Category: church

The corsair affair and yet another rejection of politics

Volume 13, The Corsair Affair, is a collection of texts (many of which not written by Kierkegaard) that helps readers to understand what came to be known by this volume title.  The Corsair was a satirical journal that took aim at any culturally relevant figure in Denmark.  While the journal was notable and feared for its lampoons Kierkegaard (or Victor Emerita) was first mentioned in praise for work Either/Or.  Kierkegaard (Emerita) responded publicly by asking how he could be so insulted as to be praised in The Corsair.  While there are many layers involved in understanding why this exchange escalated the way it did one aspect was the growing awareness of Kierkegaard as the author of his pseudonymous works.  Once Kierkegaard’s indirect method became engaged directly he was skewered mercilessly for his own personal appearance, affect and mannerisms.  It is said that the phrases ‘Soren’ or ‘Either/Or’ became pejorative terms hurled at him in the streets.  He was also consistently compared to a local known as ‘Crazy Nathanson’.

What interests me is the extent to which this escalation reflects Kierkegaard’s vehement guard against directness.  To what extent was The Corsair taunting him to see if he would show his cards and lose composure.  Kierkegaard it seems never lost his composure though he appears to have been hurt considerably in the process.  I admit that my reading of this volume was a little more superficial as I found the historical understanding more interesting than the texts themselves.  I did however pause over an extended comment by Kierkegaard rejecting any notion that he is interested in changing externals (politics).  It seems as though from the very beginning people were interested in leveraging a political theory out of him.  I thought it worth offering his comments almost in full.

In Ursin’s Arithmetic, which was used in my school days, a reward was offered to anyone who could find a miscalculation in the book.  I also promise a reward to anyone who can point out in these numerous books a single proposal for external change, or the slightest suggestion of such a proposal, or even anything that in the remotest way even for the most nearsighted person at the greatest distance could resemble an intimation of such a proposal or of a belief that the problem is lodged in externalities, that external change is what is needed, that external change is what will help us.

. . .

There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than about all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a confusion that can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of Church reformation, a reverse reformation that in the name of reformation puts something new and worse in place of something old and better, although it is still supposed to be an honest-to-goodness reformation, which is then celebrated by illuminating the entire city.

Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening.  If at a given time the forms under which one has to live are not the most perfect, if they can be improved, in God’s name do so.  But essentially Christianity is inwardness.  Just as man`s advantage over animals is to be able to live in any climate, so also Christianity’s perfection, simply because it is inwardness, is to be able to live, according to its vigor, under the most imperfect conditions and forms, if such be the case.  Politics is the external system, this Tantalus-like busyness about external change.

It is apparent from his latest work that Dr R. believes that Christianity and the Church are to be saved by ‘the free institutions.’ If this faith in the saving power of politically achieved free institutions belongs to true Christianity, then I am no Christian, or, even worse, I am a regular child of Satan, because, frankly, I am indeed suspicious of these politically achieved free institutions, especially of their saving, renewing power. . . . [I] have had nothing to do with ‘Church’ and ‘state’ – this is much too immense for me.  Altogether different prophets are needed for this, or, quite simply, this task ought to be entrusted to those who are regularly appointed and trained for such things.  I have not fought for the emancipation of ‘the Church’ an more than I have fought for the emancipation of Greenland commerce, or women, of the Jews, or of anyone else. (53-54)

Kierkegaard continues on in this letter to drive home with all clarity that external institutions and systems cannot essentially hinder or encourage Christian faith.  The question I have with respect to contemporary forms of ‘liberation theology and thought’ is whether this reading and presentation within Kierkegaard’s larger project can truly be said to move towards the liberation of the individual, that is, beyond political/economic (Greenland), gender (women), or religious (Jew) boundaries.

Whether or not Kierkegaard is being completely ironic he concedes space for those who can understand and interpret the larger social systems (different prophets).  I also think it is important that he encourages any who can improve on their surroundings to do so.  I say this is important not because it is a minor concession by Kierkegaard but because it is assumed.  If someone would try to critique him on this level he would likely ask how ignorant that person is in thinking that someone should not improve conditions around them only that something must transcend the quantitative value (and it still is value) that externals can play in life.

Some hate for The Tree of Life; Or, my apparent obsession with AUFS

I wrote an initial comment over at AUFS on my first impression of The Tree of Life.  And the more I think about it the more I can’t stand the film.  This is a reflective position and not a commentary on aspects of the film.  However, the movie lends itself to being processed in a larger cultural and political context and I think the context demands more of the movie than it offers.  I think the movie can be viewed in part if not entirely as Jack processing his childhood.  So Jack wakes up aloof from his beautiful wife (who I don’t think he says a word to).  Lights a candle for his dead younger brother.  Goes to work and sits atop a high tower.  Calls the other alpha male (his father) to apologize for something about the dead brother.  As I process the movie another conversation at AUFS comes to mind in which Brad states that the church has never been able to appropriate or face up to modernity.  That may be true but why is there any need when you have a movie like this which causes modernity’s implosion in the psyche of the man who builds modernity (powerful ‘modern’ architect).  This modern man traverses and encompasses all of evolution in order to find meaning for the death of his brother.  Oh, and who was that middle child again?

I don’t think it is helpful to minimize the white middle-class male experience but how can this expression not invite scorn in our context?  What if Jack was the First Nations man I encountered walking down the street a month ago.  I suspect he might have a few more things to ‘process’ from his childhood experience but he has no high tower in which to brood.  In this neighbourhood being young and native tends to invite things that do not allow for contemplation and so he is jumped and hit with an eight-ball over the head.  He continues on down the street with blood flowing down over him.  Oh wait, where was I again?  Oh yes I was up to the dinosaurs.  The AUFS view of this movie is all the more striking with its general tenor of liberation.  There seemed to be nothing here that would change the modern capitalist man or system.  He found his inner-peace.  Isn’t this the kind of thing that gets disemboweled over at AUFS?

It’s funny I was actually planning to right a post on my ‘conversion’ experience that I attribute in part to the posts and related scholars and thought that floats around at AUFS.  I am trying to shed vacuous and bankrupt theological language or at least press it for its implied meaning and implications.  This is a good time as I am entering into the ordination process with my conference and need to comment on our confession . . . well, we’ll see how good it turns out.

In any event I am not trying to take some jab at the general thinking and expression at AUFS.  I just find the engagement with this movie to be a little dissonant with the larger environment.  I should also point out that many of the comments were not actually made by AUFS regulars.  But as I mentioned in my comment over there I was really surprised it did not get a harsher review.   I suppose it provided some good intellectual and aesthetic fodder . . . and maybe that is all that it amounts to though the movie and the conversation seemed to be pointing to more.

There were two audible responses to the movie in my theatre.  First was a loud yawn.  This was only a partially accurate review in my mind.  I was sucked into the ‘evolution’ (but would have been just as happy to see it as an I-Max piece) as well as moved by many other visual landscapes.  Some of the social and psychological commentary was suggestive and provocative (as Brad elaborates in his original post).  The other audible review was probably more accurate.  It was a sarcastic wow-wee.  Of course this probably spouted by a white middle-class male.

Total guilt

I am drawing close to the mid-way point of Kierkegaard’s writings.  Appropriately enough this coincides with Concluding Unscientific Postcript which represents a sort of culmination of his earlier writings (which he actually attempts to integrate in one section of CUP).  As I understand it this work was potentially to be  his last and subsequent works are called his ‘second authorship’ many of which reflect a more ‘concrete’ engagement with social issues.

I want to offer an extended quote here as it helped to clarify certain lingering thoughts that have surfaced in various areas of my life namely the interplay of guilt and action.  How does one reconcile (if that is the appropriate method) the call of the Gospel, the limitedness of humanity, and the unwieldy variables of life?  In many ways I find my own experience partially reflected in a heightened and intensified way through recent posts by Dan O (here and here . . . in many ways it is the comments [particularly on the second site] that capture what I am talking about).

What I find intriguing in the quote is how it forms part of Kierkegaard’s attempt to shift guilt-consciousness towards a category of ‘totality’ rather than remain in an ethical category.  To remain under the ethical is to remain under the numerical (I think I am getting this right).  To remain under the numerical is to forever have the more hanging over our head that while aimed at being life-giving tends towards death-dealing in the one desiring to be a practitioner of the Gospel.  This death comes in the externalizing of guilt-consciousness which can never be integrated directly into another individual and so becomes a law unto itself.  There is no amount of ‘good’ that will resolve this guilt.

Now perhaps Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious domains are infinitely caught up in ‘beginning’ and never become as political as people want them to be but I think he should be well heeded in also acknowledging that running furiously in the wrong direction is also not much better . . . likely worse.

The second half of this quote gets a little diluted but the first half reads well in terms of the line between much guilt and total guilt.  Particularly poignant is the line about the one bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes.  There is a possibility that holds us even if the possibility continually perishes.  The emphasis added belong is mine.

In the eternal recollecting of guilt-consciousness, the existing person relates himself to an eternal happiness, but not in such a way that he now has come closer to it directly; on the contrary, he is now distanced from it as much as possible, but he still relates himself to it.  The dialectical that is present here, still within immanence, creates resistance that intensifies the pathos.  In the relation that is the basis of the misrelation, in the intimated immanence that is the basis of the dialectic’s separation, he is closely bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes – for this reason the pathos, if it is there, is so much the stronger.

The guilt-consciousness is what is decisive, and one guilt joined together with the relation to an eternal happiness is sufficient, and yet it is true of guilt, more than of anything else, that it sows itself.  But the total guilt is what is decisive; compared with it, making oneself guilty fourteen times is child’s play – this is also why childishness always keeps to the numerical.  When, however, the consciousness of the new guilt is in turn referred to the absolute consciousness of guilt, the eternal recollecting of guilt is thereby preserved, in case the existing person should be on the point of forgetting.

If someone says that no human being can endure such an eternal recollecting of guilt, that it is bound to lead to insanity or to death, then please not who it is who is speaking, because finite common sense frequently speaks that way in order to preach indulgence.  And this way of speaking rarely fails, provided three or four people are gathered together.  I doubt that anyone in solitude has been able to deceive himself with this talk, but when a number of people are together an one hears that the others are behaving in this way, on is less embarrassed – how inhuman, also, to want to be better than others!  Once again a mask; the person who is alone with the ideal has not knowledge at all about whether he is better or worse than others.  So it is possible that this eternal recollecting can lead to madness or death.  Well, now, a human being cannot endure very long on water and bread, but then a physician can discern how to organize things for the single individual, not in such a way, please note, that he ends up living like the rich man but that the starvation diet is so carefully calculated for him that he can just stay alive.  Just because the existential pathos is not the pathos of the moment but the pathos of continuance, the existing person himself, who in pathos is indeed inspired and is not, spoiled by habit, peeking around for subterfuges, will seek to find the minimum of forgetfulness needed for enduring, since he himself is aware, of course, that the momentary is a misunderstanding.  But since it is impossible to find an absolute certainty in this dialecticizing, he will, despite all his exertion, have a guilt-consciousness, once again totally defined by his never having dared to say that, in his relation to an eternal happiness, he had done everything he was able to do in order to hold fast to the recollecting of guilt. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 535-537

When a religious person speaks: On the love of selfishness

When [a religious person] speaks it is only a monologue; occupied only with himself, he speaks aloud, and this is called preaching; if there is anyone listening, he knows nothing about his relation to them except that they owe him nothing, for what he must accomplish is to save himself.  Such a right reverend monologue that witnesses Christianly, when in its animation it moves the speaker, the witnessing, because he is speaking about himself, is called a sermon.  World-historical surveys, systematic conclusions, gesticulations, wiping of sweat from the brow, a stentorian voice, and pulpit pounding, along with the premeditated use of all this in order to accomplish something are easthetic reminiscences that do not even know how to accentuate fear and pity properly in the Aristotelian sense.

. . .

The religious speaker who purifies these passions through fear and compassion does not in the course of his address do the astounding thing of ripping the clouds asunder to show heaven open, the judgment day at hand, hell in the background, himself and the elect triumphantly celebrating; he does the simpler and less pretentious thing, the humble feat that is supposed to be so very easy: he lets heaven remains closed, in fear and trembling does not feel that he himself is finished, bows his head while the judgment of the discourse falls upon thought and mind.  He does not do the astounding thing that could make his next appearance lay claim to being greeted with applause; he does not thunder so that the congregation might be kept awake and saved by his discourse.  He does the simpler and less pretentious thing, the humble feat that is supposed to be so very easy: he lets God keep  the thunder and the power and the honor and speaks in such a way that even if everything miscarried he nevertheless is certain that there was one listener who was moved in earnest, the speaker himself, that even if everything miscarried and everyone stayed away there was still one person who in life’s difficult complications longed for the upbuilding moment of the discourse, the speaker himself.

. . .

Therefore, says the religious person, if you were to see him in some lonely, out-of-the-way place, deserted by everyone and positive that he accomplished nothing by his speaking, if you saw him there you would see him just as inwardly moved as ever; if you heard his discourse, you would find it as powerful as always, guileless, uncalculating, unenterprising, you would comprehend that there was one person it was bound to upbuild – the speaker himself.  He will not become weary of speaking, for attorneys and speakers who have secular aims or worldly importance with regard to eternal aims become weary when what they accomplish cannot be counted on their fingers, when crafty life does not delude them with the illusion of having accomplished something, but the religious speaker always has his primary aim: the speaker himself. (Stages on Life’s Way, 463-465)

However one might interpret this suggestion more broadly I am coming to see it as a fair characterization of Kierkegaard’s authorship.  Through the various pseudonyms that he employs and often brings in conversation with each other (particularly in CUP) one is let in on what Kierkegaard was interested in no matter the audience.  No doubt he was affected by his literary reception or lack of it but I still get the impression he would have done this work even if he did not have the means to publish them or to the extent he could carve out time to do it.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that there is an appropriate ‘selfishness’ that is the best way we can possibly hope to love our neighbour.  This selfishness can keep us from objectifying our neighbour,  keep us from vanity, and allow us a creative productivity freed from external ends.  Life is never so uncomplicated but I see this route as far more inspiring, liberating and motivating than duty and law.  It is the appropriate inverse of what we commonly perceive as Jesus’s call.  Jesus called us to lose our lives that they might be found.  But what is life lost?  Might it not be the one constructed by local law, custom and structural power?  To lose it then is to find it in the selfishness of particularity and in the process see your neighbour through those new eyes.

Inwardness, actuality, dogmatic policing, and conversion

I would have to say that Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments was the most anticipated volume in my Kierkegaard reading tour.  So far I have not been disappointed.  While it is penned under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus I really feel Kierkegaard ‘pouring it on’ in this volume (and as far as I understand this was to be last and climactic work).  There is no ‘imaginative construction’ to set the stage in so many of his other works.  From the gate Kierkegaard pours forth his account of Christianity as the truth of subjectivity; or, truth as subjectivity.  Throughout my reading of Kierkegaard I have tried to monitor just how he develops inwardness.  I wondered the extent to which I could accept his account given the temptation of introspection as a pretext for a spiritualism that does not take social structures and actions seriously.  I always held out on the side of Kierkegaard because of his insistence on actuality as opposed to abstraction.  I felt that the extent to which Kierkegaard’s thought would veer towards an isolated spirituality then in fact it would betray his commitment to existence (which demands particularity be taken with utmost seriousness).  This being said Kierkegaard’s notion of inwardness was always a little opaque.  Then I encountered this line about halfway through CUP,

The actuality is not the external action but an interiority in which the individual annuls possibility and identifies himself with what is thought in order to exist in it.  This is action. (339)

To risk putting this in a certain therapeutic language I would say this refers to being congruent.  For instance there remains Christian language about loving the sinner and hating the sin.  However, we all know this ends up looking a lot like hating the sinner even if it only sounds like hating the sin.  There remains a fundamental incongruence here.  Kiekergaard advocates famously in another place that purity of heart is to ‘will one thing’.  All possibilities become annulled in passionate clarification of existing in the actuality of love.  And so hating the possibility of hating the sin is annulled in the actuality of loving the sinner.

I frame this response to Kierkegaard due to my own recent conversion experience.  For years I have tried to reflect on how the Gospel calls individuals to orientate themselves towards peace and justice.  This led to significant life decisions in terms of where I lived, how I acted and what I studied.  It was only recently however that I have come to realize that I carried along with this commitment a certain dogmatic policing that continually annulled the actuality of the sort of life I sought.  This dogmatic policing continued to hold people in judgment while outwardly I tried to work for liberation (in what was of course limited and often naive ways).  I still harboured ambiguity around how I could support those in same-sex relationships.  I remained largely blind or at least unresponsive to the gender prejudice that swarmed around in many of my contexts.  I did not integrate the significance that the basic lack of resources can have on people’s lives.

I was not functioning congruently.  In what felt like a very short time something simply fell away.  I felt somehow released to love (yes I will let that stand for all its possible cheesiness).  I don’t have more answers and I don’t know how to act differently.  I don’t actually think anyone would notice the difference.  But I know I am living differently and I know this will effect my ethical posture.  I just know something changed (as I also now it can change for the worse).  Perhaps I am stretching Kierkegaard’s account of actuality but if I am, I don’t think it is by much.  My notion of’ ‘peace and justice’ was largely situated in a field policed by a dogma contrary to peace and justice and so I was given free reign to explore it within those bounds.  This is abstract and speculative thought according to Kierkegaard and the further that path is traveled the further away one is from existence.

Stages on Life’s Way

In many ways Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Stages is the easiest to summarize.  The book is framed as a collection of ‘found’ pieces published by Hilarius Bookbinder.  The pieces include ‘In vino veritas’, ‘Reflections on Marriage’ and ‘Guilty? / Not Guilty’.  These pieces all address particular relationships between man and woman, with man being the subject.  The first section is likened to a remaking of Plato’s Symposium.  Men gather around the banquet table drinking and making speeches about love.  This is a poetic account in which man, woman and love are abstracted and never engaged in particular.  The second second section is an ethical account of a man married to a woman.  It includes an exploration of love in terms or duties, natures and ideals.  Marriage is no abstraction.  It is the concrete and the temporal.  The third section explores a man’s internal processing of realizing that his engagement to a woman must be broken due to his internal movement or desire towards the religious.  He understands that the two of them do not fundamentally understand each other and to proceed with marriage would be of greater harm to the woman than to break off the engagement and so the man explores how best to break the engagement for the sake of the woman.  This section is framed as a series of journal entries.  There are morning and midnight entries.  The morning entries recollect events that occurred a year ago on that day while the midnight entries reflect on current circumstances.

All three sections have their moments in terms of literary expression or conceptual insight.  However, it is the ‘fourth’ section that really engages the movement of ‘stages’.  The final section is an account by the ‘author’ of the third section in which he reveals his intention in writing the piece which is to explore the phenomenon of the religious.  This is difficult because the movement of the religious cannot be secured externally.  In the case of his account there is nothing keeping the couple from having a happy marriage, no obstacle that is, except for an internal movement in the man.  The result of the inwardness is a qualitative misunderstanding that cannot allow for a happy marriage.  I would be curious to know more about the history of ‘understanding’ as it functioned in marriage relationships as it still crops up as reason to enough to end marriage (though Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish different sorts of ‘misunderstandings’).  Also, a clear critique could come in Kierkegaard giving a masculine priority to thinking about ‘important things’ rather than a feminine (esthetic) immediacy that he characterizes the woman as having.

At one point the author makes the comment, “The religious is simply and solely qualitative dialectic and disdains quantity” (443).  This abolishes the significance of the external (which is important for creating a level playing field) and demands an ongoing movement in which “the believer continually lies out on the deep, [and] has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him” (444)

However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore.  He can become more calm, more experienced, find a confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament – but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water (444).

The stages from esthetic to ethical to religious are not linear and final once ‘accomplished’.  The movement is always towards the qualitatively dialectic which is not determined by external conditions.  And as dialectic one can never ‘rest’ in having arrived at the religious.  There is such an emphatic emphasis on ‘inwardness’ that it is hard to not criticize it.  This emphasis is only amped up in the climax of his ‘first authorship’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  I continue to read Kierkegaard at his word that there is indeed a spiritual or religious subjectivity.  This subjectivity is then lived actually and this is what must continually be emphasized in Kierkegaard’s writing, namely that the whole push is for philosophical and religious thought to take existence into account.

Well I am pretty much at the mid-way point and staying on track!

From Scripture to Spirit; Or, Once again away from liturgy (though perhaps returning again)

[This is a (rather lengthy) sermon I preached this past Sunday on John 16:5-15 and Revelation 1:9-19.]

I just finished my second year of college, papers were submitted and exams completed.  In honour of this occasion my roommates and I thought it would be good to hit the town a let loose a little.  So three of us headed downtown ready for a little mischief.  Now granted we were renting a house in [the small Mennonite town of] Steinbach [the fictional setting of Miriam Toews’ Complicated Kindness] so heading downtown may have limited our options a little.  In any event we hit the 7-11 for some Slurpees.  We pulled a stuffed racoon across the road by string when cars drove by.  You know, wild and crazy college stuff.  In any event as the night wore on we began to wander aimlessly around when eventually we heard some shouting.  We went to get a closer look.  Eventually we came across a man and woman fighting on the driveway.  We were quite close at this point.  Eventually the fight ended, they parted and the man got into his car to drive away.  We quickly hid behind a bush on the next yard.  Now as the man turned the headlights on and backed out of the driveway the car paused for a moment and in that moment lined up directly with the bush we were hiding behind.  The car lights lit up the bush like a light bulb clearly revealing three figures cowering behind it.  The engine was shut off and the door opened and we heard him get out with a yell.  And in that same moment we turned and ran with him coming after us.  Running down a back alley we eventually split up and I found myself running alone, well that is with an angry man coming up behind me.  Now I need to make clear that I am not runner, a sprinter at best, but I knew I could not keep my pace up.  And in those brief moments I needed to make a choice.  Bear in mind I had no idea how big or small, young or old this guy was.  I decided to stop.  As I stopped I turned around, folded my hands behind my back to face and see my pursuer.  I’ll leave it there for now.

Continue reading “From Scripture to Spirit; Or, Once again away from liturgy (though perhaps returning again)” →

Closeted transcendence

Over at AUFS they have just concluded a book event engaging Adam Kotsko’s recent work Politics of Redemption.  Adam has just posted a response to the event and in it engaged one of the topics raised which is the highly debated but perhaps hardly debatable question of transcendence/immanence.  I thought the response was quite diplomatic without interest in any sensational jabs (the jabs were quite under-stated but still present . . . well fine perhaps ‘jab’ isn’t even the right word).  In any event I thought of commenting directly there but it would not have been in keeping with the event as a whole and since I am still waiting for a copy of the book I don’t have much to contribute.

I did, however, want to pick up on one line.  Adam writes,

Even at its best, though, I can’t see how one can argue for divine transcendence — it’s always going to be an argument from authority, because it’s fundamentally an argument in favor of authority.

Continue reading “Closeted transcendence” →

Inwardness or Inwardism?

I have quite enjoyed following Jeremy Ridenour’s blog.  I find his contributions reflect a clarity and charity (sorry those were the two best words I could think of) that is seldom found in this nook of the blogosphere.  In his final comment on a recent engagement with Adam Kotsko’s The Politic’s of Redemption a thought has continued to linger in my mind.

He concludes his post,

Comments: On a personal note, yesterday I taught Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity in Sunday school at my mainline church. The class seemed to take quite nicely to his critique of Barth and Bonhoeffer’s idea of a suffering God. However, most were quite uncomfortable with the idea of abandoning piety and a personal relationship with God. I think Bonhoeffer’s critique is Lutheran in character because he worries that this turn inward is a false start. Luther continued to emphasize that Christ is found on the cross not inside the heart of the individual believer. If Bonoheffer’s ultimate aim is to promote a Christianity that is solely focused on living in this world, then we have to come to terms with the fact that inwardness is an obstacle to being in communion with one another. It breeds narcissism and self-righteousness. Encountering God on the cross requires that the body of Christ tear down the crosses society has erected to serve the disenfranchised. God can only be found in the midst of suffering because God in Christ has let Godself be pushed out of the world onto the cross.

Continue reading “Inwardness or Inwardism?” →

Thrusting scripture

Jaime Smith offered a brief reflection on the evangelical vortex of universalist speculation.  His guiding question in the quote is asking what compels evangelicals to branch off in this direction.  Smith readily dismisses close scriptural reasoning as the basis (because any case ‘can be so easily refuted’).  The basis for motivation then is a type of overall sensibility about God in which one speaks of their ‘hope’ and ‘imagination’ with regards to the nature of God (and Christ).  Smith goes on then to ask if this posture of hope and imagination is warranted to overturn the apparently orthodox doctrine of damnation as well as ‘the narrative thrust of scripture’.

It is the final quote that I want to sit with for a minute.  I remember sitting in a class at an evangelical seminary where the professor took great pains and extended time showing the creation motif that is strewn throughout the biblical text.  Creation, de-creation, re-creation emerges consistently in the literary forms of the Bible.  This of course culminates in the book of Revelation in which there is a return to the garden (though the return, or repetition, is with a difference as it must be and so the return is now to a city).  I am also convinced that this is a dominant theme in the biblical narrative and if there is indeed a thrust (or multiple thrusts) in Scripture creation would most certainly be one of them.  In any event, I eventually asked the professor that if this indeed was a dominant theme in the Bible (that is the  arching back [and forward] to a restored creation) then would that not lead to a doctrine of universalism.  I mean there was no hell in the Garden was there?  The professor paused for a minute and then said that he could not go in that direction due to other scripture passages.  And so the overall mechanical thrust was put at odds with an examination of the cogs that produced the motion.  I don’t really mind that this would be case only to say that an evangelical professor who had no interest in producing a doctrine of universalism basically produced one through careful scripture reading, though in the end needed to overturn it due to particulars.

So in some ways I suppose Jaime is right in that good evangelicals must require something more than scriptural motivation because scriptures in themselves will always keep people in bondage and not work in freedom because there is always a particular passage to cause reserve, doubt or ultimately condemnation.