Keller once said, “One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.”
I find interestingly that the deconstruction crowd, while rejecting the doctrines of evangelicalism that they deem problematic have retained the individualistic and experiential ways of thinking and engaging with religion that in part led to some of those problematic doctrines in the first place. We need something more solid than our own emotional whims to hang onto. These questions point us in that direction. Thank you.
Yes, I have been doing a deep dive of some writing of yours I missed over the years, but one was relevant because I'm going through MacIntyre's After Virtue and needed some help. At Mere O. you wrote:
"We are miming traditions and moral judgments but doing so out of context- not only do we not know what such things mean, but we cannot even understand the fragments we hold. What has been lost in the catastrophe of his metaphor is the traditions that give an account of the good life and how to live virtuously within them."
It tracks with your observations and advice here.
"...traditions are well equipped themselves to deal with religious change and to rid themselves of religious error, but only if they are functioning as normative religious communities. If they are simply therapeutic engagements, they lack this potential. They become merely figments of our imaginations."
Need to sit with this more.
And, at the risk of being a go-girl comment, you practice advice #1 really well even from a distance online. I don't want to read or engage soley with ideas that simply confirm what my knee-jerk thoughts are. We need people to ask good questions and bring us closer to the truth. I suppose that's why you teach. :)
the Macintrye remains very instructive, but I am a bit concerned that its utility is limited becuase "tradition" is, if not obsolete, quite fragmented. what I see in evangelicalism is that the emotive emphasis has been transmitted, but not the communal norms. That means that a religious "tradition" can become "engaging in a weekly therapeutic practice", or something like this. this will not sustain a moral life.
It seems the transmission of coherent, historical, and communal norms are what many are after these days in their experience of religion. I empathize with the draw to the Orthodox and Catholic traditions for this reason (flaws and all) as someone else pointed out, but I would hope they don't have a monopoly on a robust and rooted Christian faith.
yes, i don't think they do. they also can appeal to people for reasons that are both experiential-expressivist and cognitive-propositional.
The EE school Lindbeck is criticizing was largely catholic theologians. Bishop Barron just wrote about what a large part of the tradition that was during his formation. My thought is they are quickly turning CP instead of going CL.
Well there is that, too. Ooof.
Thank you for this. I wish I knew where the "functioning normative communities” are and who belongs to them. It seems to me that the Christian Community, particularly the evangelical community, is so fragmented into esoteric subgroups that there is no such thing as normative. No creed. No Didache. No catechism. We are adrift in experiential expressivism because that is all we have.
Bingo. But there is another way.
Tell me more. My options are Orthodoxy with its static theology, Catholicism with all its baggage, or the Evangelical morass.
maybe the first problem is acting like these are options.