Jonathan Edwards and the Meaning of Easter

In honor of Easter and under the inspiration of a wonderful quotation from Jonathan Edwards, I have prepared a week's worth of Bible readings and discussion questions, which you can download at the following link:

Resurrection

Postmodernism and the Breakdown of Communication

Words Strain and Crack
Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence…
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering
Always assail them.

Thus wrote T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton V from The Four Quartets. Eliot describes the breakdown of meaning that occurs as words and their meaning die under the limitation of time. In these lines, especially if one reads them out loud and in the context of the entire poem, the breakdown of meaning hits us in a way that is startling, disconcerting, and palpable.

 

Eliot’s Four Quartets, published in 1944, were masterful because they vividly depict so many of the struggles, challenges and agonies characteristic of the late modern (or early postmodern) period in which he wrote. Precisely because of this, the hope of redemption held out by Eliot at the end of The Four Quartets is all the more powerful.

 

The agonizing words of Eliot’s poem are a good lead-in to what I want to discuss in this article, which is the Postmodern approach to language in general and literary texts in particular. (If you do not already know what Postmodernism is, then you may want to read my brief overview of Postmodernism or buy Gene Veith’s book Postmodern Times.)

Deconstructing texts

Since the advent of mass printing, and possibly even before, texts have been second only to speech as the primary means by which human beings communicate with one another.

 

The very existence of texts presupposes that communication is possible. Words have meaning, and while the meaning of words can often be misunderstood or change with time, the possibility of genuine, objective communication remains a reality.

 

At least, that was the prevailing assumption until the 20th century. Though all generalizations have exceptions, by and large people just took it for granted that it was possible to read and understand texts, even as they knew it was also possible to misread and misunderstand texts.

 

All this began to change in the mid-1900s, when literally thousands of intellectuals began deconstructing the legitimacy of the text as a vehicle of communication. This deconstruction did not happen overnight, but was the result of at least three important factors. We will explore each of these three factors in turn, before looking at the implication this had for literary criticism.

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You mean, it's not just a matter of personal taste?

Music and the Objectivity of Aesthetics

Are preferences in music purely a matter of personal taste? Can you say that certain music is objectively better than other music? Can music be evil? And if so, is it only the words that make such a verdict possible? Can any style of music be written for the glory of God? 

In order to address these questions, lets go upstream a bit. Our era tends to give unquestioning acceptance to the truism that beauty exists in the eye of the beholder. Even Christians who would resist relativism very strongly in ethics (“what is good for you might not be good for me”) or truth (“what is true for you might not be the same as what is true for me”) nevertheless collapse into relativism when it comes to aesthetics (“what is beautiful to you might be different to what is beautiful for me.”)

One alternative to this aesthetic relativism is to say that beauty is an objective quality that describes how things truly are in God’s creation. From this standpoint, saying that a certain symphony is beautiful or that something else is ugly music is just as true as making accurate statements about what key it is in, what its time signature is, and so on. 

If we are to be consistent with our Christian worldview, it does seem that we are committed, at least in principle, to predicating some degree of objectivity to both beauty and aesthetic judgments.

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Salvo 24 Now Published!

Art is Christian

Since we are made in the image of God, there is a place for us to appreciate things for their aesthetic qualities even when there is no immediate utility value involved in doing so. For example, when we set the table nicely with flowers and candles, this has no functional value in terms of eating, but it has aesthetic value that adds richness to our lives.

Similarly, the value that literary works have for us as believers does not depend on our ability to wrest from them specific lessons we can apply in our lives. Indeed, to engage with books on a purely aesthetic level is already to be operating under the canopy of the Biblical worldview. We do not have to discover a Christian message in a work of literature before it becomes Christian, any more than we need to do story problems about the dimensions of Noah’s ark before math becomes Christian. Beautiful literature, like math, is already implicitly Christian because of what it is in itself.

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Decline in Book Reading

The activity of book-reading declined at the beginning of
this century.

In January 2009, the Washington Post announced that it would be dropping the stand-alone Book World section of the paper’s Sunday edition. Book World had been created in the 1960s and was one of the few remaining stand-alone sections for book reviews in American newspapers.

The trend had been in process for the preceding decade. In 2000, Charles McGrath, editor of The New York Times Book Review, commented, “A lot of papers have either dropped book coverage or dumbed it way down to commercial stuff. The newsweeklies, which used to cover books regularly, don’t any longer.”

A few months after McGrath penned these words, the San Francisco Chronicle decided it would no longer be publishing its Sunday Datebook of arts and cultural coverage, which had been based on the understanding that books are newsworthy. The Chronicle had to reintroduce the Datebook after protests from book lovers, but eventually reduced it to just four pages.

In 2001, The Boston Globe merged its book review and commentary pages. The Globe’s decision was followed by numerous other newspapers expunging their long-standing tradition of offering serious book reviews.

These moves were all part of a wide-spread trend away from book reading, which I am discussing in a new series of articles for the Colson Center. My first article 'Hallowing out the Habits of Attention' looks at what the decline in book reviews, and the larger decline in reading of which this is symptomatic, tells us about the society in which we live.

Were the Puritans Racist?

Were the Puritans racist?

New England law allowed Puritans to treat
African American women in dehumanizing ways

That was a question that was raised for me back in 2009 when I fell into the company of some North Idaho White Supremacists. As I tried to persuade them to adopt the Biblical view of race (which I articulated in 4 blog posts during our debates), their chief spokesman continually appealed to Calvinist thinkers in America's past who supposedly shared their racist ideology. More than once, the teaching of the Puritans came up.

At the time, I didn't give much heed to the question of whether the Puritans were racist, as I was more concerned with arguing from the Bible. However, the historical question came up again last year a friend from church asked me if I thought the Puritans were racist. My friend - a big fan of Puritan theology - had been listening to Propaganda's new album, which features a track called 'Precious Puritans', dealing with their alleged racism. My friend referred me to Joe Thorn's website, where he interviewed Richard Bailey, author of Race and Redemption in Puritan New England.

Jonathan Edwards on Divine Beauty

"All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory."

Further Reading

Blog posts on beauty

Blog posts on Jonathan Edwards

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