Comments on Permanence and Change by K. Burke

The epigraph for Burke's later work A Grammar of Motives is ad bellum purificandum, which is usually translated as "towards the purification of war." I'm tempted to say that the epigraph for Permanence and Change could be ad religio purificandum: towards the purification of religion. I'm not sure if the Latin is exactly correct, but it is close enough to convey the meaning. The book as a whole can be interpreted as making the case that while the patterns of religion change over time and vary across cultures, the need of human beings to be religious is permanent.

Over and over again in the text Burke takes traditional religious language and reapplies it to modern "secular" culture, which renders the concept of secularity very ambiguous. Examples: Piety is obviously a key concept in this book, interpreted as "the sense of what properly goes with what"(74). All human beings are thus pious, in their varying ways, whether they are dock workers, teachers, police officers, or criminals. Anyone who seeks to persuade another person of some idea is engaged in "evangelism." "Conversion" is not simply the goal of preachers; all human beings are constantly being "born again" as they reconfigure themselves as they go through life. The professors, sales people, ad writers, etc., who are the priests of the capitalist system are always seeking to uphold that orientation(179). Karl Marx, as a representative of dissent that is trying to imagine a different orientation is a prophet. The "secular mysticism in Bentham" is concerned "au fond with the problem of evil"(193). The chapter on "The Ethical Confusion" can be seen as wrestling with the Great Commandment, in that it talks about the relation between love of neighbor and love of self. People must always choose between thinking of the universe as "being created" or "having been created"; is creation purely past tense or is it present tense (218)? The tension between these possibilities is a perennial debate among theologians, with fundamentalists tending to favor the past tense and reformers such as Martin Luther and Karl Barth tending to favor the "creation continues" approach.

What is the upshot of all of this? One could say that in human culture there is tremendously powerful inertia. So, if "modern" people think that they are rejecting religion and becoming secular, they are deceiving themselves, because the subtle inertia of millennia of religion will shape how they think and act (in the many ways that Burke is cataloging). But, it may be that in three or five hundred more years that inertia will have finally dissipated and humanity will actually be secularized. Or, a person may think that the religious features of human culture are necessary (permanent), not accidental. There is something in human nature that is stable across cultures and eras, which entails that there will always be catharsis, piety, conversion, and so forth. The specific expressions of those things will vary, but they will always be there, just as the human body can have different skin and hair colors, but it will always have lungs, a liver, muscles, bones, and so forth. I think Burke favors this latter possibility. "One may doubt that places such as heaven, hell, and purgatory await us after death--but one may well suspect that the psychological patterns which they symbolize lie at the root of our conduct here and now"(184). Homo sapiens is homo religiosus. Religion arises out of our metabiology.

If this is the case, it has interesting implications for higher education. Many "secular" universities, for example, do not even have a religious studies department, which suggests that there is a tacit acceptance of the inertia-dissipation-theory. But Burke's thought would seem to imply that it should not only be the case that there is a religious studies department in every university but also that there is a sense in which that department sees the human condition at the greatest depth. It is the heart of the university as it leads people to become aware of human pieties. Another implication would be that any philosophical interpretation of the human condition (such as Burke's, for example) is actually a kind of theology. "It seems obvious that before we could establish the existence of a common situation or motive for all men, we should have to define the cosmic situation and man's place in it. In the last analysis, psychology is but a subdivision of metaphysics . . ."(221). From the perspective of traditional (explicit) theology, this sort of (implicit) theology is ambiguous. It could be seen as a good thing in that there is a recognition of the permanent religiosity of human beings; it could be seen as a bad thing in that human beings in the modern world reject God and seek to become gods in their own right (rite!). Instead of human beings submitting to God's guidance, judgment, and poesis, they seek to become "strong poets of their own souls" which will lead to various forms of judgment against their neighbors, if those neighbors poetize differently. This judgment may include killing their neighbors (or euthanizing "defective" infants or the "useless" elderly).

We have been led to the conclusion that there is limited usefulness to the phrase that "religion is the opiate of the masses"; one could make a stronger case that the secularization thesis is the opiate of modern intellectuals who don't see things very clearly. Burke is thus a trojan horse for Marxism, boring from within to advance and purify religion.

Introducing Paul Young

I gave the following brief remarks to introduce author Paul Young, author of The Shack, at the Brite Divinity School Minister's Week Conference on Feb. 11, 2010.

Good morning, and welcome to the 2010 Scott Lectures at Brite Divinity School.

Through a quirk of circumstances, I just happen to have known Paul Young before he became famous. Back in 1997-2000 I lived in Portland, Oregon. Paul was also living in that area, and we met each other as participants in a discussion group for Christians from different churches. Back then, my impression of Paul was that he was bright, articulate, and well educated in theology, but I had no clue that Paul would one day write a book that would sell millions of copies. I'm sure that most of you are aware of the subsequent story: Paul wrote the manuscript of a novel, intending to give a few copies to family and friends. He and a small group of friends created their own imprint for the book, and it quickly rose to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

The most vociferous objections to the book seem to be coming from certain conservative evangelicals who claim that it teaches dangerously heretical doctrines. Such critics could benefit from reading The Art of Rhetoric, in which Aristotle says that there are three main forms of persuasion: logos (the logical force of the argument), ethos (the authority and charisma of the author), and pathos (the emotional impact that the work has on its audience). Those who criticize the alleged theological errors in the book make the category mistake of treating it as if it were a doctrinal treatise, an example of logos, which it is not. The book is not an example of ethos either, in the sense that Paul Young was not a person who had name recognition as a charismatic leader prior to the book's publication. The book's success is purely a result of the impact it had on its readers; it is an eye-opening example of what Aristotle called pathos.

Many readers have resonated deeply with the book's message about God's love for wounded people, and we are all wounded in various ways. The book challenges pastors in particular to ask themselves whether our churches and our religiosity are turning people away from God, or opening up people's spirits to truly hear the Gospel. Even if we are not contributing to the problem, is it the case that our preaching and teaching lacks persuasive power because it does not reach people where they are? Is there a deep spiritual hunger in people, for which we have very little nourishment to offer? These are the types of questions that we should be asking.

So without further ado, I present to you the accidental author, Paul Young.