Team Fortress II

 

If fortress culture were not on some level successful it would not exist. My problem with it is that is subject to ever diminishing returns. Plus, it has a tendency to fall into self- parody as when a certain historic Christian tells us to stop using the words ‘karma’ and ‘luck’ on the grounds that those things don’t exist. To me this is on a level with Richard Dawkins’ strictures on Kafka and his insistence that men do not turn into insects. At any rate, if historic Christians object to the presence of Sanskrit words in English they should perhaps rethink the history of colonization. Really, though, my difference with them does indeed come down to the same concern with text and hermeneutics that divides me totally and completely from hard core secularists. They have a notion about text that I find strange. It seems to go like this. A man or woman is free if they are under the direct authority of God and not under the traditions and customs of man. This freedom they attain through the text of the Bible and in no other way. For this reason the Bible cannot depend on the custom and practice of earthly interpreters. It must be self-interpreting such that any person at all can read and apprehend it. The simple parts must explain the hard parts for instance. Yet none of this can work if the Bible is fallible in any respect whatsoever even at the level of brute fact. If ANY proposition in the Bible has the truth value F then the entire bible has the truth value F. This is because we would have no criteria but human ones to distinguish which propositions were true or false.  We could not appeal to the mediation of an external authority which would merely subject us, once again, to the human. If the text is self-mediating to the believer in faith it must be inerrant. Either it is ALL true or it is all false for WE cannot use human categories to pick and choose.

As far as I can tell the Bible does not work this way because it is a text and NO text works like this. Every text is a product of itself and its reader. The mind of the believer is not just subject to the obiter dicta of the external text nor is it respecting the text to treat it as such. Gaps, fissures, contradictions, out and out aporia must be synthesized and the principle of this synthesis must be the infused insight of the reader. The reader must possess the virtue of reading well. He must determine the deep intentionality of the text by the light of the spirit in which he reads. This infused virtue makes the text a text and not a dead letter. This means the reader is EXACTLY free to ‘pick and choose’ if by this we mean decide what weight and authority is to be given to which text and which text should control the meaning of which other text. This is the practical freedom of the reader which individuates the text for the judgment of THAT reader. The reader does not simply receive but also makes by the light of his own virtue and insight. Nor does this dissolve the text into pure subjectivity because the praxis of the community, liturgical, theological and ethical, stands as a check. This means the reader can read confidently as she reads carefully and does NOT need to submit to the dead externality of the text on the grounds that only on that condition can there be a text at all. So, to use an example, we can use the sermon of the mount as a control on the more violent texts that form an earlier stratum of a dialectically unfolding revelation in which certain moments can be transcended or surpassed and that is not just me speaking but your own model historic Christian C.S. Lewis.

Some of you, I suppose, will invoke notions of total depravity and the impotence of humans to contribute to their own salvation to deny this kind of active freedom to the reader. Since we depend TOTALLY on God we must submit TOTALLY to the text as empirically given lest we introduce a human moment to justification and its attendant sanctification. This is fine. I am an Augustinian on this point. He DOES NOT teach total depravity. Sin does not destroy human nature nor does grace supplant it. You differ on this point and if that is your conviction I happily leave you to it though I do note that you far out Luther Luther in this attitude. Still, if this view of yours is not just a theological conviction but a fortress to rally behind I think many historic Christians and much historic Christianity cannot be in your fortress. Indeed, a great deal of Protestant Christianity cannot be in your fortress including that of its founder. Here, alas, is where I come up short with fortresses, not only yours but those constructed by certain Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox traditionalists. I don’t want to be in a fortress both as a matter of conviction and of strong personal predilection.

I think I can explain why. A fortress has an inside and an outside. The inside is to be defended from the outside and on this principle the fortress is constructed. On the inside of your fortress are Christian believers and on the outside are the hostile forces of the secular world. These people are construed as having beliefs diametrically opposed to yours AND are construed as holding those beliefs in a manner hostile to yours. You also think they want to proselytize your children in those beliefs and will use the institutions of school and media to do so. Plus, you think these outsiders hate you and want to eliminate you and you do not believe their claims to respect your freedom to live your lives the way you see fit. You claim that, just like yourselves in fact, they have a will to conversion and if they cannot convert you they will convert your children. Plus, you think they have defined YOU as THE enemy and that as soon as they have amassed sufficient power and influence they will begin closing your churches and discriminating against you in employment, housing and other matters. Some of you even believe you will be rounded up and put in re-education camps like the Uighurs in China.  Your solution to this problem is the classic Fascist solution. If secular institutions and values and laws are against you, you need the protection of a leader who operates outside of them. This leader must be free from democratic constraint for it is the threat of majority rule that exposes you to persecution and you do not believe your nation’s tradition of civil rights will protect you (and that is why you yourselves are in favor of eroding and chipping away at them). Thus, while many of you secretly or not so secretly despise the buffoonish tyrant Donald Trump you would never for one second think of voting for the alternative. In your mind, he is all you have to protect you and bad as he is the alternative is incalculably worse. You think you are playing a zero sum game in which any gain made by the other is a loss for you.

One thing I should note about this is that at a certain point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you interact with the world outside the fortress using this as your framing that world will indeed regard you with mounting suspicion and contempt and there will indeed be social and economic consequences for that which will not be pleasant (though this is more likely to be your C.Vs going directly in the trash than concentration camps- for one thing that is far more effective).  This mutual suspicion loop is how Yugoslavia fell apart and I am sure that even in your most fevered dreams you do not want THAT. Thus, on a very direct practical level, there is a very steep political price to be paid for fortress Christianity.  Plus, there is an even worse price to be paid when we begin to wonder if anyone from outside is secretly in the fortress. We start looking for the outsiders among us and begin denouncing those of our friends who look weak on ‘wokeness’ or ‘critical race theory’ the instant they express even the most modest and reasonable concerns about racial justice. People in the fortress must cement their status by being more extreme than the next guy and turning on their neighbors as Trojan horses and fifth columns. If the fortress is not overcome from without it will eat itself from within. Nor it is any good to complain that such people are using ‘secular theories’ instead of Christian ones. I have addressed the basic mistake behind this in my previous piece which the reader may consult. Here I must ask two questions. The first is, how am I supposed to get through my day without any reference to a ‘secular theory’? Logic is a ‘secular theory’ yet I must employ it even to catch the bus. If data from the social or natural sciences is pertinent to addressing a problem am I supposed to simply reject it on the grounds that it does not come from inside the fortress? I point ALL this out without even mentioning what I could a whole other essay on which is how much you like what is outside the fortress too and how much of it you casually appropriate on a daily basis (particularly its identity based victim politics which you have gone whole hog into even as you make a show of denouncing it).