No Messing with Mister In-Between
June 30, 2005
Well the opinions on Evangelical slippage and applications to join a multi-pantagruelian throng are rolling in–most distressing and stimulating stuff. Some applicants even have the gall to cloak themselves in pseudonymity.
Now for the brass Balls! award for calling it like it is:
tNP comrade McCarraher on Mark C. Taylor’s Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption in the latest Books & Culture: “What does it take to write with such insouciance about failure, suffering, and death? I don’t think it’s flippant to respond: tenure, medical insurance, and a pension, the oblivious possession of which provides the Bobo set with security to neglect some intractable material and social realities.”
(McCarraher also responds to reader mail, defending his having trodden heavily on the Jim Wallis mush-melon, God’s Politics in an earlier issue. It was an easy squish, however, and along the way McCarraher touted his abstention for voting last November. One is tempted to ask what causes there are for such insouciance.)
Better yet, on a much more important issue, Allen Guelzo charts the material and spiritual roots of decay in CCCU schools, citing Pantagrueliste Eric Miller whose essay on the same subject in First Things may have been motivated by those cacodaimonic emails he intercepted and translated for tNP.
Says Guelzo, “It’s the unaffected willingness of evangelicals to accommodate themselves to the spirit of the age that so deeply troubles me. I do not say this merely because I am besotted with the old wineskins. I have spent a quarter-century in Christian higher education, and with only a few sunspots of grief. It is the city of my first love, and God forbid that anyone should hear this as anything but the faithful wounds of a friend. I also am describing systemic, not personal, dilemmas, and those dilemmas are not all that far removed from the pressures secular liberal-arts colleges experience. But for Christian colleges, the dilemmas are complicated by the issue of faithfulness, which we gloss over to our peril, but which also has no easy solution once we trade in conviction for professionalism. At the end of the day, I would prefer conviction, even if the conviction is a little oddball, to professionalism which dies the death of a hundred moral updates.
“It would be horrific to think that evangelicalism cannot keep its colleges, that what happened to Grinnell or Amherst or Oberlin–or Yale or Harvard or Dartmouth–is indicative of a deep-seated weakness in the evangelical mind that insists on playing itself out in an endless spool of accommodation and conformity. We hear the call of our Savior to be in the world, but not of it; we hear the demand of the prophets to serve God and not Baal; but we also hear the call of our cultural Sirens, and we discover that we do not believe what we hoped and thought we believed. What we believe in is management, financial survival, increased enrollments, and growing endowments, all the while crying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord is here. …. [Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind] may not have been right enough. What we may suffer from even more seriously, more that just a scandal of the evangelical mind, is a scandal of the evangelical heart–or, as Ron Sider has it, a scandal of the evangelical conscience, a shrinking back from the costs and penalties which a testimony against the culture of American higher education will require, a leavening of our first love…”
This is No Messing with Mister In-Between in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Reader Poll & A Solicitation for New Columnists | Next: Who’s the Boss? | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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