№ 12: An English Spring
In which we go shopping and think about vibes.
Dear all,
We’ve spent the last month or so more or less buckled down in Staffordshire, after I did what Alastair insists on referring to as my Gallivant to Venice. Why, he asks, would I even need to GO, given that there are more miles of canals in Birmingham than in Venice?
He reminds me of this geographical fact … frequently. Several times a week, I would say. Whenever canals come up, or Venice, or Italy, or Birmingham, or the West Midlands, or the Midlands, or the Industrial Revolution.
He occasionally varies the phrasing, slightly. “Did you know,” he will say, turning to me brightly, “that Birmingham… that center of English industrialism… and our near neighbor… has more miles of canals… than the Italian city, of Venice?” [Alastair: I can’t believe that my wife Americanizes the spellings in my reported speech!] He will pause there for a moment, and as I am about to turn away, he may add, “Which is known for its canals.”
He finds this very entertaining.
In any case, we’re back here, and have been hard at work.
The Intensification of the Voice of the Hebrew Scriptures in the New Testament
Alastair: Last Sunday evening I preached on 1 Corinthians 10:11: Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. I can think of few verses that better crystallize a healthy Christian reading of the Old Testament, especially when we read the verse in its surrounding context.
Several verses earlier, Paul describes the Exodus generation, presumably to both the Jews and the Gentiles to whom he is writing, as ‘our fathers’ (verse 1), emphasizing a shared patrimony and history. For Paul, the peoplehood of the Church grows out of the covenant peoplehood of Israel, yet without displacing or replacing that peoplehood. Elsewhere, in Romans 11, Paul will compare Gentiles to wild branches grafted into an olive tree. In Paul’s understanding, a covenant peoplehood once exclusive to Israel is now enjoyed by countless persons outside Israel, as, through the work of the Christ, Abraham becomes the father of many nations, his own natural descendants the firstborn of a worldwide family of peoples.
In addition to this continuity of the covenant history and peoplehood, Paul foregrounds the homology of the experience of the Exodus generation with the Church’s, describing the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness in a manner designed to invite direct comparisons: the children of Israel were ‘baptized into Moses’ (verse 2) and all ‘ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink’ (verse 3). In such descriptions, Paul ensures that we recognize the strong resemblances between the experience of the Christians to whom he is writing and that of the Exodus generation: Israel had something like the Church’s sacraments in the wilderness!
At this point, some hearers of Paul might presume that, although there may be some continuity of peoplehood and certain broad homologies that can be highlighted, these need to be understood in a ‘figure-reality’ framework for which the experience of Israel, though illustrative, is without the reality that Christ brings, merely being a ‘fleshly’ figure. While, for many Christians, reading the Torah ‘in the light of Christ’ juxtaposes Christ’s glorious presence with illustrative yet insubstantial shadows, Paul’s approach markedly differs. Paul does see Christ’s advent as representing a movement to a more glorious dispensation, but, reading the Torah, he finds the glorious light of Christ on the face of Moses (2 Corinthians 3). Christ’s glory was present all along, but it was veiled.
In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul tells the story of the Exodus in a way that invites the Corinthians to reread it with the recognition that Christ was present and active within it throughout. The Israelites truly enjoyed Christ’s presence and blessings in the wilderness, not merely signs of an absent future reality, but reality-filled promises and anticipations of that future. Christ was there all along: ‘they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ’ (verse 4) and ‘we must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents’ (verse 9). I have discussed all this here before.
While some might think that the New Testament reduces the Old Testament to something akin to Scriptures with an emeritus status, Paul’s convictions propelled him into renewed, intense, and urgent engagement with them. For Paul, the Old Testament scriptures were exemplary or typological, recounting history that divinely prefigured and anticipated realities that would be progressively and then climactically revealed. That reality was progressively more fully revealed in Israel’s subsequent history and, in Paul’s understanding, climactically revealed in the work of Christ. Like the reader rereading a detective novel in the light of its great reveal, details stick out in a new way throughout.
In 1 Corinthians 10:11 Paul daringly implies that, far from being rendered outdated, it is with the advent of Christ that the Old Testament scriptures have most fully come into their own—‘they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.’
In the Substack post before this, I reflected upon Joshua Berman’s Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith, within which he challenges readers of the Scriptures for imposing modern frameworks of history upon the text. Scriptural history, he argues, needs to be understood as exhortation. Such a reading of history is clearly in evidence in 1 Corinthians 10, where Paul tells the story of Israel in the wilderness as a form of challenge and exhortation to the Corinthians. However, beyond such a reading, in the writing of Paul and the apostles we also see a figural reading of Scripture. Scripture and the events that it records are prophetic, divinely orchestrated anticipation and declaration of glories yet to come. Israel’s history, for the New Testament authors, predictively prefigures later events, which have what Richard Davidson calls a devoir-être character as its escalated fulfilments. Paul’s reading of Scripture is also epiphanic: the veiled revelations of anticipated realities are revelations of glories. It is only as we learn to read them in such ways that we will truly begin to understand what it meant for the apostles to read the Old Testament texts as Scripture.
The New Testament scriptures both severally and collectively need to be approached as a (re-)reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. The gospels are, among other things, akin to literary icons of Christ in media provided by the Hebrew Scriptures. Matthew, for instance, tells the story of Jesus in the literary form of a recapitulation of Israel’s history, beginning with Genesis (Matthew 1:1; cf. Genesis 5:1) and ending with the decree of Cyrus (Matthew 28:18-20; cf. 2 Chronicles 36:23). Matthew’s opening genealogy presents Jesus in firm continuity with the earlier scriptural narrative and his gospel tells the story of Jesus as a reading of that narrative and as a climactic fulfilment of it (Matthew’s ‘fulfilment’ language will only begin to make sense to us as we appreciate his typological understanding of history, his belief that the scriptural history has a prophetic aspect). Matthew is history, but its fuller epiphanic and hermeneutic purpose will only be discovered as it is read in concert with the Hebrew Scriptures. Like the other gospels, Matthew presents Christ as the key to the reading of those Scriptures and those Scriptures as the key to the understanding of Christ.
Vibe Shift
Alastair: ‘Vibe shift’ is a recently popularized term for a change in the direction the zeitgeist is blowing. It captures the fickleness of trends and fashions, and the aesthetics and sensibilities that drive them: things can change almost overnight and not in a straightforward or predictable direction (even if not an entirely arbitrary one). Such changes can have far-reaching impacts in the short term, yet disappear suddenly, leaving little in their wake. Others can have a more enduring effect, while retreating to the background of the cultural consciousness.
Reflection upon such ‘vibe shifts’ can offer a helpful counterbalance to and complication of more popular linear narratives of progress or decline. Vibe shifts can be rapid, unpredictable, ephemeral, short-lived, and discontinuous. Some might argue that vibe shifts relate to larger cultural evolution as weather relates to climate: the latter concerns longer term patterns and trends that can be observed in the former, which is highly variable. However, we might also ask whether cultural evolution really has quite as continuous a character as many ascribe to it (playing with the weather/climate analogy, we might consider the way that serious weather events can cause or catalyse more systemic transformations). Perhaps culture also has unpredictable shifts, upon which we impose a retrospective determinacy, perhaps ‘culture’ is largely the accumulation of countless disparate ‘shifts’ at different levels, perhaps a lot of cultural change takes the form of cultural ‘trophic cascades’ first initiated or catalysed by shifts in the ‘vibe’.
Whether we focus narrowly on ‘vibes’, or whether we expand our frame to include other factors, the concept of the vibe shift invites us to pay more attention to the role of flux and discontinuity in the formation of our culture.
Besides this, the concept of the ‘vibe’ foregrounds the role of pre-rational and memetic sensibilities and aesthetics in shaping a culture’s character and precipitating change within it. While the concept of ‘vibe shift’ as popularly used tends to refer to shorter-term changes in trends and interests, the concept might also prompt us to reflect more upon the role played by sensibilities, people’s forms of emotional and relational awareness and processing.
The fickle marriages between vibes—or sensibilities—and ideologies have long interested me. Movements committed to a particular ideology can suddenly change their vibe, while a specific vibe can suddenly switch to a different ideology. Such an ideological vibe shift can be illustrated by New Atheism. New Atheism used to be huge and then largely disappeared. Scott Alexander suggests that it moved in the direction of social justice. Events like the fallout over ‘Elevatorgate’ were initial indicators of the shift.
New Atheism had a distinctly young male vibe or sensibility: belligerency, ‘facts and logic’, hard sciences, pugnacious debate, Oxbridge male leaders, commitment to uncensored speech, delight in triggering the sensitive and attacking sacred cows, etc.
The sensibility of the earlier New Atheism movement and the cultural power it enjoyed, it seems to me, owed much to the form of the Internet at the time. This was when there were ‘no girls on the Internet’—the social privileges that women enjoy were not as operative and more confrontational male norms of engagement dominated. Then, with the rise of social media, there was a rapid and radical ‘vibe shift’. Feminine sensibilities became dominant.
It might seem that it should have been foreseeable that media that greatly extended the reach of, heightened the undifferentiation of, and subsumed most cultural discourse within social realms would dramatically empower and lead to the cultural dominance of such sensibilities. Yet the mechanisms by which shifts in cultural sensibilities occur are challenging enough to see in retrospect, let alone to predict.
Whereas New Atheism was once dominated by a young male sensibility, the more social the world of the Internet became, the more the atheist movement shifted in a feminist and then social justice direction and there was a reordering of alignments. The sensibilities of New Atheism are now attached to guys like the followers of Jordan Peterson, belligerent right-wing debaters (‘Watch Ben Shapiro DESTROY this feminist!’), etc. Ideas such as that of evolution, which were once deemed as quite progressive can suddenly get realigned as ‘based’ in our cultural vibe shift. And many of the former adherents of such a movement will move with the vibe shift. Such persons can move quite rapidly between seemingly vastly differing and even opposed ideologies, as they can share a common vibe.
Recognition of the complex interplay of sensibilities, ideologies, and cultural transformation will help us to perceive the nature of certain shifts more clearly. For instance, the positive/neutral/negative world paradigm, which has recently received a lot of attention among right-wing evangelical Christians, is largely a linear, continuous, and directional model of cultural development. Such models can be helpful, but they can also easily underplay the part played by sudden, discontinuous, eccentric, and contingent factors, by rapid systemic realignment and cultural ‘trophic cascades’, and by peculiar and unpredictable interactions among an array of heterogeneous forces and influences. Our conceptual categories may be limited as a result. For instance, it seems to me that no small measure of what some Christians are trying to name with the terminology ‘negative world’ is less a linear cultural development towards greater hostility to the faith—or even hostility to the faith as such at all—than it is the shift in dominant sensibilities to a more feminine ethos (a shift that has occurred in many Christian contexts too).
It seems to me that, in the context of a social media age, ‘vibe shift’ becomes a much more widely applicable concept. When cultural discourse is so decontextualized, inclusive, rapid, undifferentiated, and reactive, and the participants within it are more fragilized in their identities—a situation largely precipitated by the new material, or digital, conditions of the Internet, rather than by new ideas—it will become progressively more driven by prerational instincts and sensibilities. I believe that the last decade has seen the intensification of social sorting by sensibility. Terms like ‘woke’ and ‘based’, which name rival sensibilities and vibes more than they name clearly defined ideologies, should illustrate the degree to which sensibilities rather than ideas can be in the driving seat. I believe that we need to push back firmly against this elevation of sensibility, seeking to ensure that the Church is a place that is hospitable to people with a range of differing sensibilities, while also (re-)ordering and (re-)forming all sensibilities to the service of Christ and the loving service of others.
Recent Work
Susannah
❧ The Pain and Passion issue of the magazine is, amazingly, out, and it’s a beautiful one. Highlights include:
Episcopal priest Ben Crosby on Canada’s euthanasia experiment
the medievalist Eleanor Parker on The Dream of the Rood
the essayist Nathan Beacom on the return of the bison to America’s great plains
and the historian (not the actor) Tom Holland on Christianity’s bizarre transformation of the classical idea of suffering
❧ The first episode of the new season of the podcast came out last week; Pete and I addressed the overall topic of the issue, using CS Lewis’ two books on pain - one the very abstract and intellectual Problem of Pain, and the other his anguished personal journal from just after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed.
Alastair
❧ My twenty-hour course, ‘An Introduction to Biblical Wisdom’, is now available for pre-order at reduced cost. The first ten lectures provide a summary of the entire Bible and how best to read it. The second ten lectures focus upon the theme of wisdom and the poetic literature of Scripture more directly.
❧ The full Mere Fidelity cast had an enjoyable discussion of what we would do to further Christian work and witness if we had one billion dollars. Paul Gutacker, the author of The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past, joined us to talk about how American Protestant understandings of sola scriptura and biblical authority played out in the context of the Civil War and debates around slavery.
❧ Our series on James Jordan’s Through New Eyes on the Theopolis Podcast concluded with an episode on The New World and The Course of History. Between the Through New Eyes and our forthcoming series on the book of Deuteronomy, we have released two question and answer episodes. In the first we discussed the future of theological education, full preterism, whether there is any connection to be discovered between various occurrences of names with ‘Sheba’ or homophonic terms within them, and James Bejon’s thoughts on Daniel. In the second, we discussed the Spirit of God upon the waters, questions surrounding the valid, licit, and fitting performance of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the placement of the sursum corda, and how to read the story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 and relate it questions of domestic abuse.
❧ The challenging story of the Levite’s concubine was also the subject of my recent appearance on The Weird Christian Podcast, on which I discussed Judges 19 for over an hour with Samuel Delgado. I make the case that the story draws heavily upon the patriarchal narratives, is closely bound up with the story of Micah and the Danites in Judges 17-18 and the story of the war against the Benjaminites in Judges 20-21, provides a frame for the entire book of Judges, and that 1 Samuel uses it as a backdrop for the story of Saul.
❧ I knitted another scarf.
Happenings and Doings
The last few weeks have been a welcome return to something closer to a regular routine. On the 4th, we joined Tim Vasby-Burnie and a few others for a walk on the Stiperstones near Shrewsbury, a Shropshire hill famous for its quartzite tors, most notably the Devil’s Chair. We visited the Castle Ring Iron Age hillfort before descending the hill to the Stiperstones Inn. Once again, we were treated to glorious countryside and had a great pub lunch afterwards.
We returned to Shrewsbury in time to enjoy a visit to Welsh Bridge Books and Collectables, one of the most glorious stores you could ever have the opportunity to visit.
Susannah’s old laptop needed replacing so, the next Wednesday, we decided to visit Manchester to buy a new one in one of the city’s Apple stores. We went to the Trafford Centre, originally intending to return to the centre of Manchester to visit the Ryland’s Library. The Trafford Centre is a vast and palatial ‘shopping destination’, decorated throughout with marble, classical statuary, fountains, and gold leaf, an exuberant postmodern confection of Rococo, Baroque, neo-classical, and Art Nouveau styles, a cathedral complex devoted to mass consumption. It has the largest food court in Europe with restaurants themed after different countries, vast domed atria, fake palm trees, heraldic statues, and painted ceilings.
Something peculiar activated in Susannah’s brain and we ended up devoting the rest of the afternoon after she purchased her new laptop to essential oils, skincare products, make up, and other such purchases. [Susannah: Note that Alastair originally described this as a riastrad, the “warp spasm” into which Irish warriors such as Cuchulainn notoriously enter, making them formidable opponents. I object STRONGLY to this characterization, and would furthermore like to note that I have been to a mall perhaps a total of 15 times in my life; this isn’t like a THING, with me.]
We had a meal with Alastair’s brother and sister-in-law before catching the train back.
Susannah: Last week, I spent a lovely couple of days in Cambridge (longer than originally planned, thanks to train strikes). I was there to emcee a Plough event featuring four speakers, each of whom was engaged in some form of communal living: the communities varied from the very informal, a girl who, with her housemates, hosts a weekly community meal, through a woman (Elizabeth Oldfield, a friend) who, along with her husband and another couple who are friends, bought a house in London to serve as a community hub and committed to at least five years of experimentation in this joint hospitality-focused household, to a graduate student who is living, with a commitment of a year at a time, in a community modeled on L’Arche, serving people with developmental disabilities, to Bernard Hibbs of the Bruderhof, who has joined, with lifetime vows, a very formalized hundred year old community that holds all things in common.
The event concluded with me asking everyone who was in the audience (we had about fifty) who was interested in doing some kind of experiment in Christian, or for that matter non-Christian, communitarianism, to raise their hands, and then to look around to see who else had their hands up, and finally to go talk to those people in the wine-and-pizza hangout afterwards. (There was also a very large jar of Bruderhof-made applesauce; apparently putting applesauce on your pizza is a Bruderhof custom, I can only assume not dating back to Germany in 1920.)
It was held in the church where Hugh Latimer, one of those who had been burned under Queen Mary for Protestant teaching, had preached, and his pulpit was still there.
Cambridge— Can’t say much about it except that it’s magical. I went to evensong, at which a friend from New York was singing, and we went out afterwards for a long, satisfying chat, and (obviously) I visited the Cambridge University Press bookstore; books have been sold from that site since 1581 and CUP is the oldest university press in the world; for publishing nerds it has the feel of the Motherhouse, somehow.
Upcoming Events
❧ Tim Vasby-Burnie is hosting a 'Psalm Roar' at St. George's Church in Shrewsbury for the 22nd April. The evening before, Alastair will be delivering a talk on the theology of the psalms and of psalm-singing. Sign up for the event here!
❧ Alastair starts teaching his new Davenant Hall (‘A Biblical Theology of the Sexes’) and Theopolis Institute (‘Numberology’) courses in the next few weeks.
❧ Alastair will be returning to Davenant Hall to teach the summer program in June.
❧ Most of Alastair’s work is as an independent scholar, funded by Patreon donors. His primary goal is to create thoughtful yet free Christian material for the general public, most notably his largely-completed chapter-by-chapter commentary on the whole Bible (available here and here). If you would like to support his continuing research, teaching, writing, and other content production, you can do so here.
Of Note
❧ Plough Books, the publishing house associated with the magazine, has just published the latest novel from acclaimed Ukrainian magical realist novelist Eugene Vodolazkin, the author of Laurus. Titled A History of the Island, it’s … think of it as Dostoevsky, but funny; or Name of the Rose, but not ultimately nihilistic.
Much love,
Susannah and Alastair
Strange. My wife Sarah also falls prey to occasional peculiar phenomena in her brain. It's notable how it coincides with proximity to fabric shops, candles, etc. Now I have a name for it: "warp spasm."