Can Economists and Philosophers Be Friends?

“Indeed, there is arguably no higher example of a philosophical friendship in the entire Western tradition.  It takes some effort, in fact, to think of who the closest rivals would be.”

Dennis Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought.

The Infidel and the Professor is a wonderful and ultimately quite charming book. The explanations of the writings of both Hume and Smith are very well done; brief enough that someone who has read the works in question does not find them tedious, but extensive enough that they serve as excellent summaries of the works for those who have not read them.  The character studies are similarly impeccably drawn; after reading this, you’ll never forget le bon David or Smith with his “preoccupied air and a habit of mumbling and smiling to himself.”

But, it is the friendship between the two that frames the story. 

The relative lack of attention paid to philosophical friendships, while understandable, is unfortunate. Friendship was understood to be a key component of philosophy and the philosophical life from the very beginning, as even a cursory reading of Plato or Aristotle should remind us. The latter famously claimed that friendship is the one good without which no one would choose to live even if he possessed all other goods, and Hume and Smith clearly concurred.

Rasmussen notes this at the outset of his book, and so I settled in expecting to be reading a book about two guys strolling merrily through life together, sharing good and bad times together, writing revealing personal letters to one another. 

That didn’t happen.  It turns out that while there is zero doubt that Smith and Hume were indeed great friends, they spent remarkably little time together.  What survives of their correspondence is not extensive, and even if we had it all, it does not seem like it would be all that interesting. 

Instead, what we witness in this book is a philosophical friendship.  Rasmussen carefully demonstrates how the works of these two giants are intertwined.  Both of Smith’s Great Books (The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations) are in many ways part of a long running conversation with Hume’s works.  One easily imagines the two of them pleasantly arguing late into the night by a roaring fire about such things as how we internalize a moral code.

The idea of the philosophical conversation is the true animating force in this book.  Hume describes himself as an “Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation.”  He also notes, “Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company.”

Therein lies the tragedy.  Rasmussen documents beyond any doubt that Hume and Smith should be read together, enabling us to join in the amazing conversation. 

But, in the modern world, Smith is sequestered over in the Economics department, Hume is locked up in the philosophy department, and neither one of them is ever let out to roam among the population at large. 

Oh sure every now and then you hear about “The great Adam Smith, proponent of laissez-faire economics,” which always seems to sound like some sort of libertarian nirvana.  But, it takes about 15 seconds looking at the Table of Contents of The Wealth of Nations to realize that Smith did not actually write the book his fans accuse him of writing.

Specialization has nearly killed philosophical conversation.  The Cartoon Version of Smith exists not just because The Wealth of Nations is long and rambling.  (Hume’s review is dead-on:  “the Reading of it necessarily requires so much Attention, and the Public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very popular: But it has Depth and Solidity and Acuteness, and is so much illustrated by curious Facts, that it must at last take the public Attention.”) 

The larger problem is that Smith’s two Great Books no longer have the same author: The Wealth of Nations was written by that rabid free market exponent Adam Smith, while The Theory of Moral Sentiments was written by that obscure philosopher Adam Smith.  And, so nobody reads him: economists don’t actually read Smith because, well, there isn’t enough math in it.  Philosophers don’t read Smith because he really belongs over in the economics department so obviously he could not have written a philosophy book worthy of being included in a class on Enlightenment philosophy. 

The idea that maybe, just maybe, those two books were written by the same guy and could usefully be read together in the same undergraduate, let alone graduate, class is inconceivable. Nobody could write important books in both Economics and Philosophy.

And, moreover, the idea that an economist and a philosopher could have fruitful intellectual discussions is crazy. On what subjects could the two of them possibly converse?  Would it even be possible to imagine a semester long conversation in a class which read both Hume and Smith?  It would be a fantastic course.  Undergraduates would love it.  But which department would house such a course?

The ultimate charm of Rasmussen’s book is the quiet way in which he documents a time before specialization destroyed the possibility of an intellectual kinship unburdened by disciplinary turf wars. 

Ticket to Paradise

Imagine being asked to make a travel brochure for Heaven. Could you do it? The goal is to make one of those glossy things beloved by all-expense paid resorts or cruise liners. But, your brochure will be about Heaven.

The challenge: make the Heaven brochure more enticing than the Caribbean resort’s brochure.

When you actually start imagining the pages of your brochure, what do you include? After saying in Big Letters “Best Place Ever!” what do you say?

The popular head picture of heaven is one of changeless perfection, sometimes in imagery of harps, halos, and clouds, sometimes in imageless concepts of abstract spirituality. That may be heaven for angels, but it’s more like hell for humans

That is Peter Kreeft in Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing. Kreeft knows we have a Heaven Problem. Heaven sounds boring. Obviously Heaven won’t be boing, but if you think about every description of Heaven you have read and imagine it is forever, well…

As Kreeft notes, this is similar to Milton’s problem in Paradise Lost. Satan is way more interesting that God in that book. It isn’t even close. In fact, Kreeft argues, there are only four modern writers who even managed to make good seem more fascinating than evil. (C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.)

Kreeft wants to convince us that Heaven is not boring. Asking, “How can heaven not be boring?” he immediately replies, “There are six things to be said in answer.” My hopes went quite high. After all, I have long been annoyed by the fact that heaven seems so boring. I would love to have explained the error of my thinking about heaven so that I can start thinking about heaven as exciting and interesting.

Sadly, Kreeft’s six answers are all just variants on one answer. The answer: Boredom is a product of living in Time. Heaven transcends Time. So, Heaven is not Boring. QED.

Sigh. I knew that part already. It doesn’t help.

Why do I find this book so frustrating? The failing is clearly in me. Early on, Kreeft asks us where we can turn to figure out the nature of heaven, that place for which we long. “To what, you ask, can I turn now?”

To your own heart. It is a teacher you can trust, for it will not despise you (it is you), and it is wiser than your head, wiser than you think. Listen to your heart. It will tell you for what you may hope; it will tell you “the meaning of life” if only you listen deeply. It will tell you of heaven…
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a picture of heaven, a silhouette of heaven, a heaven-shaped shadow, a longing unsatisfiable by anything on earth. This book tries to raise that picture to consciousness.

In the contest between my heart and my head for being the source of understanding, I am afraid I am much too beholden to my head. All these attempts to speak to my heart, to raise whatever pictures linger in my heart to consciousness in my head are all far too mushy for my tastes. I see the shape of Kreeft’s arguments, but they just don’t fully resonate.

That conclusion sounds more critical of the book than it is meant to be. After all, if I tried to write a 200 page book about Heaven, I know full-well that it would end up sounding, well, terribly mushy. There are no edges here to describe.

Indeed, the only person whose description of Heaven is one that I can fully embrace is Dante’s:

for my sight, becoming pure,
rose higher and higher through the ray
of the exalted light that in itself is true.
From that time on my power of sight exceeded
that of speech, which fails at such a vision,
as memory fails at such abundance.
Just as the dreamer, after he awakens,
still stirred by feelings that the dream evoked,
cannot bring the rest of it to mind,
such am I, my vision almost faded from my mind,
while in my heart there still endures
the sweetness that was born of it.

I love that description; Heaven really is beyond words. Kreeft is trying to use words to describe what Dante found no words to describe. While I admire his attempt, it is not satisfying. However, we can give him a pass on this; it is hard to imagine it is even possible to provide a description of Heaven which will make it sound exciting. Our Language simply doesn’t have the words for it.

However, Kreeft wants to do more in this book than convince us that Heaven is not boring. He wants to convince us that we know Heaven exists because our hearts long for it. If you explore your heart, Kreeft assures us, you will find this:

What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a heavenly hole, a womblike emptiness crying out to be filled, impregnated by your divine lover…
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but “the highways to heaven”…
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but the finger pointing to heaven…
Many books have explored the heaven-shaped hole in the modern head, the meaningless of atheist and secularist philosophies. But there’s not a single book in print whose main purpose is to explore the heart’s longing for heaven. For the heart is harder to explore than the head and has fewer explorers. The field of the heart has been largely left to the sentimentalists. But sentiments are only the heart’s borders, not its inner country. We must discover this “undiscovered country.” 

But, is that right? Theologically, I have no problem accepting the statement that we created beings are incomplete without a relationship to God. I can even agree that there is something in our hearts which longs for that relationship with God.  But that is not what Kreeft is arguing.

He goes the extra step. He assures the Reader, no matter who that Reader might be, that if the Reader looks at the heart, that heaven shaped hole will be found. Is that true? Does everybody secretly know they long for heaven? Kreeft argues:

We have a homing instinct, a “home detector,” and it doesn’t ring for earth. That’s why nearly every society in history except our own instinctively believes in life after death. Like the great mythic wanderers, like Ulysses and Aeneas, we have been trying to get home.

That argument is just silly. Yes, Aeneas and Odysseus long for home, and yes they both visit the land of the dead, but in both cases the home for which they long is most certainly not the afterlife. This is just the flip side of Freud’s argument that despite the fact that lots of people have this oceanic feeling of eternity, because Freud does not have it, it does not exist. The lack of logic in Freud’s argument does not make the reverse argument any better. If someone insists that their heart does not have a heaven shaped hole in it, do we just tell them, “Well, yes it does”?

That criticism, however, might be terribly unfair. Perhaps I am still just using my head when Kreeft is trying to speak to my heart. I don’t know.

But, this is what I learned in Kreeft’s book: maybe, just maybe, I have been thinking about Heaven all wrong. Maybe it is not something about which I should be thinking at all. Maybe the reason heaven seems so boring is purely the result of wanting to use my intellect to ponder it. Maybe if I just felt the idea of heaven with my heart instead of thinking about it with my head, I’d have a better understanding of it.

On Lecturing

Chekhov’s “A Boring Story: From an Old Man’s Notes” does not have the most promising title. 

The tale is about an elderly university professor, also not very promising.

But, then, in the middle of this “boring story,” the professor talks about lecturing at a college

The passage is quite literally stunning.  It is without a doubt the single best description of what it is like for me to give a lecture (or a sermon) that I have ever read. 

It’s a bit long for a blog post, but here it is in its entirety.  If you want to know what I feel like in class, this is pretty much it. 

(The translation, by the way, is by Pevear and Volokhonsky; always read their translations. Always.)

I know what I will lecture about, but I don’t know how I will lecture, what I will begin with and where I will end. There is not a single ready-made phrase in my head. But I have only to look over the auditorium (it is built as an amphitheater) and pronounce the stereotypical “In the last lecture we stopped at…” for a long string of phrases to come flying out of my soul and—there the province goes scrawling! I speak irrepressibly quickly, passionately, and it seems no power can stem the flow of my speech.  To lecture well, that is, not boringly and with some profit for your listeners, you must have not only talent but a certain knack and experience, you must possess a very clear notion of your own powers, of those to whom you are lecturing, and what makes up the subject of your talk. Besides that, you must be self-possessed, keenly observant, and not lose your field of vision even for a second.

A good conductor, as he conveys a composer’s thought, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, gestures now towards the drum, now towards the French horn, and so on. It is the same with me when I lecture. Before me are a hundred and fifty faces, no two alike, and three hundred eyes looking me straight in the face. My goal is to conquer this many-headed hydra. If, as I lecture, I have at every moment a clear notion of the degree of its attention and the power of its comprehension, then it is in my control. My other adversary sits inside myself. It is the infinite diversity of forms, phenomena, and laws, and the host of thoughts, my own and other people’s, that they call forth. At every moment I must be adroit enough to snatch what is most important and necessary from this vast material and, in pace with my speech, to clothe my thinking in such form as will be accessible to the hydra’s understanding and arouse its attention, and at the same time I must observe keenly that the thoughts are conveyed, not as they accumulate, but in a certain order necessary for the correct composition of the picture I wish to paint. Furthermore, I try to make my speech literary, my definitions brief and precise, my phrasing as simple and elegant as possible. At every moment I must rein myself in and remember that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In short, it’s no little work. I have to figure at one and the same time as a scientist, a pedagogue, and an orator, and it’s a bad business if the orator in you overwhelms the pedagogue and scientist, or the other way around.

You lecture for a quarter, a half hour, and then you notice that the students have started looking up at the ceiling, at Pyotr Ignatievich, one feels for his handkerchief, another tries to settle more comfortably, a third smiles at his own thoughts…This  means their attention is flagging. Measures must be taken. Availing myself of the first opportunity, I make some quip. All hundred and fifty faces smile broadly, eyes shine merrily, there is a momentary murmur of the sea…I, too, laugh. Attention has been refreshed, and I can go on.

No argument, no amusement or game ever gave me such pleasure as lecturing.  Only while lecturing could I give myself entirely to passion and understand that inspiration is not an invention of poets but exists in reality. And I imagine that Hercules, after the most piquant of his great deeds, did not feel such sweet exhaustion as I experienced each time after a lecture 

As I said, remarkably accurate.  In so many ways. 

I have the stock opening; mine as surely every student who has ever sat in my class could tell you is, “So.  Where are we?”  I think I start every single lecture with that rhetorical question.   

Irresistible rapidity?   Check.  I simply can’t slow down even if I try.  Constant attention to the audience while wandering through a reservoir of ideas and anecdotes and turns of phrase while trying to turn out sentences with some literary flair?  Check.  The well-timed pun or joke to reacquire attention?  Check. 

Even the exhaustion.  Before reading this, the best description of lecturing I had seen wasn’t about lecturing at all.  In the old Bob Seger song, “Turn the Page,” there are the lines: “Out there in the spotlight/ You’re a million miles away/ Every ounce of energy/ You try to give away/ As the sweat pours out your body/ Like the music that you play.”  I think about that a lot at the end of a lecture, when I have tried as hard as I can to generate in the audience the same energy I feel when thinking about the subject at hand.  (By the way, I really like the Metallica remake of that song; it may well be my favorite Metallica song.)

This week, summer ends and classes start here at Mount Holyoke.  I am frequently asked if it is going to be hard to return to the classroom after not teaching all summer.  I find that to be a very odd question.  Why would it be hard?  Lecturing is so natural. 

I think that passage from Chekhov explains why; when a lecture is like that, it isn’t a time consuming chore to prepare.  You spend some very pleasant time learning all about a subject, a little time sketching out a rough order of material, and then you show up and the lecture is there waiting for you. 

But, I don’t think lecturing is like that for everyone.

So, yes, this Wednesday I am very much looking forward to walking into the lecture hall. There is a thrill in the lecture.  Summer work has joys which are quite different.  But, there is nothing in summer work quite like the never ending quest for the Perfect Lecture. 

That lecture never quite comes. 

I learned long ago, though, that part of the art of lecturing requires adopting the mantra of the Cornerback: never remember the last play. 

Every time I walk into the room, it starts anew—it makes no difference if the last lecture was great or a disaster.  This lecture is a new creation; this set of students on this day deserve the best lecture I can muster.  There is no tomorrow, there is only the next 75 minutes.  And it will be glorious. 

The Nice Machiavelli

“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.”

Macaulay wrote that about Niccolo Machiavelli.

You’ve heard of Maciavelli, of course. He wrote The Prince, that manual for back-room, double-crossing, amoral, evil, self-serving, repulsive, despicable people. Not people like you, obviously. Those awful, terrible, no good, very bad people.

Indeed imagine an interview for a leadership position. One of those inane questions beloved by people who have no idea how to interview is: “What is your leadership style?” Imagine someone answering, “I am Machiavellian.” Is there any chance that person gets hired?

(I am now going to spend the next few years trying to convince a Mount Holyoke student to use that line in a job interview just to see what happens. Suggestions welcome on how to persuade someone to do this.)

Set aside for a moment whether the popular impression of Machiavelli is entirely fair. (It isn’t.) Think for a moment about Machiavelli’s other book. It is vastly less well known. Discourses on Livy.

The conventional wisdom about Discourses is that it shows the other side of Machiavelli. The nicer side.

You see, The Prince is, shockingly enough, all about how to be a prince. But, in the modern age, does anybody defend the idea that a country really ought to have a prince?

Instead, we all (tout le monde) are enamored with Republics, those societies where you get to select your leaders. And, Conventional Wisdom (that tautologically wise interpreter of all things) says that Discourses on Livy is about being a ruler in a Republic. To lead in a Republic, you can’t be a, well, Machiavellian Prince. You have to like freedom and other good things.

What does Discourses on Livy actually say? Therein lies a tale.

The Prince is a crisp book. Fun to read, easy to see the point. Discourses on Livy is a sprawling 300 page dense examination of the Roman Republic/Empire, full of endlessly minute details and stories, some of which are accurately told and some of which are, well, not. The tales are sometimes followed by a whole bunch of advice on an array of minute subjects.

In the end, you have a book which for the casual reader (i.e., not the Machiavelli experts) is one of those endurance tests which are worth reading because just often enough there is a sentence or a paragraph of such clever insight that you think it is worth continuing. You just keep hoping the whole time that the tone of the book will change and just get to something crisper, something that reminds you of the experience of reading The Prince, but this time it will be about how to be a nice ruler in a nice Republic and not a manual for being a reprehensible Machiavellian prince.

I was at a conference not too long ago which was about this book. About a third of the way in, I was annoyed at the endless small details and observations, which never quite seemed to fit together into a whole. I was wondering why in the world Machiavelli never bothered to write a short summary articulating his main point which would at least give some hints about why he included these stories of Rome and these observations.

Then it hit me. Machiavelli did write the executive summary of Discourses on Livy. He wrote the short version for the Busy Ruler who doesn’t have the time to read 300 pages of Roman anecdotes. He entitled the executive summary: The Prince.

At the moment that realization hit, the clouds lifted and suddenly Discourses on Livy made total sense. Instead of trying to figure out how Machiavelli is saying different things in these two books, look at how at the heart of books, they are really arguing exactly the same thing. They are both manuals on how to get and keep power.

What is the difference between Principalities and Republics? Machiavelli doesn’t hide that:

For it is seen that two virtuous princes in succession are sufficient to acquire the world, as were Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great. A republic should do so much more, as through the mode of electing it has not only two in succession but infinite most virtuous princes who are successors to one another. This virtuous succession will always exist in every well-ordered republic.

The fundamental difference between these two government forms is simply how long they will last.

Now imagine you are the ambitious type. Imagine you want to rule a country and you want to set that country up so that 500 years later people in that country will still talk about you and how amazing you were and you will have monuments to you all over town and your picture will be on the currency. What should you do? Obviously, according to Machiavelli, if you can set up a Republic, then that is the better route because people will praise you for a very, very long time.

How do you set up a Republic?

This should be taken as a general rule: that it never or rarely happens that any republic or kingdom is ordered well from the beginning or reformed altogether anew outside its old orders unless it is ordered by one individual. Indeed it is necessary that one alone give the mode and that any such ordering depend on his mind. So a prudent orderer of a republic, who has the intent to wish to help not himself but the common good, not for his own succession but for the common fatherland, should contrive to have authority alone…

There it is. If you want to craft a Republic, then you start out by getting complete power and ordering the society exactly the way you want it to be ordered. If you want to be a Prince, by the way, you do exactly the same thing.

But, Conventional Wisdom rushes in to argue with this crazy argument that The Prince and Discourses on Livy are really the same book: “This is not right because Machiavelli makes another distinction between Republics and Principalities. Look at that passage just quoted; he talks about the common good! Republics have freedom and freedom is important because it is better to be free. The prince doesn’t care about freedom. Republics preserve freedom. So, Discourses on Livy about rulers in free societies is totally different than The Prince about rulers in unfree societies.”

Yes, Machiavelli talks a lot about how important it is to preserve the freedom of the population. For example:

Besides this, the common utility that is drawn from a free way of life is not recognized by anyone while it is possessed: this is being able to enjoy one’s things freely, without any suspicion, not fearing for the honor of wives and that of children, not to be afraid for oneself.

There is also this on how to avoid the hatred of the population:

This he will always do if he abstains from the property of his citizens and his subjects, and from their women; and if he also needs to proceed against someone’s life, he must do it when there is suitable justification and manifest calls for it.

So, as both passages make painfully clear, freedom is really important. As both passages say quite explicitly, if you want to be a great ruler, don’t take away people’s property or family.

But, look again at those two passages above about the importance of preserving freedom if you want to be a Great Ruler. Only one of them is from Discourses on Livy. The other is from The Prince. Can you tell which is which?

Should you read Discourses on Livy? Sure, if you have already read The Prince enough times to feel like you have a good handle on it and want to see the further development of the argument. When you read it, though, don’t get bogged down in the wealth of stories. Just go along for the ride and watch Rome grow and see the advice Machiavelli is giving you and imagine creating your own Republic.

Seriously. Imagine creating a Republic. It is a useful exercise. In doing so, you will realize two things. First, what is it that would make the perfect government, the perfect society? And second, do the means you would have to use to create that perfect society justify the ends of having that society? Those are not rhetorical questions.

Calvinists Anonymous

“Hi. My Name is Jim, and I am a Calvinist.”

(That is true, by the way.)

According to J.A. Medders, Calvinists have a problem; the first step is to admit that. He doesn’t suggest setting up a Calvinist Anonymous chapter, but that is the logical conclusion of his book, Humble Calvinism: And if I Know the 5 Points but Have Not Love…

First, a note about the audience for this book. Is this a book for you?

Quick Test: If TULIP makes you think about a 17th century financial crisis, your garden, or an Easter bouquet, then you are going to find this book terribly bewildering. It isn’t until over 30 pages into this (short) book that the typical reader is going to discover that the “5 points” mentioned in the subtitle and the acronym TULIP which Medders keep mentioning are simply shorthand for the thing called Calvinism mentioned in the title.  This is unfortunate, because much of what Medders has to say would be interesting for a great many people who know not TULIP.

So, who is the audience? Well, TULIP lovers.

Lest we replicate Medders’ Audience Limitation, what is this TULIP? Therein lies a tale.

First off: neither the acronym nor the five points originated with John Calvin, the 16th century Reformer. It is possible that the five points have their origins in early 17th century theological battles, but that origin story is not as crisp as many Calvinists would like it to be. It really isn’t until the mid-20th century that the “Five Points” are established and the mnemonic TULIP is crafted and popularized. (And, in a little observed point, the acronym only works in English.)

What is the acronym?
Total Depravity
Unconditional Grace
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Call
Perseverance of the Saints

So, first note: if that is the first time you have seen that set of phrases, well, you are undoubtedly wondering what all the fuss is about because you didn’t get too excited about the list. Calvinists, on the other hand, often get ridiculously excited about that list.

What does it all mean?  A curiosity of the five points is that it is really only one, fairly simple, point. But, it sure sounds better to talk about five points and have a cool acronym, doesn’t it?

Here is the little secret of the five points and TULIP and Calvinism: saying you accept TULIP and saying you believe in Predestination are for all practical purposes the same statement. (Calvinists: commence your quibbling.)

The argument: Humans created in the image of God rebelled against God and are thus not worthy of standing in the presence of God (that is the T). God, who is Love, decides to save humans from the effect of their own rebellion (U) through the death of Christ (L). The Holy Spirit draws those whom God has called to Himself (I) and those whom are called will spend eternity with God (P).

The only part of that which is even debated in Christian circles is whether God decided before the foundation of the world whom He would call or whether God simply puts out an offer to everyone and lets them decide whether to accept it. In other words, the only matter of dispute is the role of human agency. Once you settle that question, everything else follows.

Medders is surely right when he notes that the biggest problem with Calvinists is not their theology, but their arrogance. Calvinists often talk like they are the Spiritual Elite who know all things, unlike the rest of humanity (including even all the non-Calvinists who call themselves Christians) which is a bunch of foolish reprobates.

So, why do Calvinists get so worked up about TULIP? I suspect it is not really Calvinism that is the exciting thing. I suspect TULIP is just a proxy for what really excites Calvinists. Imagine growing up in church and hearing bland expressions of Christianity aimed at the intellect of a 10 year old. Then suddenly, one day, you hear about this exciting new thing called Calvinism. Your heartbeat leaps suddenly; for the first time in your life, you realize that this Christian thing may actually be an adult belief system.

In other words, I suspect what is really exciting to most Calvinists is theology, not Calvinism per se. If the Five Points is the first time in your life you have ever seen a theological system, it would be hard not to get excited and think you have discovered some great secret. Everyone else will suddenly seem ignorant and uniformed. Knowing the Secret of the Temple, it would be hard not to become arrogant.

Medders’ entire book is an argument to Calvinists that they need to lose this arrogance, tone down the rhetoric a bit, and, you know, love everyone, including Christians who are not convinced that Grace is completely unconditional. He is not the first to make an argument like that. C.S. Lewis was incredibly harsh when it came to thinking about Calvinists.

Modern parallels are always to some extent misleading. Yet, for a moment only, and to guard against worse misconceptions, it may be useful to compare the influence of Calvin on that age with the influence of Marx on our own…This will at least serve to eliminate the absurd idea that the Elizabethan Calvinists were somehow grotesque, elderly people, standing outside the main forward current of life. In their own day they were, of course, the very latest thing. Unless we can imagine the freshness, the audacity, and (soon) the fashionableness of Calvinism, we shall get our whole picture wrong. It was the creed of progressives, even of revolutionaries. It appealed strongly to those tempers that would have been Marxist in the nineteen-thirties. The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings, were likely to be Calvinists…As we recognize the type we begin, perhaps, to wonder less that such a work as the Institutio should have been so eagerly welcomed. In it Calvin goes on from the original Protestant experience to build a system, to extrapolate, to raise all the dark questions and give without flinching the dark answers. It is, however, a masterpiece of literary form, and we may suspect that those who read it with most approval were troubled by the fate of predestined vessels of wrath just about as much as young Marxists in our own age are troubled by the approaching liquidation of the bourgeoisie. Had the word ‘sentimentality’ been known to them, Elizabethan Calvinists would certainly have used it of any who attacked the Institutio as morally repulsive. 

Ouch.

But, Medders was induced to write his book because the New Calvinists often do sound exactly the same as the way Lewis describes the O.C. (Original Calvinists). On this level, Medders is performing an admirable task. If you know any insufferable Calvinists (or, even more so, if you are one), then send them (or yourself) a copy of this book right away. Medders speaks the language perfectly and his message is accurate.

But, for the rest of us, Medders slips into what I am pretty certain is an inadvertent mistake. Consider the following pair of claims from the last chapter of the book:

Real Calvinism is a humble, God-enjoying, and loving-thy-neighbor Calvinism. Arrogance, lack of gentleness, impatience, and thinking we have the spiritual gift of street-fighting doesn’t reveal a problem with the doctrines of grace but with our hearts.

Calvinism is a pile of coal, mined from the depths of doctrine, that sets a fire blazing in our hearts that drives us down the track toward godliness. True Calvinism helps us love God with all our minds and hearts, and love our neighbors as ourselves. If your Calvinism doesn’t do that, then check the coal; you might have a bad batch. 

Now both of those sentences are entirely correct in the advice they give. But, what is the word “Calvinism” doing in those sentences? The word should have been “Christianity.” “Calvinism” does not help us love God and our neighbors; Christ does.

This points to the real reason Humble Calvinism would have been stronger if Medders had expanded the scope of his implied audience. Another description of “Humble Calvinist” is “More Christ-like Christian.” While Medders’ argument in the book is that Calvinists need to stop confusing the subset (Calvinist) with the whole (Christian), because he thinks of himself as only talking with his theological tribe, he all too often rhetorically slips into the same error. I don’t know Medders, but based on the tone of his book, I think he would agree with that assessment.

Episodes of Grace

An Episode of Grace is a collection of short stories by Linda McCullough Moore.  The title of the collection is apt.  Yes, one of the stories bears the same name, but really every story in the collection could have that title.

The stories present an interesting way to think about life. 

It seems obvious to think of our lives as akin to a novel.  There was a beginning, someday there will be an end, and we spend our lives working out the middle.  The events of our lives are all part of the larger story.

In those larger scale stories, however, there are those short stories, the small parts of our lives that could be taken out of the novel and presented as a whole and complete story unto themselves.  We all have these short stories; indeed when we tell people about the episodes in our lives, we are relating those short stories.  We have no real ability to relate the novel of our lives; we don’t yet know how it all turns out.

But, Moore points to yet another dimension of our lives.  The episodes.  Those brief moments, hardly noticeable, whose reflections ripple outward.  Among those moments are the episodes of grace; those moments when the burden of life is lifted ever so slightly by a passing comment or a stunning sunset.

Reading about those moments of grace, I had a shock of recognition.

One of the curious things about being a professor is that I say a lot of good-byes.  Every year, there is a whole set of students who are leaving Mount Holyoke.  Some of them I will never see again.  Sometimes a student comes back for a reunion or just visiting the campus, and we pick up right where we left off in the conversation.  Sometimes I get an e-mail out of the blue from a former student. (I always like those e-mails.)  Sometimes, I stay in regular contact with a student.

But, in every case, no matter which of those futures will materialize, there is that moment of good-bye. 

One result of all these relationships, really friendships, in which neither of us knows whether or when we will talk again is that there is a comment I hear frequently.  It is the sort of thing you don’t say to someone you know you will be seeing again.  It is what you say when someone is leaving and you know this may be the last chance you have to say it.  I cannot count the number of times a student has looked at me and said in a tone of deep gratitude, “I just want to thank for that time you said X to me.”

Here is the interesting thing: I don’t always remember saying X.  I remember talking with the student.  For some of them I remember having those long conversations which ramble all over the place.  Others, I only talked with once or twice when they were taking a class with me.  But, I don’t always remember the conversation in which I said X. 

It is a weird feeling.  Here is someone thanking me for saying something deeply meaningful, something which made her life a bit better, and I do not recall saying it.

I now know what to call those comments.  They are episodes of grace.  They are brief, not always memorable to the person saying them, but full of grace for the person hearing them.

We have all experienced these episodes of grace and we are grateful for them.  But, before reading Moore’s book, I had never really thought about being a creator of episodes of grace.

What would it look like to actively work at creating episodes of grace in the lives of others?  Interesting thought experiment.  Imagine living your life thinking that the conversations you are having may be the single most important conversation the person with whom you are talking will have this year or this decade.  Imagine that the comment you are about to make will be remembered in a decade by the other person.

If you think too much about that, it would be nearly impossible to have a conversation.  So, how do you cultivate a life where you are unconsciously providing those episodes of grace?

I don’t have the answer, but it is hard for me to escape the conclusion that this is the sort of thing I really should figure out.  The world could use more episodes of grace.

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