Habits of Mind

2 Corinthians 11:16-21a
Luke 20:1-19

The New Testament is filled with people trying to get the best of each other in argument. Paul’s letters are filled with extended metaphors/arguments. In 2 Corinthians (this is from a few days ago, there is this long riff in which Paul casts himself as a fool and weak, and then argues from that position about the authority of his words:

I repeat, let no one think that I am a fool; but if you do, then accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little. What I am saying in regard to this boastful confidence, I am saying not with the Lord's authority, but as a fool; since many boast according to human standards, I will also boast. For you gladly put up with fools, being wise yourselves! For you put up with it when someone makes slaves of you, or preys upon you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or gives you a slap in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!

Paul’s sentences twist and turn, and you have to slow down to see the point.

Jesus also engages in verbal sparring throughout. Sometimes it takes the form of quizzing the Apostles, or performing a miracle followed by instructions like “tell no one” or “let’s get out of here.” He also constantly argues with authorities (up to the very end in front of Herod):

One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, "Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?" He answered them, "I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?" They discussed it with one another, saying, "If we say, 'From heaven,' he will say, 'Why did you not believe him?' But if we say, 'Of human origin,' all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet." So they answered that they did not know where it came from. Then Jesus said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things."

Here you can see the priests, scribes, and elders trying to catch him up, then Jesus parries the question with a question that puts them on the defensive. They perform an evasive manoeuvre, he responds in kind, ending in a draw, but in this chess game the priests lose from a draw. They had wanted to catch Jesus out, but ended up with nothing solid, and Jesus of course knew everything he needed to know about them.

And he follows with a parable, about a man with a vineyard leased to tenants who kills his slaves and son when they go to collect rent. “What will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” The priests realize this is a barely veiled reference to them.

With accounts like this at the heart of the faith, Scholasticism and its progeny is no surprise. The faith conditions habit of mind that will take pleasure in logic and argument. Obviously many people have argued that these habits of mind started with the characteristics of this religion, spread into other realms, and led to the predominance of the West for the last several centuries.

The West may be losing that power now – only a blind person would look around and say the West leads the world by direct control or by assimilating other peoples into Western cultural practices. To me, it is much more the case that other cultures have adopted what they like from the West and are working with it in distinctly different directions, whether it is the Chinese version of capitalism or the way radical Islamic movements use modern communications methods to promote their cause.

One possible factor in this weakening of the West’s strength is the fact that some parts of the West, notably the U.S., are leaving the West. And I’m not talking about immigrants. I’m talking about native born people who increasingly abandon the cultural traditions and notions of progress and reason in favor a deracinated post-modern Americanism that devalues the intellectual practices that have, for better or worse, marked the West. A big part of this, in the U.S., is traced to a church that turns its back on the value of reason and argument embedded in the primary stories and texts of the faith in favor of calls to emotion only and to the simplest possible reading of complicated texts. The personal experience of Jesus and the Bible reduced to slogans, with study of the text itself and theology something done as an afterthought, left to others, or even rejected. Much American Protestantism has long reflected a non-metropolitan distrust of academic learning. It’s a healthy antidote to taking it too seriously, but when it so dominates that all interest and respect for reason is lost, that’s a problem. It also violates the historical memory of our country’s development, in which even with the crudeness of the early white settlements, people carried books with them. The light of the culture went with the people.

I’m afraid George Bush sums it up pretty well. Went to Yale, but didn’t bother trying to learn anything there, because learning is for chumps. Knew everything he needed to know, with a notorious lack of curiosity, even about critical issues he faces as a leader. Religion can reinforce such proclivities, or it can counteract them.