Priestly Reading No. 7
The Disappearance of Rituals, The Doctrine of Sufficiency of Scripture, and Reading List
In This Issue
The Disappearance of Rituals - Han series Pt. 2, where Han explains how the loss of ritual results in the loss of community and various other pathologies.
The Sufficiency of Scripture - I try to give some of the best passages I’ve read recently that explain what it means that Scripture is ‘sufficient’.
The Reading List - A selection of some articles, essays, and pieces of news I found interesting or helpful. It is admittedly swollen this issue. Hopefully that is an added value to you!
The Disappearance of Rituals
In a previous post I began a series on Byung-Chul Han’s philosophical writings with the question, “Way are we all burnt out?” My goal is to summarize and comment on Han’s thoughts in these books and hopefully explain the concepts for you readers in a way that is helpful.
Han’s thought across these books is pretty connected and we will begin to see some various ideas repeated over the course of his essays. I will start Disappearance of Rituals in this newsletter, but have decided to split it up to keep this post from getting too long. I’m going to need at least one more. In this post, I will lay the ground work, and then try to make my way through the rest of his argument in the next newsletter.
In his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, Han works to show that our culture is symbol-poor, lacking in significant rituals that create community. He begins the book by arguing that rituals "represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based.” He defines rituals as "symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” When we lose ritual, we lose meaningful stabilizers in communal life.
As an example I have in mind something like the national anthem at the beginning of a sporting event (leaving aside the stand or kneel politics for a moment). The pragmatic effect of the ritual of standing for the national anthem before a game is that it communicates loyalty to a social order and bonds people together around a shared identity as the free and brave. It acts like a comfy chair for the regular sports fan. More on that in a bit.
Rituals of life structure time and make sense of life. Rituals such as rights of passage, religious ceremony, festivals, rights of closure are necessary for grounding communities. “Rituals stabilize life.” They do this in a few key ways.
Rituals not only give structure to passing time, but they stretch out time and pause time so that we can linger. Something like Christmas is a ritual festival observed by almost all Americans and helps make sense of the passage of time. At its best, Christmas is a sacred time, stretched out and emptied of productivity so that we can be at rest. Its repetition throughout life draws life together so that December 25 is ‘the same day’ in my childhood as it is in my latter years. The convention of new year and numbered years is ritual remembrance giving structure to life and making it last in our minds.
There are forms of vacation that are composed of poor leisure. In these overly consumptive and lazy experiences, time seems to compress and vanish. Likewise, when someone works a long day, accomplishing many tasks or projects, the day flies by and time seems to warp. When time is marked with ritual seriousness, the leisure takes on meaning and a restful character.
Additionally, these symbols are repetitive and thus intensify as they are experienced in successive turns. They work themselves in the hearts and minds of those who attend to them. Someone who is ritually grounded in their life knows that they are entirely at home in this place with this people doing these things repetitively. Change is difficult because it violates home. This repetition is different than routine which is escaped through ever newer consumption of experiences and goods. Ritual repetition is embodied and communal.
Back to the national anthem. When the twin towers fell on 9/11 and the national anthem was sung and the president of the United States went out to throw out the first pitch at a New York Yankees game, an old and repeated ritual came to the peak of its intensity and was fully realized as a galvanizing act. Every American in attendance and watching on TV felt they were an American to their core and was moved deeply by it. It helped make sense of the moment. That is the power of ritual.
Another way rituals stabilize life is by forcing us out of ‘narcissistic interiority’. That is, participating in a ritual requires the person to not be the center of focus. Rituals do not sit will with self-absorption. The self-absorbed person who is concerned primarily with consuming commodities and emotional experiences cannot participate in rituals because “those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves.” The ritual exists outside of the individual and their attention must linger on it. This would help make sense of why our intensely narcissistic society remains very spiritual, but religiously unaffiliated.
Third, Han contrasts what he calls symbolic perception, the act of lingering on symbols and being drawn into them—he contrasts it with what he calls ‘serial perception’. This is the “constant registering of the new,” never lingering on the same thing twice or for extended time. Think short form media.
This kind of serial perception is shallow and short-lived because it must be ready to bounce to the next source quickly. This of course is the source of unintentional binge-watching. Hours into scrolling through reels or binging a Netflix series, someone may ‘wake up’ and wonder how they just zoned out and consumed so much content. The essence of ADHD is losing the capacity to linger, and succumbing to the compulsion of serial perception. “Serial Perception is never at rest.” Slowing down is the enemy of capitalist media. Han says that this kind of attention can establish ‘connections’, or what the media metrics would call ‘impressions’, but it cannot establish relationships. Bingo. Community is predicated on symbolic attention.
Symbolic rituals as simple as manners—greeting a stranger cordially, for instance—force us to slow down and linger. Lack of ritual manners allows brief connection to pass by and community is averted. At deeper levels of relationship, religion, and social life, symbolic attention forces us to linger in a self-denying posture, thus creating the context for community.
This then is the basis of the rest of Han’s book, and more of that in the next issue.
The Sufficiency of Scripture
sufficient, adj. suf·fi·cient, enough to meet the needs of a situation or a proposed end
A few quotes regarding the sufficiency of scripture, in no particular order:
“To speak of the sufficiency of Scripture is both an affirmation and a qualification. It is entirely sufficient for redemption but not exhaustive concerning everything in life…When it comes to the essential matters of salvation and the nature of the Christian life, the Bible not only contains all necessary truth; it also communicates these truths clearly and distinctly…Scripture is silent on certain matters, and our own wise and well-considered reflections on matters not directly addressed by Scripture are necessary. It is meant to be supplemented by human reflection, philosophy, the natural sciences, and in matters of church life, Christian tradition.” -John W. Yates III, Sola Scripture in Reformation Anglicanism
“God sanctifies the texts of old and New Testament, I like to be, for his holy people, the unique medium of his saving speech: that, like the angels, the people might "Harkin, to the voice of his word” (Ps 103:20. rendered fit for service, scripture is sufficient to the task. To speak of sufficiency, as a divinely bestowed attribute of scripture is simply to affirm that what God has ordained it to do it is capable of doing. God has not, as it were, brought a knife to a gunfight… in the communion of Saints, in the power of the spirit, the scriptures will accomplish the Lord's purposes, because the risen. Jesus hasn't doubted with the capacity to do so. God has not asked of the text to something it cannot achieve; God has not given the church a book that cannot deliver on his promise.” -Brad East, The Doctrine of Scripture
The testimonies of God are true, the testimonies of God are perfect, the testimonies of God are sufficient to the purpose for which they were given. Thus we do receive them, not thinking that God has committed anything essential to His purpose or left his intent to be accomplished by our own devisings. Whatever Scripture sets out to do, it accomplishes perfectly…However, we must note one thing lest we go astray in our judgment: the absolute perfection of Scripture must be understood in relation to the purpose for which it was written. On the one hand, some imagine that Scripture’s main object is not as great as it truly is and that God did not intend to deliver a full account of all things necessary for salvation…On the other hand are those who make God’s scope and purpose in delivering Holy Scripture larger than they ought, twisting it and stretching it further than He intended. This is no less dangerous than the other error.” -Richard Hooker, Book II, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: A Modernization
“Properly understood, however, inspiration is not foundational but derivative, a corollary of the self-presence of God which takes form through he providential ordering and sanctification of creaturely auxiliaries…it is simply that act of the Spirit through which this set of texts proceeds from God to attest to his ineffable presence. The theological notion of inspiration needs to be expounded in clear connection to the end or purpose of Holy Scripture, which is service to God’s self-manifestation.” -John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch
From these quotes you can see there is an emphasis on accurately defining what exactly Scripture is meant to do so that we can properly affirm what it is sufficient for. Your Bible is not sufficient as a flotation device, to put it crassly. There is some limit to what the text in abstract or in print is meant to do. Simply put, Scripture is not all-sufficient, as if every scientific or even moral question is answered by it. Living a biblical life or having a biblical position on an issue doesn’t always mean that you have a verse for it. The vast majority of issues we face on a daily basis will not have a verse for them exactly. Being biblical, to quote John Hannah, means your position reflects the spirit of the whole Scripture. We might call this the mind of Christ.
That said, there are many issues on which Scripture speaks. When it does speak, it is sufficient to address what it speaks about, and it is authoritative and clear on those matters. Issues pertaining to God’s requirements for salvation and a holy life are sufficiently addressed by Scripture. Sufficiency means there is nothing required of us by God for salvation and a holy life that is not found in Scripture. That does not mean there are not helpful guides outside of Scripture. There certainly are! But only as they support and build upon the foundation of Scripture. It is not a violation of Scripture’s sufficiency to supplement it with human teachers. After all, what is a sermon? It is a violation of Scripture’s sufficiency and authority to say that you are required to do something for God that cannot be proven by explicit statement or reasonably deduced from Scripture.
Scripture is sufficient because God is a merciful Father who is thorough in telling us how to return to him.
Reading List
Rod Dreher—who I am wary of reading these days on most things—published a vintage-Rod newsletter on the ‘swarm’ and why figures like Trump and Swift do not make MAGA and Swifties, but that there is a reciprocal relationship where the crowd creates the leader who then creates the swarm. Citing another author on the experience of the swarm, he shows how the experience is a kind of enchantment, even perhaps an idolatry. Any kind of enchantment like this, in our day, will inevitably also be political it seems. The final paragraphs on being enchanted by God are especially good.
“Taylor Swift and Donald Trump are both enchanters. In my forthcoming book, I explain how the experience we call “enchantment” is one in which we become conscious of feeling that we have a foot in two worlds: this one, and one that transcends this one. It can’t be enchanting if we can’t relate to a phenomenon. A middle-aged conservative dude like me is not a likely candidate for being enchanted by Taylor Swift. There has to be some real possibility of deep connection. And it can’t be enchanting if we can control the phenomenon. If we bound the phenomenon with rationality, it loses its ability to enchant. I can give you the reasons why I will vote for this or that political figure, but that’s not the same thing as enchantment. The person, place, or thing we regard as enchanting has to serve as a kind of portal into transcendence.”
This cultural commentary by Kate Kresser is a series of vignettes/reflections on various subjects, evaluating them for sham, for veneer. She shows how sham is essentially the desire to cover up imperfections, real humanity, and substance.
“Sham in its full flush, meanwhile, quails at the frankness of ruin—ruin owned and accepted. It quails at the fate that will meet us all. It says: “you are young forever”; “you can be whatever you dream”; “flesh and matter must bow to you”; “the shaping will is all.” Yet corruptible flesh is meek and lowly of heart, and so (as the Gospels say) it is blessed. Its mulishness is a check on our quasi-demonic will to power, our satanic and infantile demands for instant-everything-winningest-best. My own flesh is a ruin—a noble ruin, by God’s grace. And it is also my kind companion, my Brother Ass (to use Saint Francis’s phrase), that sags and plods in its constant march toward humility, where humility is not self-abasement but rather surrender to a greater love.”
“Sham is subtractive, covering and erasing, waving misdirecting hands (abracadabra!) in pursuit of illusion. But beauty, I think, is the “splendor of being” (as the followers of Aquinas have written), and it finds its highest form in the embrace of natural harmonics, quirks and complexities. If we grow impatient with being, covering it up, it is because we demand simplifications, instant gratifications, that feed the sloth of spirits no longer able to rise.”
In the same Image Journal, this very brief poetic reflection on staying put when the work is hard and seems fruitless was very moving.
Ross Douthat—whose work you should be reading if you aren’t. He’s one of our best Christian cultural analysts—recently published on his newsletter about the collapse of traditional large media and the big religious institutions of the mainline. He compares them and shows some similarities about how big institutions are failing to understand micro cultures and the Very Online world we inhabit. It seems the small size of these micro communities and the speed at which they form and communicate makes cultural analysis increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Macro-level culture is growing nearly impossible to track with meaningful accuracy. A paragraph that struck me as on-point:
What I’m describing with religious phrases is similar to the distinction drawn in a recent essay by the critic Ted Gioia (another Substacker), who describes how the old America of “macroculture” doesn’t understand the new America of “microculture” — meaning, mostly, that big lumbering enterprises like movie studios and media companies and Ivy League universities are working uphill to adapt to a world where a YouTube star they didn’t know about till yesterday can matter more than Oscar votes, a well-reviewed book or a Harvard imprimatur. At one point, Gioia paraphrases another critic, Ryan Broderick, arguing that there’s increasingly a “real internet” and the “media’s idea of the internet,” implying that traditional media isn’t working hard enough to understand or learn from the microcultures that are quickly taking over.
Totally stealing this one from Douthat, but he also shared this piece on the loss of literacy from Slate which, for me, is fear-inducing. The opening paragraph is a little bit of an eye-roller for me, but he moves quickly into his main point, that the skills of simply reading well and being able to comprehend texts, narrative or expository, is falling off a cliff amongst our young students. Why? Complex factors, to be sure. This author cites the smartphone, the replacement of phonics education by a ‘balanced-reading’ approach, and the advent of Common Core, where educators teach to a standardized test and are arguably penalized for assigning difficult texts. I am convinced that what will separate the free from the technologically enslaved in the coming decades is the ability to make the choice to read and think well, rather than to be compelled what to think by simplified and spoon-fed adolescent taglines. When kids aren’t taught to read then they don’t even have the choice as young adults to deselect material. All they have is the content they are fed by the algorithm, which is of course making some guy money somewhere in San Francisco, or China.
I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
In this essay, Robert Louis WIlken unpacks a Christian view of love toward self and neighbor, and even 'eros' toward God. Stoic thought has made somewhat of a resurgence amongst men especially through various influencers and authors. There are some aspects of Stoic thought, like self-denial and self-control that are helpful and needed in our day. But its core is to suggest that we should eliminate desire and the passions so one can make cool, 'objective' decisions about morality and life. This is antithetical to the Christian way of full devotion and love. Self-control and self-denial do not require stifled affections, just properly directed ones. The Christian view of self-control is ordering passions at God and his good design, thereby controlling the *direction* of the passions. The Stoic view of self-control, though it pretends at eliminating them, actually directs the affections totally inward. Why? Because eliminating affections and attachments means we can't love others and results in loss of relationships. The result is isolation and individualism.
Faith, as the Book of Hebrews has it, is the “conviction of that which is not seen” (Heb. 11:1). When one can see, faith is no longer necessary. In the same way, we hope for that which is not present. In the words of St. Paul, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24). But the love of God can never cease, for it is through love that we “cleave” to God, to use a beautiful old word in the King James translation of the Psalms (Ps. 73:28). For “if love is taken from us how will we remain united to God?,” asks Gregory. Desire is a restless activity, a yearning for something one craves but does not possess. Love, however, has within it the possibility of repose, satisfaction, and joy that comes from delight in the presence of the beloved. Desire feeds on absence; love lives off presence.