Thank you all yesterday for your kind comments and messages about my post on Alistair Begg. As the news cycle is swallowed by Taylor Swift and her political and romantic possibilities, I hope will be able to remember to pray for Begg and his church.
I took the recommendation of a friend and listened to this fascinating podcast episode yesterday, the first in a series called Genealogies of Modernity. It was all about how modern people came to believe that they were the first people, in the whole history of all people, to be enlightened by the act of climbing a mountain (I’m way oversimplifying—you should go listen to the whole thing) when in point of fact, the thing that made them modern was the feeling of mastery over the mountain and the world. What distinguished the modern person from the pre-modern person is that when he got to the top, he no longer felt close to the divine, or began to build a church or a shrine, rather, he felt in himself that he asserted his independence and dominance over the mountain itself. The irony in this, elucidated the podcaster in his most fascinating interviews, is that many of the most famous mountain climbers of the early modern period who spoke this way had a lot of help to labor to the top, and some of them had to be carried down those mountains by phalanxes of other mountain climbers. The early modern mountain climber spoke of independence and mastery, but only by forgetting all the help he had received from other people.
This seems like an auspicious moment to remind you that I had once to read and write about a book called The Mountain is You and it was just as irritating as we all expected it to be.
Anyway, the larger point of the podcast, and I expect will be of subsequent episodes, was that what kind of story you tell about who you are and where you came from either opens up or narrows the possibilities for who you will be in the days to come. Certain kinds of stories have been told about our immediate past, particularly the relationships between men and women in the aftermath of the Industrial and then the Sexual Revolutions. Those stories seem fixed, but it feels to me more like they have settled into a sort of sedimentary rock, the kind that deserves to be picked at to see if there is anything interesting inside that might not actually comport with the versions of the story we all know and, in many cases, love to hate.
Today, because I’ve got to do a little bit of study for a podcast I’m going to record with Melanie of the Christian Research Journal about Scot McKnight’s book, The Bible is Not Enough, I’m only going to sketch out one of the stories, very quickly, and then flesh out more fully my thoughts in the days to come. The stories are about that dread word, “Feminism,” and they have to do with how men and women live together in the home and together in the church. They flow out of my post from last week, The Great Anglican Disappointment. It is important to think about this because a new chapter of one or other of the stories is unfolding before our very eyes, and whichever way it goes, the possibilities for how we live together will either be fraught and, in my favorite word—disappointing—or gracious and pleasant.
The first story of Feminism is that once women were freed from their reproductive capabilities, and the Sexual Revolution had conquered all the prevailing modes of being, women, who had always wanted to be liberated to enjoy the sensual pleasures of men with the same consequence-less freedom of men, were able to throw off the shackles of their families and their bodies and emerge into a glorious sunlight. For people like Kristin Kobes du Mez and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, this was a fabulous moment. No longer would women have to live by the teachings of Elizabeth Elliot and @thetransformedwife.
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