Scholarship

Interview: Matthew Levering, Part One

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Levering-003-ARTMatthew Levering holds the James N. and Mary D. Perry, Jr. Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary at the University of St. Mary of the Lake. He has authored or co-authored over twenty books, including the recently published Dying and the Virtues, reviewed yesterday on this blog. I had the privilege of sitting down with him for a conversation while at a conference on the Mundelein Seminary campus. We discussed his personal journey to faith, his decision to enter the Catholic church, his scholarship, his latest work, and his thoughts on the work of a theologian and the state of theology. It was a rich and long conversation. Today’s post will include his thoughts about his scholarship and his book, Dying and the Virtues. Tomorrow, I will include his take on the work of a theologian and the state of the theological enterprise. Both are lightly edited transcripts of our conversation.

Bob on Books:  You’ve written a lot of books and I wonder if you could talk about whether there is any thread or trajectory that ties together your scholarship?

Matthew Levering:  Certainly there is a desire to be touched by Jesus, to learn about Jesus from all angles,  and to learn about Jesus in his divine sonship and his relationship with the Father, his love for us, and to reach out to him through writing and thinking. That’s the motivating thing. There’s also a strong thing that moves me very deeply of bridging the elements of the Christian past with the Christian present.  I’m very interested in scriptural reading. I read historical critical biblical scholarship. A fun day is if I’m reading something from Augustine and then I read something from Richard Hayes and I make a connection between the two because there’s a sense of the fullness of Christianity, the wholeness, that I’m not getting stuck in any one century where I’m bringing together past and present. To me that’s the biblical office of a scribe. You bring old things and new. You offer them to fellow Christians as essentially a bringing together, a meditating on the scriptural word, but with all the centuries involved or as many as possible.

And it is bringing that word of God, that Living Word which is always new, always fresh, that has all the centuries and also an insistence that the passage of time has not distanced us from the actual gospel.  I’m very concerned that people say “well it was medieval or it was patristic, it was Reformation, it was this or that, it’s been distanced, it’s been separated from the Biblical word.” That would mean for me that God was not being faithful to his people during those time periods. In other words, to each generation, God is faithful to his people in giving the gospel to his people. So therefore, there must be a way to bring together all these diverse voices, to show their deep unity in Christ. You see what I mean?

Bob on Books: it sounds to me what you’re trying to do is to help people to see how this long tradition of scholarship hangs together.   That it is Christ who makes it hang together and reconciles all things. It seems like you’ve moved from your own encounter with Christ to helping others encounter Christ in this long tradition of people who have contemplated…

Matthew Levering: Yes that’s exactly the goal but also with contemporary questions, with questions that we have today, whether it’s from Richard Dawkins who is so influential– all sorts of questions that we have today. I don’t really do what’s called historical theology, I did one book of historical theology but it was the most boring book I ever wrote!  For me, all theology is caught up with the now, because it’s the day of Christ, because he’s present, he’s living. We need to draw upon all the centuries, all the wisdom, that Christ has been giving his people. We need to hear those voices, and those voices are going to be able to help us as we speak today to answer and to proclaim Jesus.

Bob on Books: You’ve mentioned the questions that we ask today. Your most recent book Dying  and the Virtues seems to address a very important question about  death and about how death shapes how we live. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what you were trying to do in that book.

Matthew  Levering:  That’s wonderful, because I wrote that book after the book on creation which was about God the Life Giver and the pouring out of life. As I pondered on this, I thought I needed to write a book on dying. Included in dying I also included the fall of Adam and Eve. That was a topic in my creation book and so I had already in mind the question of death. In my creation book I include a chapter on the fall and on Christ’s atonement. These things are already somewhat present  in the creation book. But the main point I want to get across is that for me, I can’t think of death as an academic topic. Nor can I think of any topic as a merely academic topic. It’s always deeply personal for me. When people say the word “death,” when I say the word death, I think it’s very concrete for me in the sense death isn’t an abstraction, a concept. Neither is creation, the Trinity, or anything. When I think of death, when I think about the experience of the last moments, the last days, that feels very concrete. I feel very contingent even if I were to live 50 more years.  Death doesn’t seem a distant thing from me but a very present neighbor.

Bob on Books:  It’s the same transience you were talking about in your personal experience…

Matthew Levering: Yes that’s it, the sense of transience.  I feel very strongly calling out to Christ Our Lord who dies on the cross for us.  I feel very strongly calling out to him saying “Lord, Lord is this really good? How could you leave me here to go through this threatening, this entering into darkness, a complete destruction of my bodily frame? How could this possibly be your will?” Calling out to Jesus and saying it’s good for you Lord, to be on the cross, and maybe we can build some booths around you like Peter and we can Rejoice that you have saved us Lord but now you’re surely not calling us to go through this Darkness, this sense of Destruction? My answer is surely not Lord! Surely not! Just like Peter saying by no means would the cross be good for the Lord.  

Bob on Books:  Connect up for me the idea of dying and the virtues–the two parts of your title.

Matthew Levering:  To give away the idea of the book,  it’s that God permits us to go through dying  because we need certain virtues. In other words dying is a crucial part of living and the process of dying begins everyday.  We need a set of virtues given our fallen condition. Even though we are redeemed we need to beg, we need to plead for these virtues. Dying is an instruction manual that teaches us to beg for what we actually need in order to flourish, what we need in order to be Christ-like.

Bob on Books:  I would assume that it has to do with faith, hope, and love?

Matthew Levering:  Yes it begins with faith hope and love. The first chapter is on the threat of annihilation. The first chapter is on love. I begin with the Book of Job where Job questions. I assemble a bunch of texts from The Book of Job where he questions whether God truly loves him. He remembers that one time that he and God were really close and that God seem to love him then. In fact God made him in the womb.  God knew him and crafted him. God built his flesh and bones. God loves him and put him in the community of people and God blessed him. Job cries out, “You’re not a lover, you’re a destroyer!” Job says that to God. I’m not quoting directly but he says “you’re there to destroy my flesh.”

This raises the question of love.  Does God love us? Do we love him? And can we love him given that our bodily frame is going to be destroyed. Do we love this God? Can we love him given that he seems to be threatening us? What kind of lover would allow us to go through this horrible misery and be destroyed? Does God really love us? Do we really love God? My main point is that we often don’t love God. We sort of fear God because we think he really doesn’t love us. He really doesn’t quite love us because he’s going to allow us to die. He’s going to humiliate us. In the end we’re going to be stripped and humiliated. So we love the God who sets us up on a pedestal and gives us a nice book by Eerdmans and stuff! We love that God but the God who sets us down and says you’re going to be stripped and humiliated– that God we don’t love. We don’t love the God of the cross. So we have to be turned around , we have to allow God’s voice to come through. Remember how God speaks to Job in the end. God says, “you don’t know my plan. You weren’t there. Were you there when the angels sang for joy at the dawn of creation? Do you know the power of the different created things?“

So God tells Job, “you just don’t know my ways.” And ultimately God’s point is that you don’t know the plan. The point that God has made to Job that Job understands is that God loves Job. God comes out and cares for Job and speaks to Joe.   God assures Job that his power to love is not going to be stopped by Death. The end of Job is like a blessing of resurrection, of communion in a certain way. It’s all really pointing to Christ where God shows who God is in the midst of death and resurrection in his perfect love. Since we’ve got to live it through Job, we’ve got to realize that we tend not to love God. We tend to love the God who is giving us blessings. But we tend to think that there’s this other God who is a humiliator, who is essentially going to abandon us.

Part two of this interview will appear tomorrow.

Bringing Discipleship and Scholarship Together–Part Two

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Yesterday, I wrote that because scholarly communities are formative communities, Christians and other persons of faith who care about a seamless connection between belief and scholarship need to engage in what James K. A. Smith calls “thick formative practices” that foster that seamless connection.  The alternatives to this are assimilation into the prevailing worldview and values of one’s scholarly community at the loss of vibrant Christian faith, the bifurcation of life into sacred and secular categories resulting in privatized faith and a public embrace of the worldview of one’s discipline. A third alternative is the “embattled enclave” mentality, where one holds to one’s faith convictions but engages with one’s discipline from an exclusively conflict-oriented posture.

Today, I want to turn to what those “thick formative practices” might be. I would like to focus on four practices which I believe important to bringing our discipleship and scholarship together.

1. Cultivating practices of attentiveness to God in one’s life. Years ago, as a college student, I was taught the habit of “The Daily Quiet Time”. At times this is maligned as inflexible, or confining of God to one’s personal devotional life. This needn’t be the case and there are a variety of spiritual practices of attentiveness one may explore in these private times with God over a lifetime.  At the core of all of these practices is the idea of listening attentiveness to God, in prayer, in scripture, and in the examination of one’s life resulting in a response to God of joyful worship, trust in the practical matters of our lives, and obedience to the commands and precepts and personal insights from God that we gain in these times. What I and others are discovering more in recent years is that the habit of humble attentiveness is one that spills over into academic life, as we seek to attend to the creation, to data, to other voices–listening for the promptings of God–sometimes in the form of questions that turn into research questions, sometimes in terms of insights.

life of the mind book

2. Learning to think Christianly about all of life. This practice flows from the practices of attentiveness as we consider, what is God’s pleasure in this area of research, this area of human activity, this personal endeavor, this relationship? But there are two additional pieces that the scholar-disciple needs to cultivate. One is a devotion to study of Christian sources: the Bible with the end of understanding God’s redemptive story as that is worked out from cover to cover, the basic contours of Christian belief captured in creeds, confessions, and theological works, and at least some understanding of Christian history and how believing people have confronted life’s greatest questions over two millenia. It is often helpful to ask how the truth we encounter bears on the questions of our disciplines. Mark Noll in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind gives us a wonderful example of how reflecting on Christology, our beliefs about Christ, inform questions in various disciplines. The other is study in and practice of one’s chosen discipline where one is consistently asking God for insight into the underlying worldview, the questions, findings and practices of one’s discipline. In some cases these may be consistent with Christian conviction, in some cases they actually reflect a creative outworking of that conviction, and sometimes at the level of ideas, sometimes at the level of ethics, we will find ourselves differing. My sense of how this seems to work for many is the movement from disparate things (faith and scholarship) to strands of connection, to a seamless garment over the course of years of thought, exploration, questioning, and discussion.

3. Engagement in Christian scholarly communities.  One of the paradoxes of scholarly life is that one is both deeply embedded in a formative community of fellow scholars, and yet often working in a solitary fashion. Temperament may reinforce this as many, though not all, academics are introverts. Certainly an important element is involvement with a diverse worshiping community beyond the university that reminds us of the relevance of our faith beyond our own contexts. At the same time, via physical communities in one’s own university, virtual communities online, and the written works of others wrestling with questions similar to ours, we sharpen our insights and strengthen our resolves to live faithfully in our own contexts. The “Inklings” with which C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and others gathered to read and critique work is an outstanding example of this (which also included friends who didn’t share their beliefs). In another context, William Wilberforce’s efforts to abolish slavery were greatly enhanced by a community of religious leaders, businessmen and scholars committed to working out the implications of Christian faith for the benefit of British society and the glory of God.

4. Practicing intellectual hospitality and engagement in one’s context.  I posted recently on some of the contours of intellectual hospitality so I won’t reiterate all of that here. In brief, I would say that in the departmental or professional context where one works there are opportunities to the practices of Christian charity, courtesy, and courage. Charity means welcoming colleagues or peers as Christ has welcomed us and treating them as valued human beings regardless their views. Courtesy calls us to afford the ideas and beliefs of others the same respect we would wish for our own. It also can mean accepting the hospitality of peers and colleagues–both in terms of personal friendship, and in terms of intellectual exchange. And finally it may sometimes call for courage in being honest about our faith where the situation requires it, even while we seek to be charitable rather than belligerent, and willing to listen as well as to speak. Sometimes, speaking to a Christian student group or as part of a public discussion hosted by such a group involves practicing this courage. This is not a call to proselytize in class but rather a call not to “duck” when we are given opportunities to be honest about our identity or speak about how our faith contributes insight to important disciplinary questions.

I would appreciate hearing the insights of others in bring faith and scholarship together. In a world where these two are so polarized, and often function antagonistically toward each other, it seems this is a vital discussion.

Bringing Discipleship and Scholarship Together-Part One

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If there is one thing about the graduate school context that I wish more people would understand, it is that graduate school is a powerfully formative experience. Going to grad school isn’t just about information–it is about formation–shaping you into a person who is part of the “academic guild” or a member of a particular profession, like law.

Graduate school is a powerfully immersive experience. You are embedded in a disciplinary community. You are not only engaged in a process of intellectual formation but you are being inducted into the practices, values, and worldview that undergirds your discipline. Furthermore, the social norms and social acceptance of peers and especially advisers who can further or block your career progress have a powerful formative effect.

And much of this is good. Whether it is training in rigorous research protocols or best practices in surgical technique or legal reasoning–all of this prepares one to perform in their calling with a level of excellence, integrity, and skill that serves a much wider good.

What I think is critical for Christ-followers (and equally for other religious adherents from multi-faith conversations I’ve been a part of) is understanding the power of this formative community and where its beliefs and worldview may clash with one’s most deeply held beliefs. It could be the metaphysical (as opposed to methodological) naturalism embraced by many in science and engineering. It could be the results-oriented pragmatism that may inform fields as disparate as public policy and business. Or it may just be an indifference that considers faith nice but irrelevant.

Sadly, I’ve witnessed the corrosive effect this has even on those who have been leaders of undergrad Christian communities (reflecting those with whom I’m most familiar). Some may say that if their faith could not stand up to the rigor of grad school and the intellectual challenges, then it is fitting that they should abandon their faith as youthful delusion.

In theory I would agree except that I know scholars in every area of the university who have not turned from their faith–Christian or otherwise–but rather have gone deeper into it as they’ve pursued their scholarship. All all of them deluded? Perhaps, but it seems to me that this is too facile and dismissive.

Desiring the Kingdom

So what makes the difference between those who I would say “assimilate” into the prevailing assumptions of their discipline and those who “constructively engage” their disciplines while going deeper in their faith? James K.A. Smith, in Desiring the Kingdom speaks of the importance of “thick” formative practices to counter socially pervasive practices in the broader culture. These are communally supported and personally embraced “habits of faithfulness” that reflect and sustain one’s beliefs. These cannot be a retreat into a kind of personal pietism that divorces the sacred from the secular but rather a constellation of practices that sustain both spiritual and intellectual vitality as well as a posture of hospitable participation in one’s disciplinary or professional community.

In tomorrow’s post, I will explore what “thick formative practices” I believe can sustain the constructive engagement of Christ-followers in their disciplinary or professional contexts.

 

Let’s Lose the Term “Revisionist”!

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In another instance of my books talking to each other, two authors from very different perspectives argued that the rhetoric of “revisionism” is unhelpful to serious discourse, though quite convenient for polarizing polemic! Robert Tracy McKenzie, a Christian historian argues that we should lose this term in discussions of history (in his case, in his book The First Thanksgiving). Ellen Schrecker, whose core beliefs can only be inferred but probably differ from McKenzie, makes the observation that the accusation of “revisionism” became the popular argument of the conservative right against the perceived “political correctness” of the academy in her book The Lost Soul of Higher Education.

Why is this so? Both contend that revision is a constant and healthy process in the academic world. In no field do we know the exhaustive truth about anything. Both of these writers are historians, and history is an effort to write an account of the past to which we have no access apart from primary source materials and artifacts, which gives us far from an exhaustive view of that past. Revision happens when new source material comes to light, or new perspectives allow one to give an account of past events more congruent with the totality of the data. It is the latter type of revisions which come in for the greatest criticism because many of these involve looking at history from perspectives other than that of white men. The roles of women and non-white peoples are often given a truer account when historians do scholarship from perspectives that include concerns for these peoples. Often, such history shows our “heroes” as people with feet of clay–consider for example Thomas Jefferson, and the studies that reveal him as a slaveholder, and likely a father of children by at least one of his slaves.

Rather than tarring certain areas of scholarship with the “revisionist” label, the scholarly thing to do (but one that can’t fit into a media or blog soundbite) is to assess the quality of the scholarship in question. Does it indeed represent the best account given all the extant sources or data? Does it deal even-handedly with competing theories or explanations and provide a convincing account of why this explanation is superior? Are all the assertions made reasonably supported by the data or sources, or are there unsupported claims? Are all the sources or data accessible to or reproducible by other researchers? These are the kinds of questions a genuine concern for truth in our scholarship requires.

In most discourse, I would argue that the “revisionist” tag is the cheap-shot substitute for a serious response to scholarly work (or work that purports to be intellectually serious). Most of the time, it is a pretentious way of saying I don’t like what someone is saying, or resent that the person has questioned the verities of my life. If we genuinely think a piece of work is bad thinking or bad scholarship, the answer is not to label it revisionist, but rather to produce better thinking and better scholarship that shows bad scholarship for what it is and advances the search for truth.

The “-ist” in revisionist  in fact makes an inference about the person producing a given piece of work, as much as about the work itself. As such, I would contend that this is a form of ad hominem argument that moves our disagreements from the realm of disagreements about what is true to personal attacks upon the character of the person advancing that argument.

What are other words you’ve come across that shut down serious efforts to pursue truth, that function as verbal “smackdowns” that deepen divides rather than produce understanding?