Closed Circles

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In his book Enchantments, which I continue to pore over, Rev. Thomas M. King, S. J., speaks of how a verbal enchantment can make of those who are entranced by it a "closed circle" that excludes all who are not caught up in the enchantment. Such was the case with the words of the prophets in the Old Testament. When the Jews were in exile, they were sustained as a people by the likes of Isaiah, who wrote: "O my people, who dwell in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrians" (10:24).

The prophets had foretold what actually happened: the destruction of Jerusalem by the Jews' pagan enemies. Yet, King writes (pp. 103-104):

If the prophetic words [had once] disheartened the nation, they sustained it when fortifications and arms were not to be had. In the Babylonian exile the captive Jews would have lost their hope, if they had not been supported by the prophetic word. And they would have lost their identity if their words had not made of them a "closed circle" ... with its familiar clichés. The words had a power to hold the community together and bring courage into being.

Words, even familiar clichés, can speak to us with power when

... all we see before us is "a grayish sea of ambiguity." We seem to be looking for something else — someone who will speak to us so that we will pass out of ourselves into the other. If that happens, everything is changed. At such a moment, the words spoken may be few, but they can change the direction of our life. (p. 105)

This, I think, is exactly what evangelicals experience when they say they have been "born again."


A new documentary, Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi, premiered last night on HBO. It depicts the lives and beliefs of the estimated 50 to 80 million evangelical Christians living in America today. Pelosi is an Emmy-wining filmmaker and the daughter of new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. As I watched her interviews with leading evangelicals such as ...

Pastor Ted Haggard, who recently stepped down as president of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals — the largest evangelical group in the U.S. — following allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute and bought illegal drugs (see the synopsis of the documentary here)

... I was struck by the way many of the interviewees talked as if they had been programmed by a cult. A very large cult. There was a notable absence of independent thought.

For example, when several interviewees were asked whether they believed in the theory of evolution, all responded to the effect that, no, they believed in the Bible and creation, and that it was evolutionists who could be accused of parroting a pre-programmed package of thought. Yet Pelosi's footage shows anti-evolutionist preachers and lecturers in action, feeding anti-evolution notions into the heads of Christian adults, teens, and pre-teens, in what I found to be a scary, chilling litany of vibrant, well-honed rhetoric and potent musical singalong.

In other words, the documentary showed me that if you're born again, you're apt to be subjected to religious and quasi-religious enchantments that serve to make all who are like you into a proverbial "closed circle," staunchly defending a party line on what is and is not true.


The born-again Christians in the documentary are not unlike the Jews held in captivity in Babylon, in the following sense. They feel they are a put-upon minority, strangers in a strange, secular land. Mouthing things like "America was founded by Christians" and "This is a Christian country," they feel they ought to be — and someday soon will be — the majority voice in the land.

According to my history books, the Founding Fathers indeed were mostly Christians of various stripes. But many of them were, as was Thomas Jefferson, deists who held that the Creator is no longer involved in human affairs. Some were of Puritan stock; it is not clear to me that the Puritans should be counted among the ranks of born-again evangelicals. Many were Anglicans, or what we now call Episcopalians. Quite a few were Lutherans or Catholics, neither denomination being particularly evangelical. There were Quakers and Methodists, Baptists and Anabaptists, Presbyterians and Calvinists ... but I am not aware of any signers of the Declaration of Independence who claimed to be born again.

Yet today's evangelicals are convinced we are on the threshold of a new Jerusalem.

This can take the form of expecting Jesus's imminent Second Coming. Different evangelicals have different notions of how the world's "End Days" are to play out, but there seems to be a general tendency to champion the cause of Israel's Jews, in furtherance of the prophecy in the Book of Revelation concerning their putatively necessary role in it all. If the Jews aren't living in Palestine, the thinking goes, it can't happen. But it has to happen, so we Christians need to do our part by making sure the Palestinians don't expel Jews from the Holy Land.

In other words, Israeli Jews have lately become members emeritus of an American evangelical "closed circle."


Looked at abstractly, evangelical belief seems to hold that the history of the confusing, chaotic, material world is about to be subsumed into that of the ideal world, directly under the will of God. Very soon now, those pesky differences between what is and what ought to be — the condition which I generally term worldly "injustice" — are going to go away. If we all hope real hard for this to happen, it will happen, and sooner rather than later.

I see this sort of thinking as a way to stave off the Second Baptism which King speaks of, the one that inaugurates in us a true spirituality of humanity and compassion. It staves it off by obviating the Dark Night of the Soul — the descent into a whirligig of confusion, doubt, and temptation — which necessarily precedes the Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

Not that evangelicals aren't compassionate. Toward others in their closed circle they are most caring indeed. As Ted Haggard pointed out in the documentary, when a member of his 14,000-member New Life Church phones 911 in a medical emergency, someone from the church community is likely to get there before the ambulance does. A megachurch, he says, is very much like an old-time village or township, providing all the fellowship and brotherhood those vanished institutions once did.

The problem, as I see it, is that the compassion is not universal. It does not extend much beyond the church community, or the larger community of American evangelicals ... with notable exceptions being made for members emeritus such as Israeli Jews and for those who are being evangelized in hopes that they will become initiates to the cult.

Those who clearly are not about to join the cult are in a different category. A personal anecdote: When I was about 16, I spent a summer with my cousin Susan's family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was taken to Sunday School at their Southern Baptist church. With other kids my age I sat in, yes, a closed circle and heard the teacher/leader put the following question up for discussion: Now that we were reaching an age in which we would be going out on dates, was it a good idea to date people who did not share our religion?

I put up my hand and, as the guest, was called on first. I said it was fine to go out on dates with non-Christians such as Jews, as well as Christians of other denominations such as Catholics, because meeting them and their families would broaden our understanding of other types of people.

That turned out to be the wrong answer. The right answer was that dating non-Baptists could lead to knotty problems if marriage and children ensued, such as in what church to have the wedding and how to raise the offspring.


Extrapolating from that, I assume that in this view non-Baptists (or, at least, non-evangelicals) are to be evangelized, or, failing that, pitied. But pity is not the same as compassion. Pity is suffering for or about the woes of others. Compassion is suffering with others. Jesus did not teach pity. Jesus taught compassion.

His teaching of compassion, furthermore, went beyond the closed circle of his Jewish ancestry by virtue of the cross. King writes (p. 143):

The Gospels proclaim the Good News. Yet the good news is paradoxical, for the Gospels tell of God's chosen One going to a shameful death. In [the Gospel of] John the paradox is even more striking [in that it is] a stunning revelation of divine Glory. A contemporary exegete has explained the Jewish background of the term: "In the [Old Testament] the glory of God implies a visible and powerful manifestation of God to men" ... . For John the Glory of God was fully manifest only in the passion when Jesus was raised on the cross.

Late in his public ministry Jesus was told that some Greeks wanted to see him. This interest — from non-Jews, from those outside the closed circle — indicated to Jesus that his time of preaching was over. He responded, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified" (12:23). That is, his preaching was for a "closed circle" of listeners, those who shared a common book; hearing of the interest of the Gentiles he knew that his time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence. Raised on the cross he would be present in the full absurdity of the human scene, but then his message would become universal; he continued, "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (12:23). The power of the crucifixion would extend beyond the "closed circle."

It would do so in a way beyond words and sense, beyond the clichés of the book faithful Jews held in common, beyond preaching and verbal enchantments. It would pose a riddle for one all to contemplate in the depths of the spirit: how could one so high be glorified by being brought so low as to be executed like an ordinary criminal? What does this paradox say to us?

Moreover, how does it say it to us? Not with words alone. King says (pp. 143-144):

As the passion began Jesus again spoke of it as his time of glory ("Now is the Son of Man glorified"). By his passion he would become a "visible and powerful manifestation of God" to all the world. His glory would be manifest on the cross where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated.

... Zen [Buddhist] masters ... lead their disciples to the point of illumination by proposing koans for their consideration. These koans [are] paradoxes which ... take the disciple beyond words. The most famous koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" One is not able to conceive of one hand clapping, yet one meditated on this or other koans until one "saw" apart from meaning; phenomena apart from meaning was the illumination. The Jews lived in a world of meaning, for, having received the heavenly word, everything was meaningful. But by their book they also formed a "closed circle with their own clichés. During the days of his ministry Jesus was drawing those within the circle — the Gentiles would be drawn a different way. ... The phenomena itself would be the revelation, his time of Glory.

Think of it: according to John, the final glory of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, comes to all of us alike in beholding a phenomenon without words. A riddle, a paradox, a koan, an incomprehensible cross is needed to take us out of our hitherto closed circles and into an attitude of universal community and compassion. Here, then, is a crucial part of the Christian message which evangelicals seem to have forgotten!

Impulse Control

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In his book Enchantments, Fr. Thomas M. King, S. J., describes a spirituality of any type as a way of dealing with the impulses and urges within us, given that they lie outside the domain of the rational will. In general, an act is potentially sinful only to the extent that it is willful. If something wrong is done as a result of a mere impulse, uncensored by rational intent, it is in a different category of transgression.

Christian ethics and morality seek to train the will to want only right and proper things, but as King points out, none of us can suppress our urges and impulses entirely. We may dedicate ourselves to serving an ethical ideal. Then we may encounter a Dark Night of the Soul, when we realize that our chaotic inner impulses have refused to die. Oddly, the next stage of religious development is quite marvelous: a "second baptism" into a true spirituality.

Impulses are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. However, they need to be placed under some sort of control, some "decider" which tells us in which direction to move after an impulse has propelled us to make a change in our life, or even just to alter something in our momentary situation.

King suggests this is the province of the Spirit of God, which, the Bible says, "blows where it will." The Spirit, that is, does not adhere to rules that can be stated in words, in the way that a rational ethic does. (This is why King says that the Bible cannot always be read literally, as if all divine truth could be conveyed in flat, everyday prose.)

I am put in mind of a scene in the movie The Apostle where the protagonist, Robert Duvall, is kicked out by wife Farrah Fawcett for his philandering ways. He is nonetheless a holy man. As he motors along toward some sort of new life, he asks the Good Lord for direction by driving his car round and round in circles in a deserted intersection until an impulse tells him which highway to take.

I think this is something my evangelical/charismatic friends Chris and Dee (see Aspiration and Inspiration) are intimately familiar with. They are always talking about how God is "leading" them to do this or that, a locution which I interpret as meaning that the Spirit is moving them in a particular direction. Or, in terms of the urges and impulses that they feel as complex human beings, I think they are saying that they experience one particular impulse, among the riot of possibilities that well naturally up within them, which they feel has God's sanction and bears his blessing. It is that particular one which deserves to be followed. It is that one which marks the highway they need to take, at the proverbial crossroads.

Activating Compassion

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

I wonder how many people, Christian or not, know of the Gospels' reference to a baptism that happens after the first, familiar one, that by water. The second baptism, of fire and spirit, is crucial to the understanding of the faith which is explicated by Thomas M. King, S.J., in his book Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris).

If the first baptism is the seal of righteousness, the second is the precondition of compassion. It is the guarantor that righteousness does not mean self-righteousness.

The first baptism is that of being spellbound by a verbal enchanter — Jesus was such a one — being taken up out of oneself to an ideal world above this one, a paradisal world of perfect justice in comparison to which our world of impure sense experience can seem utter darkness. We can be so taken by the Word that we seek wholly to abandon the World. This is the Night of the Senses. After it, as various knights-errant, we may devote ourselves to serving our ethical and moral ideals to the exclusion of giving free expression to our own needs and interests.

This typically brings on a Night of the Soul, since such purity of adherence to any impersonal verbal formula or set of commandments is ultimately, we tend to find to our chagrin, beyond our ability. Temptation intervenes in our lives, just as it did for Jesus when he was thrice tempted by the devil in the desert. That is when our baptism of fire can, if we are as steadfast as Jesus was, become a baptism of spirit, a germination of our inborn capacity for humanity an dhumility into the habit of compassion. Compassion, in which we confront the ways in which we are all equally prone to temptation and imperfection, to suffering and weakness, is seemingly the key to the kingdom of heaven on earth.

This is the paradigm of religious experience which King refines from his reading of scripture; from the spiritual biographies of Thomas Merton and Ignatius Loyola; from medieval mystical writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing; as well as from the Dialogues of Plato, Faust, Don Quixote, and a host of other works.

When I peruse King's book, I find it totally convincing. But after putting it down, I find myself asking questions. One of these is that with which I opened above: why is it that so few people think of the Christian faith as one in which the germination of humanity into full-fledged compassion is the crucial point?


We think of righteousness first, and only then (maybe) compassion as the prime directive of Christian living ... right? Righteousness, as in holiness, uprightness, rectitude, or probity; as in virtue, decency, goodness, honesty, integrity. As in being free of sin and going to heaven rather than hell when we die. If we serve God and not Satan, we do so first and foremost by our pious faith, by our turning away from sin, no? That is how we save our souls.

Not only does compassion come in a distant second to moral compunction, some even see religion as the enemy of compassion. In the current issue of TIME magazine, scientist Steven Pinker's article on "The Mystery of Consciousness" betrays such an attitude. Pinker suggests we may never be able to solve the "Hard Problem" about consciousness, no matter how much we learn about the workings of the brain. That problem is the one I talked about in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts (the last of which was "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans"). To wit, how does our brain give rise to the sheer experience of undergoing its own activity, as we internally monitor its subjective nature? Or, why is it like something to see the color green?

Pinker notes that the religious idea of the soul is akin to this notion that consciousness is an ethereal reality above and beyond the workings of the brain. Lewis Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell, according to this article on personal grief in a recent edition of The Baltimore Sun,

... that it would be odd for nature to waste anything as complex as consciousness. "I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for the biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter."

If that's what consciousness is, severable at the filaments of its attachment, then maybe that's also what the soul is. But Pinker nixes that easy identity of soul with consciousness — without going so far as to deny the validity of the Hard Problem, as does philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is a much more impassioned atheist than Pinker is.

Pinker expresses his own distaste for religious belief in his final section, "Toward a New Morality." He finds the scientific impenetrability of consciousness to be an aid to compassion. If each person knows that he or she is conscious as a mysterious property of brain functioning — however unprovable that fact of one's consciousness may be to skeptical others — then every other person with demonstrably similar brain function must be seen also a like vessel of conscious experience, entitled to the same consideration we give to ourselves: "Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer."

Religion with its concern for the advancement of the individual soul to the afterlife is, to Pinker, the enemy of such a recognition. It can promote cruelty, not compassion: "Just remember the most famous people in recent history who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11."

I'd say that's a caricature — nay, a corruption, a demonic parody — of the idea of religion. Yet it's one to which many religious practitioners are prone, in the name of God or Allah. It's simply incorrect for Pinker to fall into the trap of identifying a thing with its demonic parody. Yet it's understandable that he and others do so. In fact, I'd say it's far more important for someone to find his or her own compassion than to be right about religion.

Aspiration and Inspiration

I recently received in the mail a flier from Heather K. telling of her youth group's plans to evangelize in Europe this summer of 2007. Heather is the teenage daughter of good friends of mine who I think it is fair to say are among America's huge number of evangelical Christians, though they could also be described as charismatic as well. Heather's youth group, the flier said, is looking forward to preaching God's word in countries that they feel have pretty much lost touch with it.

I know there is widespread sentiment on this side of the Atlantic that the Europeans are a bunch of rank atheists, but I can testify from my multiple visits there that there are plenty of Christians in Europe and plenty of churches, some of which I have attended beautiful services in.

One of the things that distorts our understanding of this is that American Christianity has a strong evangelical orientation that seems to be lacking in much of Europe. My guess is that it's because evangelicalism fits in so well with upward socioeconomic mobility in America, but in Europe the movers and the shakers tend to be the ones who have abandoned religious values for secular ones.

Meanwhile the "ordinary" folks in Europe are still religious, but in a quieter way since they don't necessarily aspire to the next rung up the ladder. In this country, folks who are climbing the socioeconomic ladder see God as an awesome, mighty force in aiding that process. In other words, how we experience God depends on how we experience life. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to make Christians of different styles talk past one another, rather than to one another.


Those are the kinds of things I told Heather's parents, Chris and Dee, in an e-mail I have just sent them today — in which I also told them I have mailed Heather a small donation in support of her trip. It just so happened that Chris and Dee e-mailed me to find out how I've been doing, and I received their missive on a morning after I had awakened during the night with a host of thoughts concerning evangelicalism in American religion.

My primary thought was this: I have to admit, personally, to having an anti-evangelical bias in my own religious sensibility.

In trying to explain that to myself, I began to focus on the notion that I have never been in the position of aspiring to a great deal more socioeconomically than the life without want I was born into as the son of parents from the American heartland or Bible Belt whose own upward trajectory — a very successful one, in material terms — I would call sort of "European," in a broad sense. Or, at least, cosmopolitan.

Harold Francis Stewart and Leota Isabel Berry Stewart, my beloved parents, now dead, were among the generation of Americans who became teenagers in the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when religious backgrounds (she was Southern Baptist, he Methodist) were experienced by many Americans as hindrances to the high life that could be theirs if they threw off old-fashioned strictures and shackles of religious observance.

My family did very little churchgoing in my youth, though some of my mother's large family stayed faithful to the old-time religion. They stayed away from big cities and remained back in the Midwestern states which Mom and Dad had left behind to make a better life, during the Great Depression, in the "godless" East. Of course, the metropolitan East wasn't really godless, but neither was it evangelical. Religion was mostly a private affair.

My parents kept it so private that, today, I am not quite sure exactly what they believed about God, or how much they believed it. I do remember one dinner-table conversation in which they told me how the home of my maternal grandfather, William Palmer Berry, a man who was trained as a lay preacher in the Southern Baptist Convention, was run so strictly that there was no listening to records or the radio, no dancing, no card playing ... and, of course, no cigarette smoking or alcohol drinking.

My father's father, Willis Warder Stewart, was also a stern sort, in a Methodist way rather than a Southern Baptist one — I never quite caught on to the difference, if there was one. All I knew is that my parents had abandoned religion, while still clinging to some belief in God. They were not, strictly speaking, freethinkers, but their lives had been strongly influenced by the free thought of the likes of, say, H.L. Mencken.

Mencken was the newspaper reporter and columnist who had emerged from strictly local renown in Baltimore, Maryland, to a national audience through his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. This was the famous trial of a local schoolteacher accused of violating state law by teaching evolution. Mencken assailed the Dayton townsfolk who resented Darwinism and set up the prosecution of John Scopes as benighted ones "unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible" (see this account of his coverage).

My parents felt that success in this world — what I think of as the high life — would follow upon the relinquishing of such benighted, fundamentalist attitudes.

In other words, their aspirations were such as to lead them away from religion. I think for Chris and Dee, as for countless other evangelicals today, it is just the opposite. Aspiration and inspiration are inseparably linked in their religion and in their life experience.


In mid-adulthood I became a Christian. But, rather than having a born-again experience, I gravitated toward and eventually became a member of the Roman Catholic faith. In other words, instead of emphasizing the evangelical, as so many Americans, my life experience has been more of the Old World variety, even down to the style of Christianity I felt drawn to.

I remember during my childhood watching, on that first new TV that entered our home in the primitive 1950s, one of the early televangelists thumping his Bible and asking members of his live audience to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I also remember my mother saying something disparaging about it — her exact words are ones I can't recall. All I know is that it left me with a distaste for that kind of religion, which persists to this day.

In my middle-of-the-night musing about such things, I realized my distaste may be in large part a matter of not wanting to re-associate myself with the socioeconomic class my parents left behind on their rise to the upper middle class.

Or perhaps the class to which I refer was the one their parents had left behind in moving from the recurrent edge of poverty to what I think of as a staid "middle middle class" existence in the American heartland. I may have this wrong, and if so I apologize to any whose feelings I offend, but my impression is that evangelicalism appeals mainly to the peculiarly American socioeconomic stratum that I think of as poor Scotch-Irish and their ilk.

The Scotch-Irish in America, my ancestors, are the descendants of Protestant people who moved away from oppression and penury in Scotland centuries back, to take up residence in Northern Ireland. After their prospects there dimmed, many sought a brave new world in America — including my direct Stewart antecedent, one of three brothers who came here from Ulster at about the time of the War of 1812. One brother struck it rich as the founder of the world's first department store, A. T. Stewart's, later Wanamaker's, but the other two, including my lineal forebear Robert Stewart, weren't so lucky. My heritage on both sides of my family — not all of it identifiably Scotch-Irish, by the way — came through ancestors who often had to struggle to make ends meet.

All my grandparents were devoted to their religion, as far as I can tell, but I received no inkling that they were particularly evangelical in their religious style. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, my paternal grandfather had remarried after mourning the death, some time back, of his first wife, my true grandmother. Then he died before I could get to know him. As for the grandparents on my mother's side, I did get to spend some time with them before their own rather early deaths, but I never knew them as particularly fervent religious types. True, when we went to visit them in Springfield, Missouri, my mother had to slip into the bedroom to sneak a smoke, or, along with my Dad, a wee nip. But I don't recall being taken to church on a Sunday or hearing much in the way of religious talk. And there were the games I'd play with Grandpa Berry, checkers and Chinese checkers, to make him seem like a regular guy. There was a bit of a dust-up, as I recall, over whether I was allowed to chew gum in their house... but a lot of that generation, born in the second half of the 19th century, thought gum-chewing was "common"; it wasn't just religious evangelicals.

The point is, I don't really know why my grandparents weren't terribly evangelical, but I suspect it was because they had attained their early aspirations of middle-class security and respectability long before I came along. That, and they were no longer young and full of zeal.


By the time my parents were thinking about leaving their respective nests, the smart set back East were well known across the land as having traded in the old-style religion for a high life of sophistication and glamor. My father wanted to follow in the footsteps of Mencken ... but W.W. Stewart couldn't afford at the crucial moment to put him through journalism school at the University of Missouri. H.F. Stewart instead joined the Army; served in peacetime Hawaii; turned down Officer Candidate School to spare his intended wife, my mother, a vagabond life of military bases; married and brought his new wife to Washington, D.C., to latch on as a policeman; rose through the ranks; took time out to serve as Executive Officer on a ship in the Pacific in World War II; came home to take Mom on a belated honeymoon and engender his only child, me; and wound up Chief of Police just as I was turning seven years old.

Their world was indeed, I found, one of cosmopolitan sophistication — though later events would show what a thin veneer that sophistication really was. My father even admitted it: at heart he and his Missouri-days associates were still the hillbillies they always were, men who would visit moonshine stills in the Ozarks backwoods during Prohibition to get their dram of liquor. In his salad days, Dad would come to drink 12-year-old Scotch whisky, but in later life he reverted to Maker's Mark bourbon, bless his soul.

One of the things I don't quite get about the poorer whites of the not-too-distant American past — my own ethnic heritage — is this distinction between the born-again set and the moonshine crowd, some of whom were the same people. I have extended family in both camps. Part of me is in both camps!


That's because I'm basically a straddler, from straddler stock. I look at the situation this way: the evangelical spirit is kept alive in folks who in the Old West would have been gunslingers and card sharps and saloon girls, if not for having been saved by Jesus Christ. In more recent times they might have been moonshine runners, not just partakers like my sainted daddy. Being born again is what has put these folks, in their modern incarnations, firmly on the other side of the fault line of sin from their wilder doppelgangers. It is what keeps their energies and zest and zeal from turning rancid. It is what makes them sheriffs, not gunslingers.

As a straddler, I have one foot on each side of that fault line. I identify not with gunslingers and sheriffs, but with "peaceable townsfolk" who can secret a bottle of illicit liquor in their pantry and who believe in minding their own business about the equally minor transgressions of others.

I identify with the old sawbones doctor who may have a drinking problem. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, with all these booze references, since I myself consume no more than a beer with dinner.) Rather than toting a gun, though, he digs bullets out of those who do.

A literary hero of mine is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, who trumpets no religion but bears malice toward none and charity for all, the way Jesus did.

It is possible to be upstanding as a straddler — like Atticus was and I would like to be — but it is apparently not possible to be an evangelical. I am not able to be a trumpeter of religion. Such a trumpeting of righteous fervor makes no sense to a straddler, who knows the other side of the fault line to be but one tiny hop away.

Which has the curious side effect of making the straddler suspicious of those who find socioeconomic aspiration and religious inspiration to go so easily together. Sorry, Chris and Dee. Sorry, all ye evangelicals of this land.

Beyond Enchantment: A Spirit of Compassion

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

I focus once again on Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). The more I read it (or, actually, re-read it) the more convinced I become that King puts his finger on the true pulse of what a mature Christian life is all about. Specifically, it is about compassion.

I have talked in earlier posts about the idea of the unavailability of perfect justice in this world, taken as a cornerstone of Christian understanding. I found I was having a hard time pinning down exactly what I mean by justice ... or, rather, by injustice. It gradually dawns on me that my definition of injustice is this: anything that is capable of evoking our compassion.

It seems to me that most of us begin life pretty much blind to injustice ... except, of course, when we ourselves are its victim. Nor does real, human compassion exist as much more than a seed of potentiality within us. What causes that seed to germinate? King suggests an answer: we become "enchanted" by a verbal text, seek to exemplify it fully and to live by it perfectly, and eventually run aground on the sheer impossibility of ever doing so completely.

Then ensues a Dark Night of the Soul, followed by a Second Baptism. The First Baptism, that of Righteousness, is what happens when we take up the task of living strictly by a verbal rule or text. The Dark Night is what overtakes us when we find that such rules from on high — in Christian terms, the Word of God — cannot fully subdue either our sense-experience of this world or our impulses to do otherwise than obey rules. Only then are we ready for a Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

These are things spoken of in the Gospels and by Christian mystics down through the ages. But we hear very little about them from the pulpit today. A Second Baptism? Why, even the First Baptism tends to take place in infancy, in most churches, prior to the onset of mature experience. Not much commitment at that stage to living righteously, in accordance with a verbal text.

Yet there are in the Gospels the experiences of Two Baptisms. The second one, the Baptism of Fire and Spirit, corresponds to Jesus's threefold temptation in the desert by Satan, after his own First Baptism at the hands of John the Baptist. At that time Jesus had consented to live solely by his Father's word: Christians now call that body of text the Old Testament. A voice from Heaven had proclaimed, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Yet Jesus would have to do more than live that Word. As Flesh, he would have to suffer and die. He would be the victim of such a colossal injustice that his death and resurrection would save us all. Extrapolating from what King says about this, one feels justified in imagining it could not have been possible had Jesus the Man not learned to get beyond the mere enchantment of the divine Word. He had to understand what it was like for us, in an unjust world, in which every verbal formula eventually stubs its toe on the hard rock of woe.

Compassion is only possible when we see that words and formulas alone don't bring full justice to this material world. Righteousness can be taught by rote. Compassion cannot. Perhaps paradoxically, the Christian answer to this difficult truth is not cynically to abandon all words and formulas and rotes, but to travel beyond them as a creature of Word and Spirit, of righteousness and compassion.

Justice Versus Chaos

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) discusses Jesus' temptation in the desert by the devil at some greater length than the actual story that is presented in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The version of Matthew 4, verses 1 through 11, is perhaps the longest and most canonical one.

Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist and heard a voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." He has accordingly consented to hitch his personal destiny to the living out of a text, specifically, the first Servant Song of the Book of Isaiah as cited by Matthew 12:8: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles."

Before that can happen, though, Jesus must be tested. Like all who attempt to live by a book, he must receive a second baptism, that of fire and Spirit. It is only thus that he, the Son of God, can fully identify with human weakness while still embodying the Word.

So Jesus fasts in the desert for forty days, led or driven there by the Spirit of God, and is tempted thrice by Satan. Satan first tempts him by seeing whether, in his grievous hunger, he will easily abandon the Word in order to assuage his nagging appetite by turning the very stones into loaves of bread. Jesus passes this test: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."

Changing tactics as befits his role as spiritus vertiginis, the spirit of confusion, Satan then tempts Jesus to do the exact opposite: to dismiss the reality of the physical world in which bread is necessary at all. Satan recommends that Jesus be like an angel and soar across the sky. But Jesus rejects the implicit bifurcation of his bodily experience: "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."

Jesus is in danger of being torn in two by competing extremes — fidelity to the Word, and giving in to the necessities of life in the material world. The sciences of chaos have shown that bifurcation, pressed to the extreme, can in fact turn order to chaos.

King is spot on here: "The mind becomes a whirligig of identities: at one moment one is a bodily appetite and the ideal does not count, then one identifies with the ideal and the body does not count. The mind is caught in a witch's dance — a dance wherein one does not know if he is there and the witch is absent, or if the witch is there and he is absent. Half-real identities alternate with increasing rapidity." Such is the run-up to total chaos, science shows.

Satan's third temptation is thus his most cunning: cynical acquiescence in the chaos of a whirligig world. Satan urges Jesus to, as his worshipful viceroy, seize power over the nations. Instead of proclaiming a single justice to the Gentiles — to the "nations," in the Jewish term — he will merely rule them, one and all, in their disunited multiplicity.

But the science of chaos also shows that there is a hidden new order that can emerge out of sheer chaos, if it is pressed to extreme — a third way between the horns of the dilemma of Word versus world, as it were. Jesus found that way when he refused to kneel to Satan: "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve."

Hence Jesus, having passed the third and last test, "would give first place to the Word of God; secondly, he would understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world," whose legion competing injustices sow chaos (p. 120).

Chaos is accordingly a stand-in for the devil's own confusion as the enemy of not only order but final divine justice. We in our human weakness live in a world that turns whirligig too easily, yet in which a not-quite-yet rule of divine, uniting justice is always "at hand." It behooves us, King writes, to experience the two baptisms Jesus experienced: the first of water and Word, and the second of fire and Spirit.

It admittedly seems a tall order, in a cynical and chaotic world. Yet faith tells us that justice will prevail.

Justice Theology III

In Justice Theology and Justice Theology II I have tried to name justice as the main concern of the Bible. In both cases I feel I have failed to adequately convey what I mean by justice and why I think it's topic number one in holy writ. I have just come across a short story in The New Yorker that I think makes the point perfectly, if elliptically. It is "The Bible," by Marguerite Duras, translated from French by Deborah Treisman.

The story tells of a young man and woman, without names, who meet casually in Paris and proceed to have a passionless affair. Except when they go to bed together, they talk only of "Islam and the Bible." Or, rather, he talks; she, mostly bored, listens. Though he doesn't believe in God (neither does she) he has a lifelong obsession with scripture — Jewish, Christian, Muslim. He is buying a 16th-century Hebrew Bible on layaway! That is his only dream.

The story's last paragraph packs a wallop:

He bought her a pair of stockings; he was a kind man. But since they’d begun sleeping together, she had no joy in her life. One night, she understood why. I am not made for him, she told herself. All her strength, her youthful joie de vivre seemed to shrivel in his presence; she couldn’t help it. Still, she was flattered. In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them. But she did try to please him; in the evening she read the Gospels, as he had asked her to. What Christ said to his mother made her want to cry. That he had been crucified so young, before his mother’s eyes, was even more revolting. But—it wasn’t her fault—she couldn’t go beyond a certain level of emotion. She did not think that he was God, this man. She thought that he was a man who’d had very noble plans; his death gave him back his humanity, which meant that she was unable to read his story without thinking of that of her own father, who had died the year before, crushed by an industrial wagon, one year before his retirement. He’d been the victim of an injustice that had begun long ago. That injustice had never ceased to exist on earth—it continued through the generations of man.

At the risk of ruining its literary delicacy, I take the passage to suggest that the nameless heroine, like so many of us, can make no strong connection between the religion of the Bible and her sense of "an injustice that had begun long ago," that "had never ceased to exist on earth," and that had "continued through the generations of man." Even the injustice committed at Calgary bears, for her, faint resemblance to her own immediate experience of her father's untimely and excruciating death.

It seems to me that the Bible is the story of our humanity: of that unceasing, pervasive injustice, and its eventual remedy.

It seems to me that there is no book that takes the injustice of the world more seriously than the Bible does.

And it seems to me that we have grown tone deaf to the story, as has Duras' heroine ... and her Bible-besotted hero, as well. He can quote Ecclesiastes from memory, yet it is but a vanity to him, a feat. In all his fetishistic obsession with the Koran and the Old and New Testaments there is no comprehension. There is no passion. There is no humanity.

Justice Theology II

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Justice Theology I started (actually, continued) weaving ideas I got from Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) into a semblance of a Christian theology based on the idea that the key to understanding the Bible is its concern with justice.

By justice I mean ... what? Intuitively, I'd say, justice is whatever is "meant to be" by God. The world, to the extent that it is not what God had in mind for it, is unjust.

That's a pretty big extent. Injustice, as I think of it, either is co-extensive with evil, or it subsumes it. We hear an awful lot about sin and evil from the pulpit, or at least we used to before religion began downplaying these harsh ideas to keep people in the pews. Nowadays, we have to read theology books to hear much about Christianity's take on evil.

Yet as soon as you start reading up on the "problem of evil" in a theology book, you immediately run into a hitch. Evil is always discussed as a concept within a particular systematic approach to theology. If you read a theology book based on a different systematic approach, you get a different take on evil.

But the people who first spoke the words of the Hebrew Bible, even before they were written down — and the auditors who first listened to them — didn't have a systematic theology. They had an experience of injustice, having been held captive in Egypt, and later in Babylon. The destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of pagan foreigners smacked of the possibility that the Jews' just God had punished or deserted them. How to keep their unique faith intact and hold themselves together as a people was more than an intellectual question for them. Their concern for justice was their very identity.


King's book tells us, in speaking about John the Baptist, that

His message concerned justice, and like any good ethician, he spelled it out in detail: "He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none"; tax collectors were told to "collect no more than is appointed," and soldiers were to "rob no one by violence" (Lk 3:11). John was preaching social justice as the [Old Testament] prophets had before him. ... His baptism of "righteousness" called for confession of sins, a washing in the Jordan, and a moral reform. ... [One must begin] the transformation with a moral reform: one committed oneself to the careful observance of a law. Only after the moral reform did one go to the second baptism, a Baptism of Fire and Spirit. John did not administer the second baptism, but he promised another who would (p. 116).

The second baptism would be administered by Jesus, whom John did not yet know when he said, "I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" (Mt 3:11).

Jesus submitted himself to John's baptism first, before embarking on his own mission. He did this "to fulfill all righteousness." A prophesy of Isaiah thus came true: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles" (Mt 12:18).

As King points out, Jesus' baptismal commitment to harness his personal future to the preordination of a religious text was quickly put to the test by Satan, who tempted Jesus three times during his forty-day sojourn in the desert. Thus did Jesus prove he would hold fast, and would "give first place to the Word of God" in all its justice and righteousness. From that point on, though, he would also "understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything)" (p. 120).

Accordingly Jesus, in identifying fully with human weakness, went beyond justice without undermining justice in the slightest. How it is even possible for anyone to do that — especially one like Jesus, who was divine — is a riddle, a conundrum, and a paradox.

King likens Jesus' temptation by the devil to the dark night of the soul spoken of by later Christian mystics. After an enchantment by the word of God or any other ethical text, the believer inevitably founders on the shoals of an eventual disillusionment. Ultimately the "difficulties in identifying with a text" come to the fore. Good! As long as the believer does not renounce the Word, the Second Baptism — of fire and Spirit — ensues. Only then does one's true spiritual life really begin.

Parallels with koans used to provoke Zen enlightenment are manifest. The Zen postulant is given by his master a riddle, perhaps "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" This is the koan he must decipher. But it is undecipherable by any normal sort of logic. Good! Only once that is come to grips with is spiritual transformation possible.

But the Zen seeker doesn't just knock on the door of a monastery and get handed a koan right away. He is subjected first to the severest form of discipline, for a very long time, in a sort of religious boot camp. He has to measure up to the highest standard: a stern ethic of right behavior. Only after the Zen master senses the postulant is total in his devotion to the ethic of servitude does the master begin to treat the seeker with any sort of decency.

Likewise, King says, the baptism into righteousness offered by John the Baptist came along with the insistence on an ethical standard of behavior, a submission of the ego and the will to exacting norms. Still and all, "John and his baptism were not final; they were the first and lesser part of a double process" (p. 116). The second and greater part involved a riddle, a Jewish koan if you will. How could a God of pure righteousness and perfect justice identify himself with our own human weakness, even unto death on a cross?

Justice Theology

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). In More about Justice I extended my remarks to say that injustice is endemic to our world of experience, both internal or external to the personal soul.

King contrasts the world of sense experience with the Word of God which is spoken to us — and spoken of — in the Bible. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," the gospel of John begins. The point of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is that pre-existent Word.

Words, whether scriptural or not, can enchant us. Stories take us to "another world." In such a story world, justice can win out in the end. Peace and harmony can prevail at last. Order can expunge chaos. What is "meant to be" will actually come to pass in a "new world order."

That is the Bible story in a nutshell. The Bible starts out — after the poetry of God's creation of the universe in Genesis, chapter 1 — in an Eden of peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice. When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, it is as if a primordial symmetry has been broken. Dynamic change has become possible. The bad news is that dynamic change potentiates conflict, disharmony, chaos, and injustice. The good news (gospel means "good news") is that God, at great personal cost, restores peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice at the "end of days."

Symbolically, perfect justice comes when Christ as the "bridegroom" weds his "bride" — us! We are God's partners in bringing justice to the world!


How are we to understand such things as the "fall," the "redemption," the "end times," and the "kingdom that is to come"? If we take these phrases literally, we may look for an actual, tangible, physical "end of the world" ... and quite soon, since the Bible always talks of God's kingdom as imminently arriving. I don't take them literally. Like King, I take them far too seriously to restrict them to their literal meanings. Instead, I take the Bible's "narrative arc" as a template that can be applied again and again to everyday experience.

I am just beginning to apply it in what is for me a new way. I call it "justice theology."

Justice theology sees injustice as the overriding issue of human experience. By injustice, I mean anything other than what is meant to be by God. It can be social or economic injustice, but it can just as well be interpersonal or even sexual injustice.

It can even be intrapersonal injustice. If I don't deal justly with myself — if, for example, I try to be more of an ultra-pure Pharisee than the admittedly flawed Christian that I really am — then a grievous wrong has been done in the world.

Justice theology, accordingly, doesn't believe in whitewashing the world, any more than it believes in whitewashing the soul. It sees injustice as an unavoidable concomitant of the capacity of the world for evolution and change. The idea is to right wrongs wherever they pop up — not to expect to keep them from popping up in the first place.


You can't right wrongs unless you have an ethical standard, and you can't have an ethical standard if you, in King's phrase, "go native" and elevate "the deed" (i.e., whatever happens) over "the word" (the source of the ethical standard: God). Still, you can be enchanted by the phantasmagoria of events, too.

A phantasmagoria of events is a chaos: ever new, ever fresh, ever purposeless. The Word of God never changes. Ethical standards are, at root, absolute, as are divine purposes. These bespeak immutable order, but we, in our lives, live in territory between order and chaos: the edge of chaos.

This is indeed what science shows today. There are dynamical systems that embody order, pure and simple. There are chaotic systems, like the weather. And then there are systems which, like life on earth, are located between order and chaos. These last systems are the only ones that evolve gracefully. Pure order produces nothing new. Pure chaos cannot sustain that which is produced. Only at the edge of chaos can novelty both appear and be sustained.

Justice theology recognizes that systems at the edge of chaos are continually subject to perturbations and hiccups that push them into chaos proper. That's unjust ... but justice can be restored when the system recovers its poise at the edge of chaos. Result: positive evolutionary change.

Justice on earth is dynamic, because events on the evolving earth are dynamic. We are called by Jesus to be "salt of the earth." Salt ... as in the substance used for preserving meat in Jesus's time. By seeking justice in all of its guises and ramifications, we help bring our world out of chaos, time after time after time.

More about Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). From the Old Testament prophets to Jesus, from the letters of St. Paul to Revelation, the message is always that a godly kingdom of heaven, divine and just, is near at hand. The obdurate injustice of our world, of our everyday human experience, will give way to the order, harmony, and peace of a new world ruled by the Word of God.

It is hard for me to speak about this crucial biblical idea — the idea that God's justice wins! — without seeming to say that I have an inerrant sense of what is or is not just in God's eyes. I really don't. All I'm truly saying is that Jesus told the Pharisees, and others who challenged him, about real justice, which was not at all the kind of divine favoritism the Pharisees presumed their holy scriptures promised to them especially.

The Pharisees — and I fear I am pretty much a latter-day Pharisee myself, deep down — sought to export from their closed circle whatever woes living in an unjust world might otherwise bring them. They did this by vilifying and excluding those "unclean" Jews who were poor, ill-educated, crippled, leprous, or otherwise existing outside the Lord's obvious ambit of favor. Along came Jesus and reproached them, the Pharisees, for attempting in that way to immunize themselves against all worldly grievance.

Remember: among Jews at the time the idea of an afterlife was not particularly prominent. If one was not right with God, presumably one knew it by how blessed one was in this life. But God's blessing was not upon the individual so much as upon the nation. Ergo, the Pharisees said, our best bet for a happy life as a people is to cast out from among us whomever seems most infected with God's displeasure.

"Wrong," Jesus preached. "Injustice is part and parcel of the present world. You cannot, in a futile attempt to secure God's favor, export it from your midst by means of excluding the poor and all others whom you don't particularly like from your pristine circle. In fact, that just perpetuates worldly injustice and blocks God's kingdom."

At least for latter-day Pharisees like me, that preaching of Jesus goes against reflex. I admit it ... when I see someone who is sick or deformed or filthy, my first reflex is to get as far away as I can from ... yes, from such signs of injustice. What is less just than being born missing an eye or a limb? What is more foul than being unwashed and having no home to wash in?


It is not hard for me — now, after no small amount of reading and reflection — to see how wrong, how un-Christian, that attitude is ... and how difficult it is to eradicate from my soul.

It begins to look to me as if Jesus knew exactly how difficult it is when he said it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter heaven. By rich, he meant those not poor, not visibly unclean, not seemingly out of favor with the Lord. Injustice pervades the inner world just as it does the outer world. Injustice is endemic to our world of experience, whether internal or external to the soul.

If that weren't so, the Bible would make no sense. Everything in the Bible revolves around the notions of justice and injustice. Why is the world so full of injustice and woe? Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden. What can be done about it? Get right with God. How? Follow the commandments. How best to do that? Love God and treat all his people as any "neighbor" ought to be treated. How? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which means what, exactly? Treat them with justice.


In short, make the kingdom of heaven real, make it come to earth. The Jews speak of this by the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam: "repairing the world." Christians call it "good works." But it's not just about doing good external deeds — it's a spiritual healing of one's inner world as well. As King shows in Enchantments, it requires (metphorically speaking) two baptisms, the first of water and the second of fire and spirit. The first baptism — not the physical act but the inward mark it bestows — gives us our chance at faith, our capacity to become enraptured by the Word of God. The second baptism allows us to re-enter earthly experience, not blinded by the divine light, but changed and charged for the task of reparing the world.

Poetic Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) touches (p. 112) on what I think may be the root question of all Western religion, why do bad things happen to good people?

We, each one of us, have a built-in sense of rightness, of justice. The evidence of this is that we are all capable of being enchanted by stories whose outcomes are somehow "meant to be":

... the verbal world (especially the world of fiction) is ruled by a "poetic justice" (justice underlies most novels and has a strong rhetorical appeal). A verbal world is a world of form wherein all is regulated by Principle. Accordingly, in a novel, hidden goodness and hidden wickedness eventually become manifest and everyone is suitably rewarded (p. 110).

We have an instinct for a just outcome in a perfect world. Outcomes in this, our world, however, so often fail to satisfy it. Bad things happen. Worse, they happen to good people, for no defensible reason. Not everyone is suitably rewarded. Possibly no one gets perfect justice.


As a Christian who most of the time doesn't really "get" his religion all that well, I find I am prone to making a very bad mistake. It is possible to react to "not being suitably rewarded" by assuming as I do, quite erroneously, that one is in fact being fairly treated in life. If one does not feel all that happy with one's lot, he then may (consciously or unconsciously) imagine he has not been "good" enough to deserve better. The remedy would seem to be to live a "holier," more sin-free life.

But reforming one's life can be taken only so far. After enough of that, one becomes not a good Christian but a latter-day Pharisee, "a whitewashed tomb full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Clamping down too hard on the "bad" impulses we all carry around inside us is not what Jesus wants of us.

But why not? Ultimately, the answer seems to be that we and the world we live in are so constituted that we and it cannot be perfectly just, perfectly righteous, perfectly good. As I said in an earlier post, The Problem of the Two Souls, we are all like Faust, with "two souls" dwelling in our bosom. Only the first embodies our sense of perfect justice. The second wants ever fresher and more intense worldly experience, at the expense of any guiding ethic or moral purpose.

King calls it an ongoing conflict between Word and World. The divine Word tells us of a perfect World, not yet ours. But these two worlds, the perfect one and the real one we see and experience, coexist; both are real:

The prophetic wrtings [in the Old Testament] regularly affirm that the two worlds (Word and experience) are not ultimately separate: the God of whom they spoke practices "justice and righteousness in the earth" (Jer 9:24). In making this claim, the prophets had to face the immense difficulty that confronts every theologian: why do bad things happen to good people? If God rules the world in justice, why is injustice so evident? (p. 112)

Sometimes the Hebrew prophets promised retribution soon to come, yet:

... the good continued to suffer and the retribution did not always occur. The World seemed victorious over the Word ... The evident power of the wicked had overcome the sense of justice. But [still the prophets insisted] the Lord would come soon ...

"The great day of the Lord is near and hastening fast," wrote the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah (1:14). In the New Testament, Jesus in the Gospels spoke also of the imminent coming of the kingdom of heaven to earth, saying "not a stone would be left upon a stone (see p. 113). Saint Paul advised in 1st Corinthians 7:31 that "the form of this world is passing away." And the author of the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, sees "a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away" (21:1).

Whatever this kind of talk may mean — King takes it seriously, but not literally — it clearly has to do with the idea that the words of power that God poured into the prophets will ultimately come true: poetic justice will somehow prevail in the end, here for us on earth.


We all are capable of being put under a verbal spell by a prophet or preacher, today as in earlier ages, and of resonating with such a message. This is King's main point. The enchantment itself is the best "evidence" of the prophetic message coming true:

But what evidence did the prophets present? The enchantment itself. That is, the message of the prophet — the visible world will pass and be replaced by another — tells of the auditors' experience as the prophet speaks. As the people listen, the visible world fades and a new world, a new heaven and a new earth, rise from the scroll of the prophet. The Word replaces earth and sky, for these "roll up like a scroll" and, as long as the spell remains, they are not even remembered (p. 113).

When the spell is later broken — as it is bound to be — how do we react? This, says King, is the principal question of all spiritualty. Do we continue to grant any primacy whatever to the spellbinding Word?

If not, injustice wins. At the end of the day, this is why I insist Judeo-Christian religion has not yet, and never will, grow obsolete.

The Problem of the Two Souls

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

By now it's no secret that I consider Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) essential reading for Christians. Saying why I think so is unfortunately not easy.

One reason is that the book talks of a duality within the breast of each of us that can turn our religious commitment to God's word into a spiritus vertiginis — a spirit of confusion. This comes out most clearly in King's discussion of Faust, Goethe's poetic masterpiece of the early 19th century.

The main character of this 12,111-line dramatic poem has elsewhere been called Dr. Faustus. He was a scholar and professor enchanted by words and books. One day he suddenly realized his books were unable to slake his thirst for pure experience in the world. He abruptly turned for once to the Erdgeist, the Earth Spirit, for guidance.

This was exactly what Mephisto — Mephistopheles — wanted. Mephisto was the adversary to God sometimes known as Satan. But, as in the Book of Job, Satan began the story of Faust in attendance at the heavenly court, of a mind to arrange with the Lord to put Faust to a test. Though the Lord promised Mephistopheles he, God, would ultimately lead Faust "to the light" (p. 88), Mephistopheles would be given, in the meantime, a free hand to corrupt Faust's erstwhile devotion to godly things.

Faust would accordingly succumb to Mephisto's urging for him to sign a contract: if Mephisto could arrange for Faust to experience such bliss on earth that he "was satisfied with the present moment and asked it to linger" (p. 91), Mephisto would gain Faust's soul for all eternity.

But Faust had an ace in the hole: he was aware that his own inner life was based on a duality. He told his book-besotted assistant, Wagner,"You know only a single impulse ... Two souls dwell in my bosom" (p. 90). One of Faust's "souls" was that of the literary lover of texts. Such a lover is subject to the enchantments of worlds made entirely of words.

Faust's other "soul" resonated with the Erdgeist. It wanted nothing more than the perfection of Faust's experience in this world.


King makes clear that books — words, texts, verbal enchantments — are, for us all, psychological stand-ins for the Divine Word by which God created the world, according to the Old and New Testaments. In the way in which books are capable of enchanting us and transporting us out of this too often unintelligible world here below, they are associated in our psyches with God, heaven, eternity, justice, harmony, and order. As such, they embody the perfect forms which Socrates spoke of in the Dialogues of Plato.

But as Christians like St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton have found, pure contemplation of what we imbibe from words and books, the Bible included, is bound to run aground on the shoals of our second "soul," the one which, like Faust's, is oriented toward earthly experience, not heavenly delight. Hence after declaring that the deed, not the word, was everything, Faust willingly underwent the "phantasmagoria" that Mephisto arranged for him: a chaos of experience that led to tragic consequences for those Faust most loved: his virginal lady love Marguerite and others.

Marguerite's mother and brother died due to Faust's diabolical machinations. Marguerite herself drowned the illegitimate child Faust fathered in her and died on the gallows for her crime. But, just as had been promised by the Lord, Faust himself would be saved from eternal damnation!

How can this be, this inversion of what we would normally expect divine justice to mete out? Thomas King's explanation of the conundrum is that God knew Faust would never fully succumb to Mephisto's World-over-the-Word philosophy. Why wouldn't he? Simply because Faust's first "soul" — his enchantment with stories of higher things — would ensure that he would remain restlessly unsatisfied by the chaos of earthly experience, with no guiding ethic or purpose in sight.


We all have two souls, no? We all undergo an inner dialogue, a tension between the desire to know a perfect, static order, God-given and eternal, and the desire to allow a chaotic unpredictability to make our experience of this world ever fresh, ever new. God, make me your perfect servant every day, in every way — but not yet, dear God, not yet!

Carl Sagan on Natural Theology (II)

Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Now, more on the late astronomer extraordinaire Carl Sagan's posthumous The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God: the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Sagan delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1985, now in book form. In these lectures, Sagan took on natural theology, religion's claim that scientific studies of nature bolster belief in God.

Sagan, who died far too young in 1996, is remembered for his pioneering work in exploring (robotically) other worlds in our solar system. He created the popular TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and was instrumental in establishing the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI. He championed nuclear disarmament and warned of possible nuclear winter. And he opposed religious fundamentalists who resist Darwinism and other fruits of modern scientific inquiry.

In a number of previous posts to this blog I extolled Sagan as possessing as fine a spirituality as anyone could hope for. But he was clearly allergic to religion, as distinct from spirituality. The Varieties of Scientific Experience is in large part a compendium of reasons why he spurned religion.

I touched on one of them in Sagan on Natural Theology (I). There are a number of traditional "proofs" of God's existence that philosophers and theologians have proposed down through the centuries. Sagan says none of them satisfy a true skeptic. In fact, skepticism was precisely what Caarl Sagan believed most "religiously" in: the suspended judgment, systematic doubt, and the unbridled criticism characteristic of modern science.

In this book, Sagan questions (among other "proofs") the cosmological one: the assertion that an infinite backward regress of causes is absurd, so there has to be an uncaused cause, God. Why not, he says, then ask "What caused God?"

As I said in the earlier post, it now appears that scientifically investigatable causes cannot be tracked back any further than the big bang. But why stop there, intellectually? Why not ask "What caused the big bang?" and answer "God"? In other words, why terminate the causal regress at a point of utter incomprehensibility, rather than with an intentional agent?


One of Sagan's reasons for preferring incomprehensibility to intentionality is that he habitually tried to disentangle answers to important questions, such as does God exist, from our natural human tendency to project our fondest wishes onto the universe. We hope there's a God, Sagan said, so we should resist the conclusion that God exists. "We should ... pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be" (p. 230).

In offering such guidance, materialists like Sagan assume that "There is a God" is the type of assertion that evidence can establish or refute. Then they show how weak the physical evidence is, taken all by itself.

But religious faith is the hope of things unseen. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," Hebrews 11:1 reads. Faith starts by assuming that certain propositions cannot be proven by evidence alone. That's why we look to revelation. God is told of, so believers hold, first and foremost in scripture. Only after we accept scripture can we resort to natural theology to see what extra evidence of God's providence we can find, what greater clarity scientific inquiry can offer us.


The science Carl Sagan loved proves the Bible cannot always be read literally. The creation stories in Genesis and the counting up of generations which seems to show the earth is but a few thousand years old mean something other than what a literalist would assume. Our human forefathers alone go back over 2 million years. The planet we live on is 4.5 billion years old. The universe began 14 billion years ago.

Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

One of the greatest arguments within modern Christianity is about the "literal inerrancy" of the Bible. The literary critic Northrop Frye, a non-fundamentalist Christian who was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada, wrote two books towards the end of his life which claimed that the "literal" meaning of much of the Bible is much closer to the poet's than to the fact-based historian's or to the descriptive journalist's. In The Great Code Frye wrote, "In the Bible the literal meaning is the poetic meaning ... in a quite specific sense of confronting us with explicitly metaphorical and other forms of distinctively poetic utterance" (p. 62).

Northrop Frye's Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature

In Words with Power Frye said the Bible's "literal meaning is its mythical and metaphorical meaning" (p. 102). The earliest authors of the Old Testament were, during the Jews' Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B.C., writing down and weaving together stories from a longstanding oral tradition that was in danger of dying. Words at that time had always been used in powerful ways to evoke an unseeable God. It would have been unthinkable to insist on what we today call "literal" inerrancy. That type of language expectation wouldn't come to the fore until modern times, in the last four centuries or so.

As the Wikipedia article on Frye puts it:

... it was in reflecting on the similarity between [the poets William] Blake and [John] Milton that Frye first stumbled upon the “principle of the mythological framework,” the recognition that “the Bible was a mythological framework, cosmos or body of stories, and that societies live within a mythology” [quote from Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye and the Theoretical Imagination]. Blake thus led Frye to the conviction that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature.

Northrop Frye thus found the spirit of the Bible in its poetic, mythic power. Many Christians dispute this. The ones who do not typically have little trouble reconciling faith with modern science. The ones who do gave Carl Sagan dyspepsia. In reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience, one wonders whether Sagan would have had much to say if fundamentalists weren't talking so loud.

Carl Sagan on Natural Theology (I)

Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Carl Sagan, the late astronomer extraordinaire, has a new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. Ann Druyan, his widow, has edited into book form the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Sagan delivered at Scotland's University of Glasgow, on the occasion of the lectureship's centennial in 1985. In these lectures, Sagan highlights Western religious orthodoxy's incompatibility with modern scientific understandings, suggesting that the former will give way to the latter, just as it has in the past.

But to me there seems to be a great big hole in his argument.

In his chapter on "The God Hypothesis," Sagan assails the various proofs of God's existence that have been offered in the history of religion in the East and in the West. One is the cosmological argument. All things are caused by something else, yet an infinite regress of causes of causes of causes is, presumably, impossible. There must be a first, or uncaused, cause: God.

Sagan doesn't accept that. "And who made God?" he asks.

Then he turns to the big bang, the explosion of our cosmos 15 billion years ago out of a tiny primordial dot of super-dense stuff. To the question of what preceded the big bang, he says there are two available answers:

One is "Don't ask that question," which is very close to saying that God did it. And the other is that we live in an oscillating universe in which there are an infinite number of expansions and contractions (pp. 155-156).

Sagan clearly favors the latter hypothesis, since it obviates the need to ascribe the universe's origin to anyone or anything. But his editor footnotes the passage with:

In 1998 two international teams of astronomers independently reported unexpected evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These findings suggest the universe is not oscillating but will continue to expand forever.

Which implies that the big bang, the origin of the universe, was unique. It will not be repeated, much less repeated ad infinitum.

It appears that the entire gamut of laws of nature which science studies began with the big bang, such that we lack all scientific purchase on what may have happened prior to it. The big bang is, as best we can tell, a scientifically impenetrable "singularity" at the origin of time, space, matter, and energy. Assuming that it had a cause, there is no way for science to figure it out.

If the backward chain of natural causes simply terminates when we reach the big bang, why? If that first, uncaused cause is meaningless to the point of total incomprehensibility, why?

A nice alternative — if we are not in an infinite loop of eternal cosmic oscillations — is to assume the big bang itself was caused by a meaningful, intentional, comprehensible agent, itself primary and uncaused.

Why is that so hard to believe?

Isn't it now more likely than it seemed in 1985 that science and religion can come to sing from the same hymn book?

Isn't the uniqueness of the big bang very strong natural-theological evidence that there is, after all, a God?

Paths to Spirit

It seems to me that the fundamental basis of Western religion might be boiled down to this: what is meant to be is destiny. It will happen, somehow, thanks be to God.

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) talks of how we can be "enchanted" by stories. In stories there is a sense of intrinsic inevitability, of destiny. The outcomes of the stories we love best are simply meant to be.

King contrasts story outcomes with events in the real world, many of which are clearly not meant to be. The world is accordingly less intelligible than a book. A lot of the time, what happens is not what is really meant to occur.

Deep down, we would all like to live in a world in which what is is always what is meant to be, and what happens is always what is meant to transpire. Religion tells us of just such a higher world, up above ours. King puts it this way (p. vi):

Santayana has said, "Another world to live in — whether we expect to ever pass wholly over into it or not — is what we mean by having a religion."

We have a sense of the discrepancy between what actually happens in our world and what is truly meant to be. It is by means of this inbuilt sense that we simply know when a storybook narrative hits the nail squarely on the head ... and when it doesn't.


One of my favorite stories is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Hifalutin' critics sniff at it, yet it has entranced millions over the decades since it was published, spawning a triptych of marvelous movies in recent years. Why? Because it tells of the victory of what is meant to be over that which currently is.

What is meant to be is the peace of the Shire, the dwelling-place of hobbits Bilbo Baggins, Frodo, Samwise Gamgee, Merry and Pippin, et al. Indeed, what is meant to be is the harmony of all Middle Earth. What is actually happening in Middle-earth, however, is that a force of evil, represented by the power-mad Sauron, is seeking to control everything, by regaining The One Ring. Sauron's lust for power ruins the peace. All struggles for power are inimical to peace. So the plot of the tale concerns the need to destroy the Ring once and for all, lest it turn its bearer as contentious and power-mad as Sauron.

Evil, by this broad definition, is that which stands in the way of what is meant to be. If what is meant to be is universal harmony and peace, then struggles for absolute power destroy peace and constitute evil. That is the moral logic of The Lord of the Rings.


Is there a heavenly book, a story written by a divine author that inevitably shapes events on earth? Are there things that are simply meant to be? Is there an eternal being whose very words make things so?

Yes and no. What is meant to be — the peace and harmony of the Shire and all Middle-earth, metaphorically — is possible only if there is a King, with us his willing subjects. Then and only then do actual destiny and what is meant to be coincide.

King Aragorn, whose return the destruction of The One Ring enables, is like King Arthur or any other good king. The primary function of a monarch is not so much to rule as to unite. To turn a multiplicity into a unity is what distinguished England's Queen Elizabeth I, whatever her double dealings with rival France or duplicities with Mary Queen of Scots. Our first president, though he eschewed a crown, knew this. How many of us can name a single ideological position or policy initiative of George Washington's? How many think he wasn't, with Lincoln, one of our two greatest presidents?

Making a unity of an internal multiplicity is, for Thomas King, the distinguishing mark of a spirituality, any spirituality. "In this study," he writes (p. 59), "spirituality has been identified as any method that deals with the impulses and moods that act apart from the will." Our impulses, moods, humors, and appetites are the "spirits" that dwell within us. If such psychic forces control us, independent of the will, then the kingly, uniting self can effectively disappear — just as Frodo vanished whenever he put on the Ring. Sauron (or the Devil) can then run rampant.


Religion is a gateway to spirituality. The Christian religion speaks of Christ the King. Christians are told to submit their inner multiplicities of impulse and appetite to taking up and bearing their cross on a daily basis. King describes the earnest attempts of great Christians such as St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton to do just this — to become knights-errant of the cross, as it were.

Their noble attempts to escape the World of Sense Experience and live by Word Alone ultimately broke down in failure, though. A bad thing? Not really. In each case, a Dark Night of the Soul betokened the birth of a true spirituality:

Now the knight must create his or her own judgments and a new way of life. Inner spirits (moods and impulses) can no longer simply surrender to words; now the process is reversed: words — if words are involved at all — must arise from the spirits. That is, the impulses and moods must now create a truth, a personal truth. As one proceeds with this awesome task of creating a truth, one gives birth to a new and indescribable self, a self that is not patterned after examples found in a book. It is a self so awesome and personal that it arises on the border between freedom and madness. In the world of time one is confronting an eternal presence, and, though one speaks only to a human friend, one knows one is speaking to the eternal God. One speaks to God as to a friend and to a frriend as God — and one is amazed aat both the Presence one addresses and the self that speaks. (p. 63)

Before Aragorn took up his mantle as king, he was a wandering knight: a Ranger named Strider. He operated under the blessing of otherworldly Elven Folk. He lived by Word Alone. Knights seek justice, but only kings can unify.

In a way, The Lord of the Rings can be read as Aragorn's Night of the Soul, in the course of which he regained the ability to make decisions on his own. The reforging of the shattered ancient sword of kings, Narsil, as Aragorn's sword Andúril symbolized his newfound — rediscovered — sense of personhood, integrity, and authenticity. Then he was ready to tread the Paths of the Dead without fear, and eventually to become King of Gondor.

In so doing, Aragorn found his destiny and made real what was meant to be. Like Ignatius after his own personal or spiritual rebirth, Aragorn "gave primacy to a sort of sure intuition whereby 'the devout soul, without questioning and without desire to question, follows what has been manifested to it' ... a personal and wordless manifestation of God that cannot be generalized" (p. 63).

Aragorn, like other knights-errant, came to "a moment wherein they find a depth in themselves that is so unique that all the guiding principles they have received no longer apply" (p. 64). Aragorn could no longer accept what the Elf-Lord's prophesies held in store for him. They were but words, and now words alone could not decide. Spirit ruled Middle-earth.