Category: Discipleship

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Structure: Part 1

According to a second philosophical view, the coherence theory, there is a kind of truth that pertains less to physical realities or events than to a set of propositions within which a claim may be regarded as true if found to be logically consistent—or coherent—with the rest of the data set.

From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice

Early in their volume, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillett provide three models of truth that the Christian literary critic must understand and be ready to encounter. The coherence theory is the second of these.

It is the one that most closely aligns with the critical term “structure” and the critical school “structuralism” that I’ll be investigating this week.

The essay on “structure” from Critical Terms for Literary Study concludes with this claim:

“Structure” is one of the key terms of our postmodernity because it openly acknowledges its claim for scientific rigor as well as its fabricated character.

From John Carlos Rowe’s essay “Structure”

This is the tension of the coherence theory of truth in one pat definition. It demands rigor, a kind of internal logic (i.e. rational and scientific), while on the other hand admitting that it’s not true (i.e. that it does not correspond to objective reality).

Rowe’s essay is considerably denser than WJT Mitchell’s, so I’ll be ruminating on it more before sharing the central claims in Rowe’s definition. Suffice it to say that structuralism is premised on a Kantian inability to describe the transcendental realm. Structuralism in its many forms shows humans making the world over in their image in an attempt to understand a fundamentally alien reality. While some theorists–Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye, for example–see this process as liberal and humane, it is also disconnected from truth and the divine.

The chief question is, then, where should the structure of thought come from? What should they be?

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Representation: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of representation that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here.

In what follows I respond to the nine points made by WJT Mitchell in his essay on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “representation” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis) and that humans are symbol making creatures. At the heart of God is the Son’s perfect representation of the Father (Heb. 1:3). At the heart of creation is the Logos creating the universe and calling it good (Gen. 1) which implies that creation is a perfect creative representation of what God intended to make. Moreover, both men and women are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). So the study of literature begins by acknowledging that humans are not just symbol-making creatures. They are symbol-made creatures who reflect a symbol-making God.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country. Representation is not just aesthetic or political; it is spiritual. Or rather, because it is spiritual, it is necessarily aesthetic and political. Representation is at the heart of the godhead. It manifests itself in our being as creatures made in God’s image. We live in a world sustained by God’s eternal Word. Any field of study that asks us to consider representation gets us closer to understanding metaphysical truth.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth. While this claim may be true ethically (i.e. the right or wrong uses of human representation) it is not true metaphysically. For the reasons listed above, I don’t think a Christian cannot agree that representation has a necessary cost. Our image-bearing nature is premised on distance. Creation reflects God’s power and glory. He called it good although it was different than him. Christ was not suddenly sinful because he became a person. We were only able to see the Father truly because of that representation. After the fall humans can and do use God-given tools (e.g. logic, language) for ethically malicious ends, but that is different than saying that there is a cost always built into representation. In fact, it is because of representation that redemption is possible (Rom. 5:12-15).
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible. It’s telling that the perfect representation of God, Christ, is the Bible character who uses the most blatantly literary form: the parable.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication. This is ethically true before redemption, but God’s word will always accomplish what it was intended to accomplish (Isaiah 55:11) which means that even in an ethically fallen world, the metaphysics of representation are not tainted.
  6. Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art). The God of Christianity is both transcendent and immanent. The law forbids graven idols or images (Exodus 20:4) but establishes symbols and types that will represent the divine. God wants to communicate with humanity. He does so through creation, his revealed word, and ultimately Christ. Christianity is wary about representation primarily because of how crucial it is to the nature of God, creation, and humanity.
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone. My problem with this model is that it means that the audience (the one who receives the representation) is the only necessary agent in the process. It leaves the agent representing TO someone blank, as though all we can talk about is a person who imputes meaning after the fact. If the Christian story is true, then meaning and representation are ethical and personal because they both begin with God. Creation itself represents God’s glory (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20), and the Psalmist and Paul tell us we should be able to discern from creation the existence of the one who created the world. (Note: my thinking here is not as clean and precise as it should be.)
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent via arbitrary signs. Writing is the third of these. This taxonomy gives us a way of thinking about the differences among Christ (God’s icon), people (God’s index), and the Bible (God’s symbolic revelation). One note: just because symbolism can be arbitrary doesn’t mean it has to be, however.
  9. Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art. Truth. That’s why it matters if Christian presuppositions clash with those of scholars like Mitchell.
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Representation: Part 1

The core of Christian theological aesthetics is the religious experience of reestablished communion with God, mediated in this case by aesthetic structures which create, facilitate or sometimes even require a triune meeting between the work of literary art, the spiritually awakened human person, and the divine life of God revealed by faith and reason.

From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice

In their book on Christianity and literature, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet argue that Christians experience the communion above through literature when they apprehend the true, good, and beautiful in what they read.

At the core of this experience is mimesis, literature’s imitation or representation of human life.

Jeffrey and Maillet spend an entire chapter arguing for a correspondence view of truth over and against coherence and pragmatic views. The correspondence view holds that a verbal statement is true insofar as it corresponds with external reality. The way that literature’s “fiction” can claim truth is through aesthetics, its participation in the expression of the beautiful.

Beauty is an important theological concept, one that is not ultimately subjective but, as they argue, “is intrinsically linked, inseparably interdependent, with the intellectual truth and moral beauty existent within the life and presence of the Christian God.”

All this is crucial to explaining to my students what literature is and how it fits into God’s work in the world.

My next two questions are this: what are the biblical presuppositions undergirding literature’s use of representation (conceptual), and what are some concrete ways I could teach these abstract ideas (pedagogical)?

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What I Learned From…Reading Infinite Jest

Last semester, I taught a Non-Fiction and Its Process course. Instead of filling the syllabus with a smorgasbord of authors, I assigned the one book of non-fiction I knew well: David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Much to my surprise, the students dug it.

In fact, they dug it so much that a group of them were at least interested in reading Infinite Jest, DFW’s mammoth novel that clocks in at just over a thousand pages. I decided to strike while the iron was hot and wrote a schedule to get through the book over break, set up a Facebook page for an online reading group discussion, and started plugging away.

When the dust settled, six people started the book, two of us actually finished it, and I had learned some important lessons. Here are five of them…

Continue reading “What I Learned From…Reading Infinite Jest”
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True For You

I listened to the recent conversation between Brian Koppelman and Seth Godin during my evening run, and I finally put my finger on the part of their pragmatic approach to getting work done that I can’t hang with.

Early in their discussion, they debate the relative merits of believing Bob Dylan is a genius.

Godin thinks Dylan is a high-level practitioner who got really lucky.

Koppelman thinks Dylan is an artist who operates on a higher-level: a generational talent.

Their conclusion? Believe the truth that works for you. Why?

Because you can hide from doing your own work by telling yourself you’ll never write a song as good as Dylan.

Or because you can hide from your work by getting indignant that Dylan got so lucky and you, who are just as talented, will never get all those breaks.

From their perspective it’s an existential dilemma. We’re confronted with what “is” (Dylan’s voluminous output and public acclaim) and then we have to imbue it with meaning. If that’s the case, the argument goes, why not make sure that the meaning we give it is something that helps us?

The reason I have listened to and read Godin so frequently is because there are elements of truth here: namely that our hearts tend to produce what St. Paul calls “vain imaginations” that further obscure the things we know to be true. We would do well to pay attention to the stories we tell ourselves about the world.

But that’s not the entire story…

Continue reading “True For You”
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Representation: Part 2

As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the concept of representation, I read through WJT Mitchell’s really dense essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are nine observations about the essay (Mitchell’s main points) followed by three things I think are missing from this model.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis). That’s why Mitchell’s essay is the first in the collection.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth.
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication.
  6. Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art).
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone.
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent arbitrarily. Writing is the third of these.
  9. Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art.

Here’s what I think Mitchell is missing.

  1. Christ is the representation of the Father. Representation is inscribed into the ontology of the trinity.
  2. Humans are made in the image of God. We are not just defined by the fact that we use representation. Rather, we are representations.
  3. Adam and then Christ represented all humanity. That is, representation is a fundamental part of God’s redemptive narrative.

We must take this into account. Over the next two days, I will work out how these biblical concepts help us make sense of literature.

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A Commitment

During my prayer and reading yesterday, I felt convicted about what I’ve let my writing for the blog become: brief, impressionistic notes on teaching with no really substantive reviews or expanded arguments.

I want that to change.

From here on out, I’ll be writing a single longer essay each week, typically posted on Saturday. My first project for these essays is to write about key terms for literary study from a Christian perspective.

On other days of the week, my writing will continue to summarize or expand something I’m trying to understand and apply in my own discipleship and teaching. My model here is Alan Jacobs’s Snakes and Ladders commonplace book which always points me towards something useful and contains enough of Jacobs’s wonderful ruminations, annotations, and commentary that it’s never just an article aggregator.

I feel God calling me to grow and contribute. I have seen growth in my personal commitment to post here as often as I can over the past month or so. That’s a good start. But I know I’m not growing as a scholar or as a teacher through these postings because I’m never pressing myself to think through an issue more thoroughly. And because I’m not growing, I’m not sure that I’m contributing to anyone sense of how to bring their pedagogy and discipleship together.

I want to be more consistent and coherent (i.e. less arbitrary) in my observations, and I want to work towards something larger rather than just haphazardly pile up a bunch of individual bricks. I feel invigorated by the authors I’ve already read this year on practical discipleship (Mark Dever and Robert Coleman) and pedagogy (Ken Bain) as well as the theologians I’ve picked up (Calvin and David Bentley Hart). God has been very good to me so far in 2019, and I want to make the most of the time and talent He’s given me.

This post is a commitment to making my writing here, through His grace, the most truthful and lively and helpful it can be: all for God’s glory and as a way of enjoying Him more.

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The Opposite

This paragraph appears in the preface of the Christian Worldview Integration Series.

By contrast, the Bible presents faith as a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason and knowledge. We should have good reasons for thinking that Christianity is true before we completely dedicate ourselves to it. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before
we go on to apply it. We bring knowledge claims from Scripture and
theology to the task of integration; we do not employ mere beliefs or
faith postulates.

Here, Francis Beckwith and J.P. Moreland argue that faith comes out of our knowledge, that because something is reasonable we will believe it.

In other circles I have seen people describe this process as one where faith makes up the gap between what we can know and the truth of the world. Our reason and knowledge may get us 65% there, but faith is able to fill that remaining 35% because it is built on that sure foundation.

The problem is that this is flies in the face of what scriptures teach about all wisdom beginning with the fear of God and our acceptance of facts (e.g. eyewitness accounts of Christ) being less important than revelation. As Augustine argues, faith provides the foundation for reason, not vice versa. We understand because we believe.

Beckwith and Moreland are right to distance themselves from a faith that is inimical to logic and evidence, but the only way we can have confidence in that logic and in the facts we find is because of our ultimate faith in God.

This is an easier point for me to make here than actually consistently live out, so I pray that as I read, talk, and learn I will discover how this crucial distinction has real consequences.

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Spelled Out

This paragraph from Ken Bain’s book on teaching spells out the questions that good teachers ask themselves.

That question breaks into four subquestions, all prominent in
the thinking of the teachers we studied, regardless of their discipline:
(1) Is the material worth learning (and, perhaps, appropriate
to the curriculum)? (2) Are my students learning what the course is
supposedly teaching? (3) Am I helping and encouraging the students
to learn (or do they learn despite me)? (4) Have I harmed my
students (perhaps fostering short-term learning with intimidation
tactics, discouraging rather than stimulating additional interest in
the field, fostering strategic or bulimic rather than deep learning,
neglecting the needs of a diverse student population, or failing to
evaluate students’ learning accurately)?

From What the Best College Teachers Do

I would like to ask these questions each Saturday during a scheduled planning period as I assess my week’s work and then use the questions to help me plan what I’ll be doing the next week.

This week, my Intro to Lit students are learning about poetry and my Brit Lit students are studying the epic.

Just from asking these questions about my lessons tomorrow, I changed my focus on how to address memorizing a poem. I want to make sure that students see the real point of the exercise: their living with a poem for a longer time than they would if they simply wrote a paper about it or read it from a book 10 times. In order to recite it well, they will have had to dwell with the poem for a week or so. Because this having dwelt with the work is the hallmark of any good interpretation, I’ve come up for a way to practice it without writing another paper about “Stopping By Woods…” My prayer is that they will learn something about meditating on God’s word as well, the way that constant thought and reflection on certain words can help them remain with you throughout the day.

I’m excited about continuing to think through these questions and to use them to better contribute to my students’ growth as readers, writers, and disciples.

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Poetry and God

“When St. Philip asked our Lord to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14:8), he was an example of what St. Anselm called ‘faith seeking understanding.’”

From Father George Rutler

Today, we start looking at poetry in my Intro to Lit course. I typically have students survey five or six poems about God and love respectively as they start to get a feel for how to read a poem.

Fresh off of a class about interpretation and paradigms, the poems we look at today concerning God should get some discussion started. Poetry intensifies our interpretations of and emotional reaction to the world. These poems are pitched high emotionally as they seek understanding about some aspect of God.

In “Batter My Heart,” John Donne feels trapped. The fact that he needs God means that he needs God to help him do what’s right. If he good choose God on his own, he wouldn’t need God in the first place. Donne is intensifying language from the Old and New testaments, from the laments of the Psalms and some of Paul’s most despairing cries in Romans.

In “Love (iii)” George Herbert offers an allegory for the gospel. Christ offers the speaker a chance to eat with him. While the speaker finds himself unworthy to either be a guest, the Lord offers grace and love in the form of food and fellowship.

In “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” William Blake reflects on how different creatures reflect their creator. If God is like the lamb, then we see Jesus. If God is like the tiger, then he is terrifying.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Ward Howe gives us a God who actively participates in human affairs and, with war-like proficiency, advances His cause on the earth.

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tries to not only represent but give us the experience of witnessing God’s beauty in nature.

I’m excited to see if one of these poems resonates with my students more than others. We’ll spend time on Donne and Blake, but I will call for them to re-examine Herbert and Hopkins in light of our discussion.