Clearing a lot of junk off my computer desktop to start the new academic year.

The theme of Wycliffe’s colloquium on Theology & Scripture this past spring was … Theology & Scripture. We decided this year’s iteration should be an in-house event, in which faculty across disciplines could hold forth on how they hold together the two terms. In my brief (not brief enough) talk I proposed four theses, arguing that the theological interpretation of Scripture is:

1. A Tautology
2. Literal-figural
3. Ecclesial
4. Metaphysical

It’s a tautology, because if it’s Scripture (rather than, say, a random collection of ancient near easter texts) it’s inherently theological: divine discourse, the Word of God.

It’s literal-figural, because these are simply two aspects of a common practice—call it “Christian reading.” Though on second thought, maybe literal-spiritual would be better. Whatever you call it, the more-than-literal aspect arises naturally and organically from the literal. The literal keeps us close to the text (and to the history “behind the text “when that’s relevant—a crucial caveat). The more-than-literal names the way our world is drawn into the text, or illuminated by the text, or however you want to put it.

It’s ecclesial, because Scripture and the church are correlative. Scripture is “the Word of God for the people of God,” to use Todd Billings’s apt phrase.

It’s metaphysical, because if the Bible is the Word of God you immediately find yourself in the ballpark of making reality-claims. What that looks like, of course, is contested. I’m definitely not saying you have to sign off on Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, or whomever before you can read faithfully. But in general, divine speech can’t be separated from the question of “what is the world or the universe like in the broadest sense?”

Our ancestors huddled around the campfire, and as they peered into the darkness they could see the light reflected back at them from many eyes: the vole, the fox, the wolf, the lynx, the jackal. The creatures are curious, and probably hungry. They are biding their time. Or at least, this is the modern urban dweller’s imagining of one primal scene.

I turn off the lights in our bedroom, and likewise see multiple eyes staring back at me in the darkness. The TV set, the DVD player, the digital clock, the computer power cord, even the on/off switch on my bedside reading lamp, helpfully showing me where I can get more light the instant I need it. Over in the next room, the red light on my wife’s fancy Japanese iron blinks like a lighthouse, alerting her that it has safely powered down for the night. The lords of technology have seen to it that we will never be lonely: our devices have eyes to keep us company. (Seriously, can’t electronic equipment just be off? I would like to be able to retreat for just a few hours from the artificial Umwelt of modern life.)

Just read this thoughtful piece in The Plough on Bonhoeffer’s famous essay “Protestantism without Reformation.” He meant the (white) Protestant church in America, which celebrates “freedom” as the sheer absence of constraint, the freedom to do as I please. Certainly not the freedom of the gospel, where freedom is defined in relation to God and neighbor!

The essay mentions Reinhold Niebuhr, who had hoped he could persuade Bonhoeffer to stay in America in 1939. That effort failed, of course. But I have been thinking about Niebuhr of late. My first year in graduate school I took a seminar on political theology in which we read key texts by Niebuhr: likely parts of The Nature and Destiny of Man , or maybe The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. Almost all of us in that classroom had come under the spell of Karl Barth—not that anyone would admit to being a Barthian, that just wasn’t done at Yale, but he set the standard for being theologically serious. One of my classmates was rather dismissive of Niebuhr, saying that his work read “like a kind of wisdom literature.” No Trinity, thin Christology, and in place of an ecclesiology, the American liberal democratic project. Ouch.

Fair enough. Niebuhr has his limitations, and I would not turn to him for guidance on, say, the eternal generation of the Son or the question of divine simplicity. He simply was not in Barth’s league as a theologian. But … isn’t there a place for wisdom literature? We could use some Niebuhrian humility in our body politic, a salutary sense of limitations and an understanding that we do not “own” the truth. Niebuhr’s genius for epigrams—proverbs, if you will—is of a piece with his being a writer of wisdom literature. Among other things, he left us this lovely prayer: “God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Just watched: The Apartment, directed by Billy Wilder, starring Shirley Maclaine, Jack Lemmon, and Fred Macmurray. I had forgotten what a great movie this is. It was released in 1960, just a year after Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. But the film it kept reminding me of appeared a year later: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Blake Edwards’s adaptation of the Capote novella is likewise set in New York, involves an apartment used for illicit sex, has a female lead marked by an unhappy history with men, and a male lead who meekly acquiesces in his own emasculation, until one day he decides he’s not going to take it any more. The Apartment offers a cynical take on 1950’s corporate America, while Breakfast is a harbinger of the 1960’s youth culture that—in theory anyway—reacted against it. Or in New York terms: The Apartment is an Upper West Side movie—the “old” UWS, before Lincoln Center and gentrification—while Breakfast is pure Upper East Side.

When watching the The Bear, we always know what time it is. Images of clocks and timers are pervasive. There is the main kitchen clock, inexorably counting down the minutes till service begins. There are the digital alarm clocks that jolt chefs and staff out of bed each morning to start the day. There is the doomsday timer, indicating how many days till the loans come due and the restaurant has to close. And famously, there’s the sign in the kitchen declaring: EVERY SECOND COUNTS.

All this clock imagery made me think of Paul Griffiths' musings on time in his_Decreation: The Last Things of Creatures._ Griffiths characterizes time after the Fall as “metronomic” time. This is quantitative time, measurable time, linear time. Like the doomsday clock in The Bear, this sort of time is always counting down towards death. Griffiths contrasts it with liturgical time, which, being essentially dynamic and life-giving, never passes away or grow old. (He also draws the contrast using the physiological imagery of the heart’s systole and diastole, which he connects to Paul’s “the time is short/folded/compressed” (1 Cor. 7:29); but that’s too complicated to get into here.)

Back to The Bear and EVERY SECOND COUNTS: my guess would be that Carmen and Richie have fundamentally different ways of reading that sign. For Carmen, it’s a sort of death sentence: he has to make every second count, otherwise the restaurant and his world will fall apart. For Richie, the message EVERY SECOND COUNTS comes as a kind of grace. The realization that he is not fated to being a “loser” (the epithet Sydney hurls at him repeatedly, in a devastating scene) makes him grateful for every second that’s been given him. I think we can even take this one step further, and say that for Richie his new standards of excellence are also grace of a sort, because they provide him with a sense of dignity as well as a means of serving others. As Karl Barth might put it, the Law or Commandment is a form of the Gospel. Of course we don’t always experience it that way, in the hands of sinners the Commandment can be a death sentence. But that’s our fault, not the fault of the Commandment.

Where does EVERY SECOND COUNTS originate? Ultimately from Chef Terry at Ever, who passed the motto on to her protegés—Carmen in Chicago, Luca in Copenhagen. The scene where she teaches Richie how to peel mushrooms embodies a sort of unhurried, peaceful, liturgical time. It seems that for Chef Terry we have all the time in the world. Another parable of grace.

Two follow-ups to my post on Robert Jenson. First, and precisely in relation to Glenn Gould, I should have mentioned the prominence of musical imagery in Jens’s own theology: God as fugue, creation as harmony (the latter a major theme in his beloved Jonathan Edwards). There’s a reason Chris Green’s excellent companion to Jenson’s thought is titled The End Is Music.

Second, as prickly as Jens could be at times, he was also extraordinarily generous. If you showed up at his office in Princeton and just wanted to shoot the breeze, he’d make clear he had no time for it. But if you came to him with a serious question or asked him to read your work in progress, he would give you his undivided attention. I was present at an AAR panel once where six younger scholars delivered short (c. 15 minutes) papers on a set topic. Then Jens got up and responded to all six papers, making incisive criticisms to be sure, but also reading charitably and offering words of encouragement to his junior colleagues. It was a tour de force of teaching and mentorship.

Alan begins his recent Hedgehog Review essay on Glenn Gould like this:

“My friend Elizabeth Corey, a pianist as well as a political philosopher, tells me, ‘You can’t unhear Gould.’ A simple but important statement. The music of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–1982) is so distinctive, so memorable, even today so surprising, that once experienced, it stays in your mind and can easily become the frame of reference by which you evaluate other pianists.”

When I read this, I couldn’t help thinking of the late Robert Jenson (1930-2017), who may be to the theological world what Gould was to music. Like Gould, Jenson could be temperamental, quirky, and demanding. He attacked sentences the way Gould attacked the keyboard: with energy and precision. I may go to my grave still not knowing whether his radical metaphysics of the gospel “rhymes” (a favorite Jensonian metaphor) with the larger Christian tradition. I would like to think it does. He’s sometimes accused of being a Hegelian. But the more salient thinker for him was Luther, and behind Luther, Paul and the gospels. His whole project could be seen as a thought experiment revolving around the question, “what if reality is defined not by ‘being’ or ‘substance’ but by the life, death, and resurrection of this one Jewish man?”

But, well … agree with him or not, you can’t unhear Jenson. He writes so clearly that there’s nowhere to hide: when you read him, you can easily identify what the key claims are and where he might be challenged. There’s a sparse, crystalline beauty to his prose: as if Barth’s Dogmatics had been written by Wittgenstein, or possibly Hemingway. One of Jens’s greatest achievements was to have been profoundly influenced by Barth without ever becoming a Barthian. He went his own Lutheran and evangelically catholic way. His theology is “so memorable, even today so surprising, that once experienced, it stays in your mind and can easily become the frame of reference by which you evaluate other theologians.”

My son and I went to see Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day last weekend. It was great fun. As many reviewers have noted, there was an air of “Spielberg’s greatest hits” about it, with allusions to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET among others, and a spirit of Indiana Jones throughout (lots of chase scenes).

There was some pop theology thrown in there, about the impact the discovery of alien life might have on traditional faith. Most of this fell flat for me. Jonathan Mitchican deals sensitively with these issues in his review in Covenant.

Mostly, though, I ignored the religious aspect and tried to enjoy the movie on its own terms. Emily Blunt is good as always, while Colin Firth is excellent as the heavy who wants to prevent the “disclosure.”

Happy Canada Day. It seems a good day to pay tribute to David Cayley, who died on June 10 here in Toronto. I only learned about David’s death last week, just in time to attend the memorial service at St. James Cemetery. I didn’t know David well, but the times I spent with him were delightful. At Ephraim Radner’s and my invitation David attended several theology pubs with our doctoral students, generously sharing his knowledge of Ivan Illich’s thought, his ideas on technology and medicine, and a lot more.

At the memorial service, I was chatting with one of David’s musician friends, and mentioned that I was an “Ivan Illich friend.” The man said to me: “Who’s Ivan Illich?” I find this rather wonderful—David moved in many worlds, not all of which were even aware of the others. Michael Sacasas has written movingly about David’s gift for friendship on The Convivial Society.

David was playing music with his bluegrass group when he died. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.