THE PUB WHEATON’S INDEPENDENT ACADEMIC JOURNAL ENCOUNTER

Wheaton’s Prodigal Son: Loving Rob Bell Again, essay by John Ingraham . . . . . . . . . . p.2The Fruit Had Been Forbidden, poem by Josh Christenson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.6Now Hold It, poem by Amanda Tillapaugh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.7The Classroom, series by Lucy Rose Till . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 8Edwards and Thoreau: Typologies of Lakes, essay by Sarah Boss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.14Man vs. Scrubjay, poem by Josepha Natzke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.18Visitor, poem by Jonathan Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.19The Waking Place, series by Thomas Wilder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.20Death and Darwinism: A Patristic Approach, essay by Christopher Iacovetti . . . . . . . p.29Ascension, poem by Amanda Laky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p.36

FALL/WINTER 2015 VOLUME XII ISSUE I

Ellen MisloskiEditor-in-Chief

EDITORS

COPY EDITOR

MANAGING EDITOR SENIOR EDITOR

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFFACULTY ADVISOR

ADVISOR BOARD

BUSINESS MANAGERS

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

JONATHAN GONZALEZJONATHAN GROSSALEX KIRCHNERNATHANIEL PERRINJONATHAN WRIGHTSARAH BOSS

CHRISTOPHER IACOVETTIMADELINE MULKEYELLEN MISLOSKIDR. ALISON GIBSONDR. RYAN KEMPDR. MIHO NONAKA

CONNOR JENKINSJOSH JENNINGS

CHRISTOPHER IACOVETTIJONATHAN WRIGHT

This summer, while back in Califor-nia, my friend Brian asked where I was going to college. Now Brian

is a twenty-something Los Angeles cre-ative, exactly the kind of guy periodicals like Christianity Today have lament-ed over the years with articles about why millennials aren’t going to church, think-pieces on how churches can be-come relevant again, and finally defeat-ed and wound-licking headings like why churches need to stop trying to be cool. All this to say, I was pretty sure Brian would have little contact with the Chris-tian world and no idea what Wheaton College is. But lo and behold, I was pre-paring to give him the spiel on our lit-tle midwest liberal arts haven when he immediately stopped me in my tracks— “Wheaton? That’s Rob Bell’s college!”

Rob Bell had seemingly done the unthinkable: made Wheaton not only known to Brian but positively known and respected. I felt a surge of healthy scho-lastic pride; I began to hum The Beach Boys’ “Be True To Your School”.

The sad irony is that the man re-sponsible for creating this delightful connection between a twenty-something and our community is likely unknown to you. Or, if you know of Bell, you proba-bly know him negatively, through asso-ciation with his 2011 book Love Wins. In

any case, from asking around our cam-pus my impression is that most of us have no idea that Bell graduated from Wheaton, received his pastoral calling as a student while preaching at Honeyrock, and roomed on Traber 3 (glory be). The cause of this disconnect is that Whea-ton doesn’t really want to be associated with Bell—its only alumni to be on Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people—primarily because Bell has ex-pressed doctrinal opinions which diverge from mainline evangelicalism, most no-tably in the aforementioned Love Wins.

This move isn’t unwarranted—there are legitimate reasons to approach Bell with caution. That said, I believe that to discount rather than claim and welcome Bell goes against Wheaton’s deepest val-ues and against the very purpose for which it exists—precisely because Rob Bell is currently doing a better job than any of Wheaton’s other alumni at fulfill-ing our school’s mission. A steep claim, but I’ll explain why it makes sense: first by laying out what I see to be our school’s values and purpose, and second by con-tending that Rob is the man who’s doing the most to further that purpose.

Everybody has things they value, even if they haven’t quite defined for themselves what those things are. Values tend to arise from a personal experience of something purposeful, good, or oth-erwise life-giving. These values form the vast web of the human experience, and fall loosely into categories like intellectu-al, artistic, sexual, industrial, etc. Every human being goes through the process of gaining values through experience or teaching, but initially they are discon-nected from each other. As Emerson put it, “To the young mind, every thing . . . stands by itself.” But things don’t stay this way; we connect our experiences to form a worldview: “By and by, it finds how to join two things” and “[The mind]

WHEATON’S PRODIGAL SON: LOVING ROB BELL AGAIN

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JOHN INGRAHAM

goes on tying things together, diminish-ing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and re-mote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.”

This “stem” is the center and sus-tainer of one’s beliefs and values. The common view today is that whatever val-ue or truth works best for you, go with that. Or else, don’t think of any central truth or purpose unifying your experi-ences whatsoever. A Christian worldview, on the other hand, is one in which this stem is held to be Christ himself, who is the objective center of all knowledge whether you recognize him or not.

For some Christians, this can have unfortunate consequences: In affirm-ing that Christ is the source of all val-ue, some discount the value of anything not directly related to him, or else isolate themselves out of fear of the unknown. As Bell puts it in his book Velvet Elvis, doctrines which were meant to be used as springs toward action, exploration, and full life are often instead used as bricks to wall off the “Christian” from the “unchristian”, the “spiritual” from the “unspiritual”.

With Jesus severed from crucial parts of the human experience, Christian art, scholarship, and overall effective-

ness in aiding with human needs plum-mets, resulting in a generation that sees church as the last place they’d want to go on a Sunday morning. This makes sense: Unless Jesus is shown to be intimately and crucially connected to the deepest convictions and longings a person has, he’ll appear about as compelling as a bowl of lima beans.

Thankfully, there are Christians and Christian institutions who don’t shy away from making these connections but set out to create them—one being our very own Wheaton College. Here at Whea-ton, we simultaneously affirm that Christ is the center of everything, and also that “all truth is God’s truth.” The farthest reaches of intellectual knowledge, scien-tific exploration, and artistic expression are valuable precisely because we affirm, as the poet Christian Wiman put it, that “there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present.”

This, then, is what the mission of Wheaton is: to equip students to bust out of our crusty Christian shells and create those vital connections between Jesus and what it means to be alive to-day, so the salt and light of Christ can flood the world with meaning and taste instead of being kept tightly under the Christian bushel as a sort of cloistered cluster cuss.

That sounds nice, but what does it look like to actually build these con-nections? I submit that it looks a lot like Wheaton graduate Rob Bell. When Bell started his church Mars Hill in Michigan fifteen years ago, he decided to launch with a year long series on Leviticus. He took the book notorious for being the death of cover to cover Bible read-throughs and made it compelling. Exact-ly how compelling? Well, within a year, Mars Hill had moved from a high school to a 3,500 chair building. Within five years, attendance was 11,000 a week.

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The salt and light of Christ can flood the world with meaning and taste instead of being kept tightly under the Christian bushel as a sort of cloistered cluster cuss.

At this point, Bell could have played it safe. He had a massive, loving con-gregation. His books Velvet Elvis, Sex God, etc., were neatly stocking shelves of church book stores across the coun-try. And, he had the respect of mainline evangelicals (in 2003, he did a three day chapel series here at Wheaton). But that same compulsion Bell felt at HoneyRock as an undergrad to create new and need-ed connections kept eating at him, and he turned to take on the perennial ele-phant in the room of Christianity: hell. In 2011, he published the now infamous Love Wins. In it, Bell asked a number of vexed questions about Jesus, heaven, hell, and death. He wrestled through contested passages across the scriptures to fight against what he saw as an overall “toxic” common Christian perspective on the afterlife:

“It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as con-scious, eternal torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguid-ed and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.”

Bell offered several alternative views on the afterlife, one of which was a uni-versalist view—i.e., the view that eventu-ally not even those in hell will be able to stand against the redeeming love of Je-sus. Bell has denied being a universalist, and he didn’t identify universalism as the “right” view in Love Wins, but nor did he condemn it. As he concludes, “whatever objections a person may have of [the uni-versalist view], and there are many, one has to admit that it is fitting, proper, and Christian to long for it.” The retribution for this assertion was swift: Bell’s con-gregation turned on him, denunciations flooded in, my Wisconsin pastor took his books off our church’s shelf. Bell and his family moved to California.

I don’t want to say that being cau-tious when handling Bell’s claims is un-warranted. Any and all interpretations of God’s word ought to be scrutinized, especially those which, like Bell’s, carry some pretty big implications. That said, the fact is that Love Wins facilitated a fresh and necessary encounter with the living truth of Christ for many Christians around the world, including myself. I want to suggest the sort of spiritual wres-tling and question asking that occurs in Love Wins is what it looks like to take the

blueprints of connection given to us by the scriptures and actually take the risk of building a vibrant and powerfully rel-evant Christ-centered worldview out of them. It shouldn’t surprise us that this almost inevitably upsets people: It hap-pened a few thousand years ago when a guy stood up and put forward something along the lines of “you have heard it said ‘such-and-such blueprint for living a godly life,’ but I say to you that building the actual structure out of that teaching has a lot more disruptive implications than you think.

It costs nothing to say “all truth is God’s truth.” But to attempt an actu-al reconciliation of the reality of sexual ambiguity (or of the natural uneasiness which arises at the thought of eternal punishment being enacted for the crime of being born in Hindu India) with the truth who is Christ—now that’s revolu-tionary, and deeply necessary.

You may be rightfully skeptical of

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Many are upset with Bell for having the audacity to step into controversial arenas with God, but maybe God isn’t.

a man who teaches in a way that hasn’t been taught before, but I ask you to recon-sider our alumni Bell on the basis of this ancient wisdom: You shall know them by their fruit and for their love. Bell’s fruit (bear with me) is that thousands of peo-ple, millennial and otherwise, have come to Christ; and thousands more have been given a fresh connection to Jesus who otherwise would have slid into agnosti-cism. This work of connecting continues through Bell’s cross country speaking tours like his recent “Everything Is Spir-itual 2” tour (attempts to connect Christ to all truth don’t get much more direct than a tour entitled “Everything Is Spiri-tual”). On top of that, a vibrant commu-nity many thousands strong is inspired through his weekly RobCast, and thou-sands more through The Liturgists—a wonderful podcast headed up by “Sci-ence” Mike McHargue and Michael Gun-gor whose searches for God were reboot-ed by Rob Bell himself.

In light of this, I ask you to give Bell a shot. Read Love Wins, look up “Every-thing Is Spiritual” on YouTube, listen to the RobCast or The Liturgists. If nothing else, google his November 7, 2003 chapel address, a powerful and direct message

for Wheaton which is just as implicat-ing today as it was then. If you don’t like what you hear, know why, and be able to articulate why. If you like what you hear, join me in reconnecting Bell to the Whea-ton community, and perhaps before too long he’ll be standing on the chapel stage once again.

“Israel” means “wrestled with God.” The Jewish people were chosen not be-cause they submitted to the status quo, but because they got onto the mat and wrangled in dirt and grime with their cre-ator. Many are upset with Bell for having the audacity to step into controversial arenas with God, but maybe God isn’t. Maybe God lit up with eager excitement when, in 2011, He saw Bell stepping into the ring with intent to throw down. Fi-nally, He may have thought, someone with faith ridiculous and risky enough to meet me in a dangerous field, even in the face of personal injury. And now Rob, like Israel, walks with a limp— that of being disconnected from mainline Christian-ity. But also like Israel, I sincerely be-lieve God has blessed Rob Bell in order to bless many, blessing them through a fresh and relevant encounter with the liv-ing truth of Christ.

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A mallard, roughly the size of a bassinet, squats on Lars’ chest, collapsing his ribcage. It leans against his cheek, extending from the tip of its beak a single cherry.

“Christalmighty” Lars gasps. The cherry’s fleshy red is tempered by the afterthought of a blind earthworm.

THE FRUIT HAD BEEN FORBIDDENJOSH CHRISTENSON

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NOW HOLD ITAMANDA TILLAPAUGH

“Now hold it there,” you said. You’d jammed a stickInto the sewer plate, and propped it upSo that a slice of black cracked through the weeds.You were younger, but I obeyed. CrouchingIn the grass, I held out sun-browned arms To catch the cover’s weight. “Let go,” I said.The metal bit into my hands, and sank,Drawn like a magnet to the wet, black earth,With my fingers clutched beneath. I paled, yelledFor help. You — wild boy, of buzzed blonde hairAnd daring tricks — ran for Dad, who splitThe lawn and took the metal from my grip.He carried me inside and held my fingersTo the light: the weight had skinned them clean.He washed away the blood and wrapped the woundsIn gauze. “You could’ve lost a finger,” he said,And shook his head, and set me down to rest.

I see you there, still, plumbing the depthsTo find another shining thing: a light;A coin; a skull; my fingers, nubs of bloodAnd bone; lost years; our fears of Hell and fire.From up above you seem a pale, bright smudge.I sing to you, and kick the grass in fright.Brother — I wish that I could take the weight, And hold this cover high above the weeds. But I’m too weak for such a heavy, rusted thing.

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Most classrooms are boring. There are only chairs, a few electronic devices, some trashcans, and maybe an old-fashioned wall pencil sharpener. I usually de-spair of finding anything interesting to draw to keep my hands busy during

lectures. But I wanted a new artistic challenge. One that would train my eye to stop seeing a boring old desk and begin to see abstractly—to see the planes and shadows which make up an object. So for a week I only allowed myself to draw things I could see from my seat in the classroom. I made arbitrary frames on the page and then drew images to fit inside them. I used a fine-tipped black pen in order to focus on precision and realism. I wanted to make art out of something that bored me. The frames that follow are the results of my personal challenge.

THE CLASSROOMLUCY ROSE TILL

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Herman Melville remarks in Mo-by-Dick, “Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded

for ever.” Whether everyone knows this is not certain, but two other stalwarts of American thought surely did. Jonathan Edwards and Henry David Thoreau both give water serious meditation—Thoreau perhaps more famously in Walden, while Edwards’s aqueous meditations appear throughout his work, but especially in his journal Images of Divine Things.

Although these two men operate within contrasting schemata—Edwards adhering to a Puritan tradition of em-blems and typology which he extends further into the realm of nature, and Thoreau holding to the transcendentalist quasi-pantheist veneration of nature—they meditate on the exact same image of water. In the chapter of Walden, “The Ponds,” and in Image no. 117 of Images of Divine Things, Thoreau and Edwards both reflect on the image of a pond which is so clear and still that it reflects the sky in its surface. A close reading of Ed-wards and Thoreau’s accounts of a still lake or pond reveals a striking similarity in these two writers’ techne. They create parallel discourses on water, asserting the water’s significance, describing the water vividly, then finally imagining a descent into the water. However, despite these similarities, they arrive at conflict-

ing conclusions. For Edwards, such a lake is “death” and “darkness itself,” but for Thoreau, Walden is “remarkable” for its “purity.” Ultimately, their contrasting conclusions reveal irreconcilable differ-ences in methodology.

Edwards begins Image no. 117 with an explicit statement of his typology. Tra-ditionally, typology is the reading and un-derstanding of Old Testament “types” in light of their New Testament “antitypes” or fulfillment, but Edwards extends his reading beyond Scripture to include na-ture. Here, he frames his typological reading as a poignant thesis. He writes, “The water, as I have observed elsewhere, is a type of sin or the corruption of man, and of the state of misery that is the con-sequence of it.” By asserting that water “is a type of” sin and corruption, Edwards accomplishes two things: First, he an-nounces that he will interpret a universal image of a body of water, rather than one specific lake or pond, thus universalizing his forthcoming interpretation. Second, he establishes a strong sense of typology by using a being verb rather than simi-le or metaphorical language, such as “is like” or “is representative of,” thus clear-ly equating the “type” with his reading of it. Edwards’s strong, direct language and the placement of a clear thesis at the beginning of his entry strengthen his typological interpretation. Edwards moves to demonstrate his thesis through a description of the water’s “flattering ap-pearance.” He writes, “How smooth and harmless does the water oftentimes ap-pear, and as if it had paradise and heav-en in its bosom. Thus when we stand on the banks of a lake or river, how flattering and pleasing does it oftentimes appear, as though under were pleasant and de-lightful groves and bowers, or even heav-en itself in its clearness …” Here Edwards uses vivid imagery of heaven reflected on a lake’s surface to illustrate the compar-

EDWARDS AND THOREAU: TYPOLOGIES OF LAKES

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SARAH BOSS

ison between such water and deceptive sin. His use of “we” invites the reader to join him in a communal memory and em-pathize with his rendering of the image, drawing her into his pleasing description of the water’s beatific appearance. The clarity of Edwards’s thesis, combined with his succinct but vivid imagery of the water, creates a firm foundation for his interpretation.

Thoreau’s thesis, however, is more nuanced. He begins his first account of Walden Pond, “The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to gran-deur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a par-ticular description.” Thoreau here may

seem almost self-deprecating, but buried in this unassuming start is a quiet thesis, which Thoreau will aim to demonstrate through his description of the pond. By stating that Walden is humble and with-out grandeur, then claiming that it is nevertheless “remarkable,” Thoreau ele-vates Walden above other landscapes or bodies of water that seem more grand. He differs from Edwards in that he does not propose to address a universal image of water, but rather one specific body and

its special attributes. The characteristic that merits such elevation is Walden’s “purity.” Thoreau will spend the body of this description of Walden discussing its color. He describes Walden’s color as be-ing “blue at one time and green at an-other,” and recalls, “I have discerned a matchless and indescribable blue light, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerule-an than the sky itself.” Such is the pu-rity and beauty of Walden that all other ponds are merely “yellowish” and “but muddy by comparison.” The contrast be-tween Walden’s purity and other ponds’ muddiness lends Walden a special qual-ity, as if it possessed some goodness in-herent in itself. Furthermore, like Ed-wards, Thoreau notes the reflection of the sky on the water’s surface. He writes of Walden: “Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both,” and notes again times when “the surface of the waves may reflect the sky.” Noting Walden’s purity enables Thoreau to argue that it “partakes” of both heaven and earth, essentially acting as a media-tor between the two—physically, but also symbolically. Moreover, by claiming that Walden’s color is “more cerulean than the sky itself,” Thoreau elevates the water above heaven. Giving Walden this heav-enly quality suggests a symbolic essence of the water and prompts the reader to consider the double meaning of “puri-ty”—physically, in terms of color, but also metaphysically, through ontological value.

Although Edwards and Thoreau have thus differed slightly in form, with Thoreau creating a more nuanced thesis, the real deviation comes after their par-allel musings of a descent into the water and the consequences of such an action. Edwards, after describing the “paradise and heaven” depicted on the water’s sur-face, sharply reasserts his thesis: “But

The contrast between Walden’s purity and other ponds’ muddiness lends Walden a special quality, as if it possessed some goodness inherent in itself.

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indeed, it is all a cheat.” He subsequent-ly envisions a hypothetical scenario in which he and the reader are successful-ly tempted to enter into the water: “If we should descend into it, instead of finding pleasant, delightful groves and garden of pleasure, and heaven in its clearness, we should meet with nothing but death, a land of darkness, or darkness itself.” In Edwards’s account of a descent into the water, he emphasizes the “cheat” of the image and the stark contrast between appearance and reality. The “garden of

pleasure,” with its Edenic connotations, is exposed as “a land of darkness.” Ed-wards’s tone and use of the hypothetical “if” demarcate this passage as an urgent warning, rather than mere naturalistic description. Whoever descends into the water, in Edwards’s account, undergoes a sort of transformation; the water does not purify, however, but kills and trans-forms those in it into “death.”

Thoreau’s account, though paral-lel in his inclusion of a descent into the pond, could not be more different from Edwards’s. Expanding on his thesis of Walden’s purity, Thoreau writes, “This water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distort-ed withal, produces a monstrous effect,

making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.” The purity and unearthliness that ap-peared in the water are shown to be true by a descent into it. Furthermore, Tho-reau’s bather is also transformed—not by death but by apotheosis—as she becomes a living work of art “fit for a Michael An-gelo,” perhaps like Pieta or David. At the end of this passage on Walden, Thoreau finally asserts his typological reading of Walden, as water that is not only pure in its appearance but which also purifies those who experience it. Such a transfor-mation, in which the bather transcends her own humanity, reveals the duality of meaning in Thoreau’s “purity.” The pure appearance of Walden—unlike any other water—transfigures whoever is willing to embrace it. So, too, does an intellectual embrace of Walden—seeing it for its true “remarkable” self—enable a purification and transcendence of the mind.

Ultimately, Edwards and Thoreau were able to arrive at these contrasting interpretations because of their differ-ing methodologies. In composing their accounts of lakes, they drew from differ-ent sources and operated out of clash-ing ideological frameworks. Edwards’s source for his typology was vast, as he cited Scripture to confirm his interpre-tations of nature. In Image no. 156 Ed-wards writes,

“The Book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature two ways: viz. by declaring to us those spiritual myster-ies that are indeed signified or typified in the constitution of the natural world; and secondly, in actually making appli-cation of the signs and types in the book of nature as representations of those spiritual mysteries in many instances.”Here Edwards clearly presents

Scripture as the foundational interpreta-tive tool through which nature should be read. In Image no. 117 in particular, Ed-wards connects his reading of lakes back to Scripture. He concludes the entry with

Edwards’s tone and use of the hypothetical “if” demarcate this passage as an urgent warning, rather than mere naturalistic description.

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a footnote: “Prov. 5:3-6,” which is a ref-erence to the “forbidden woman” whose appearance is pleasing and flattering—like Edwards’s lake—but whose “feet go down to death.” Although his naturalis-tic observations and typological logic are sound in themselves, Edwards presents Scripture as his final evidence. Although these verses do not mention water, they use metaphor to demonstrate the same type of sin, corruption, and consequent misery as Edwards’s thesis, thus com-municating the same absolute truth. Additionally, Image of Divine Things dis-plays an extensive consideration of wa-ter, as Edwards examines water in its vicissitudes and uses biblical references to interpret it. These include: Image no. 15, flowing rivers are the effusions of the Spirit; Image no. 27, the stormy sea is the wrath of God; Image no. 77, the con-fluence of rivers flowing in various direc-tions into the ocean is divine providence; Image no. 155, spring streams that rise then dry up again represent hypocrites; etc. This wide consideration of water al-lows Edwards to make an informed, nu-anced interpretation of a specific type of water, which he supports with biblical text.

By contrast, although Thoreau cites writers, philosophers, and scientists throughout Walden, he does not explic-itly draw on extratextual sources when developing his account of the pond. In-stead, he relies on his own empirical ob-servations and poetic insight. He, too, is painstaking in his interpretation, as he seems to describe exhaustively, even through seasonal changes. Yet his obser-vations are limited by his focus on only one pond—he can cannot come to a uni-versal conclusion about ponds or lakes. Even if his interpretation of Walden was correct, it would be lost on anyone who

has not been there. Moreover, in a tone of righteous indignation, Thoreau con-cludes “The Ponds”: “Talk of heaven! Ye disgrace earth.” This spirited conclusion reaffirms Thoreau’s own elevation of earth over heaven and his emphasis on a nature-centric typology, revealing the heart of difference between Edwards and himself.

Despite these differences, Edwards and Thoreau both acknowledge the spir-itual significance of nature and its inten-tional symbolism. In Image no. 57, Ed-wards writes,

‘Tis very fit and becoming of God, who is infinitely wise, so to order things that there should be a voice of his in his works instructing those that behold them, and pointing forth and showing divine mysteries and things more imme-diately appertaining to himself and his spiritual kingdom. The works of God are but a kind of voice or language of God, to instruct intelligent beings in things per-taining to himself.

For Edwards, a typological truth embedded in nature is in accord with God’s wisdom and methods of instruc-tion. To extend typology from the Book of Scripture to the Book of Nature only enhances God’s communication with humankind. By comparison, Thoreau, though deviating sharply from orthodox Christianity, also posits an intentional, truth-laden symbolism inherent in na-ture. Concerning Walden, he writes, “I am thinking that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol.” This language of intentional symbolism—being “made for” a symbol—communicates a natural ty-pology similar to Edwards’s. Ultimately, Edwards and Thoreau’s differing typolo-gies of lakes both point to the universal symbolism of nature and its epiphanic, not just aesthetic, value.

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It was when he stepped out on the porchfaced a sunrise hidden behind headache cloudswhen the floorboards twitched and creaked under his swollen feet

That he felt his dry eyes and thin skin tighten against a windstorm of a daystrained button-holes and stained pits groan against a hellhole of a dayempty cupboards and a cold bed waiting at the end of a day

And that the bird in the treelooked like such an unattainable thing,smug in bloated privilege, in beady-eyed pride;sucker of eggs with a jarring, senseless crywith scrawny greased wings that couldbear its own heavy, gaudy weightand plunder off into the overcast sky

MAN VS. SCRUBJAYJOSEPHA NATZKE

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Dog drained of bloodsidewaysfour paws groping the airstiff with rigor mortis

It clung to the floor of the kitchenits hair stuck to the floor of the kitchenno one knew why it was therenot our dog we saidjust turned on the light and there it wasmom said

Off-white hair on the white tilelong white hair that covered its eyesthings come and gothis thing came

I asked dad if we should bury ithe said no just call the pest control

VISITORJONATHAN WRIGHT

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THOMAS WILDER

THE WAKING PLACE

For a little over a month, I took a picture of the room where I woke up each morn-ing. This point of waking up is underlined in relation to the rest of waking life as a result of the time that came before it. It is emphasized because for the last five

to eight hours, the sleeping person has had no choice in affecting his or her surround-ings. These pictures serve as a concentrated dose of my reality each morning because of the number of hours that came before it, during which I could not affect my circum-stances or condition.

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It’s all but impossible to overstate the theological importance of the doc-trine of the Fall. Most basically, the

Fall is what allows Christian theology to meaningfully draw a distinction between the world’s present state and its proper state, i.e., between how the world is and how it ought to be. Without recourse to the Fall, there are essentially just two interpretations of our world to choose from: nihilism on the one hand (there are no ‘oughts’ in reality; all ‘ought’-claims are therefore mere expressions of pow-er or preference), and dualism on the other (there are two opposite but equal-ly legitimate ‘oughts’ in reality, either of which one may reasonably and ‘ethically’ choose to prefer).1

Thanks largely to the ubiquitous influence of Nietzsche on postmodern thought, the former route has been that taken by the majority of prominent 20th century philosophers. As John Milbank and others have argued, this ‘nihilistic’ Nietzschean rejection of metaphysical ought-claims is what unites thinkers as otherwise diverse as Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida.2 And, as Mil-bank and others have somewhat more controversially argued, this rejection of metaphysics is itself rooted in a preju-dice which underlies the thought of both Nietzsche and his postmodern heirs: namely, that reality is fundamentally vi-olent and internally conflicted.

It is certainly true, at any rate, that this prejudice gave rise to Nietzsche’s own disdain for metaphysics, which followed directly from his conviction that “the world is the will to power—and nothing else besides!” For Nietzsche, the world is in actuality nothing but a cacophonous play of flux and warfare, and so to think ‘metaphysically’ about the world is really just to conceal whichever its features one finds inexplicable or unpleasant (while dubbing sacred whichever of its features happen to serve one’s interests). The only honest and “yes-saying” way to approach the world, argues Nietzsche, is with a self-deprecating refusal to tame its hid-eous disorder: that is, to refuse to really distinguish good from evil, sacred from profane, prelapsarian from postlapsari-an.

And so Nietzsche’s hatred of Chris-tianity makes perfect sense. By assert-ing that our world exists in a deeply cor-rupted state, Christian theology refuses to attribute ultimate reality to death, ugliness, and evil (which ‘exist’ only as negative parasites upon the original life, beauty, and goodness of creation). It stubbornly insists that, despite all ap-pearances to the contrary, the self-sac-rificial love of Christ is more fundamen-tally true to reality than, say, the egotism of Donald Trump; that the beauty of marital consummation is more funda-mentally real than hideousness of rape; and so forth. But if Nietzsche is correct in deeming violence more real than peace, love, and beauty (or even if he is correct in deeming violence real at all), he is cer-tainly also correct in finding Christianity pathetic and dishonest.

Which brings me back to the sub-ject of the Fall. The Fall is the means by which Christian theology accounts for the disparity between the purported character of God and the tragic state of our world. As David Bentley Hart quite

DEATH AND DARWINISM: A PATRISTIC APPROACH

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CHRISTOPHER IACOVETTI

correctly notes, Christianity requires one to stubbornly

see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and an-guish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply ‘nature’ but ‘creation,’ an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, in-nocent of all violence. … Christian thought from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ulti-mate value or spiritual meaning at all. It claims that they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may—under the conditions of a fallen or-der—make them the occasions for accom-plishing his good ends.3

But if reality is not fallen, there is no legitimate way for one to distinguish be-tween the “two realities” Hart describes: the true and false, the good and evil, the original and the damaged. And any the-ology which forfeits (or even fails to prop-erly emphasize) its claim that reality has been really fractured in some way—not by the design of a capricious and ma-nipulative God, but by the abuse of free human agency—is a theology devastated by Nietzsche’s critique. That is, if the cur-rent, death-ridden state of our world is in any sense the true or original or divinely intended state of our world, then Chris-tianity is every bit as cowardly and ridic-

ulous as Nietzsche accused it of being.4 But there is an at least apparent

problem here. Following Darwin, it in-creasingly appears that the world’s strife, death, and corruption in fact have been present and endemic from the world’s be-ginning, entering the world prior to not only the sin but even the emergence of homo sapiens. And thus, by all appear-ances, Christianity’s account of an origi-nal ‘Fall’ into sin and death is essentially gibberish.

There are a number of possible solu-tions to this problem offered (indirectly) by the Greek fathers, who set about in-terpreting the Fall and its consequences in various creative and daring ways. It’s obviously beyond the scope of my knowl-edge and space to present their views at length, but I hope, in the remainder of this essay, to gesture toward several pos-sible approaches to Darwinism that lie within the bounds of patristic orthodoxy. I’ll do so by briefly presenting four sur-prisingly relevant insights we find in the fathers regarding creation and its Fall.

First, according to many of the church’s fathers, the precise nature of the Fall’s occurrence is not something about which we can speak with much theolog-ical or dogmatic certainty. We know that “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin,” but very few fa-thers purport to know exactly how this occurred (Rom. 5:12). To offer just a few examples: Gregory of Nyssa explicitly prefaces his speculations about the Fall’s consequences with an acknowledgement that they are only “conjectures and simil-itudes”; this being the case, he urges his readers to not receive them “authorita-tively.”5 Similarly, Maximus the Confes-sor offers “two possible explanations of how [the Fall] came about,”6 leaving these two, mutually incompatible explanations open to orthodox belief. In the West, Au-gustine pondered a number of theories

If Nietzsche is correct in deeming violence more real than peace, love, and beauty, he is also correct in finding Christianity pathetic and dishonest.

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regarding the Fall’s occurrence over the course of his vast theological career, but never settled conclusively on any one of them. And so forth. This open lack of cer-titude among the fathers regarding the precise ‘how’ of the Fall must be kept in mind as we think through the Fall’s rela-tion to Darwinism and death.

Second, several of the fathers explic-itly suggest that due to the Fall’s cosmic and epistemic consequences, we cannot in any adequate way know or compre-hend what came ‘before’ its occurrence. As Augustine puts it, the redeemed mind “recalls its Lord” and knows that it for-merly fell from grace, but “has totally for-gotten” and “cannot even be reminded” of the Edenic happiness it knew before somehow falling in Adam.7 Gregory of Nyssa heavily implies a similar disjunc-tion between pre- and postlapsarian re-ality throughout books 16-18 of On the Making of Man (and really, throughout the entirety of his corpus). And the poetic theology of Ephrem the Syrian, perhaps most forcefully of all, not only involves but logically requires a radical epistemic distance between our world and Paradise. This is because for Ephrem, as Sebastian Brock notes, “Paradise was not to be sit-uated in time or space; rather, it belonged to a different order of reality.”8 Thus, in

Ephrem’s words, “The tongue cannot relate the description of innermost Par-adise, nor indeed does it suffice for the beauties of the outer part; for even the simple adornments by the Garden’s fence cannot be related in an adequate way.”9 And while Ephrem grants that we can speak in figurative and analogous lan-guage of our Edenic home, he frequent-ly points out that we can only do even this much because Paradise graciously “[clothes] itself in terms that our akin to [us].”10 Sergius Bulgakov is therefore adopting one quite viable patristic (not modernist) approach when he writes that

neither the past of the world when man was without sin nor the new heaven and new earth of the future age can be known from the life of the present age, for they are separated from the present age by a cer-tain transcensus. From this point of view it becomes understandable and natural that, on our earth, no traces of Eden or of the edenic original state of man can be found. They are in fact not found in our world, al-though this does not mean that there were no such traces in the past or even that they do not exist even now —in the depths of the world’s being if not in its empirical re-ality. Adam’s fall was a catastrophe that changed the fate of the world. It was an impenetrable wall that separated his origi-nal state from his later state, so that in the later state one can no longer find traces of the original state (except in obscure anam-nesis, slumbering in the human soul).11

And Hart elaborates upon this same patristic sentiment: “The fall of rational creation and the subjection of the cos-mos to death is something that appears to us nowhere within the unbroken time of nature or history … it belongs to an-other frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death.”12

The Christian is by no means obliged to take as strong a stance here as do Hart or Bulgakov, but the stance they represent is evidently patristic in its pedigree and hence available as an orthodox option.

Augustine pondered a number of theories regarding the Fall’s occurrence over the course of his vast theological career, but never settled conclusively on any one of them.

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Third, and somewhat more crucial-ly, according to certain patristic accounts of the Fall, God’s foreknowledge of sin allowed certain consequences of Adam’s sin to sequentially precede the sin itself. As Conor Cunningham puts it, “Creation was intended to be perfect, and this eter-nal intention is its true nature; but God’s foreknowledge of man’s sin eschatologi-cally ordered creation toward Christ and thus to perfection.”13

Perhaps the most profound elucida-tion of this view is offered by Gregory of Nyssa in books 16-18 of his On the Mak-ing of Man.14 Having raised the question of how God, who is utterly impassible and neither male nor female, is aptly imaged

by passible and gendered humans, Greg-ory suggests that the “creation of our [hu-man] nature is in a sense two-fold: one made like to God, one divided according to this distinction [of sex]” (16.8). In other words, as Cunningham summarizes, “be-cause God knew of man’s future sin, and that it would lead to death, he bestowed on man the ability to procreate, thus sav-ing him from extinction.”15 Gregory spells this out clearly:

perceiving beforehand by His power of foreknowledge what, in a state of indepen-dence and freedom, is the tendency of the motion of man’s will He devised for His image the distinction of male and female, which has no reference to the Divine Ar-chetype. (16.14)

The division of humanity into sexes is thus not part of what Gregory calls God’s eternally intended “first creation” (which will exist only in God’s creative intention until its eschatological actualization), but of God’s “second” creation (which God brought into actual existence in light of His foreknowledge of human history and sin). Gregory goes even further: God im-planted not only the division of sexes into humans in light of His foreknowledge of sin, but also the “animal and irrational mode [of procreation] by which [humans] now succeed one another” (17.4). And the various passions which incline us to sin, Gregory asserts, “issue as from a spring” from the “animal mode of generation” im-planted in us from the beginning (18.1-2).16

To a large degree, Maximus follows Gregory in these speculations. While he is happy, like Gregory, to speak at times of Adam falling from a paradisal state and into corruption, he makes clear in his Ambiguum 8 that he does not under-stand such a fall to have necessarily hap-pened in a literally sequential fashion. In addressing the question of how man fell into a state of passibility and corruption, he raises “two possible explanations of how this came about,” the latter of which is quite similar to that of Gregory:

One possibility is that God, at the very moment humanity fell, blended our soul together with our body on account of the transgression, and endowed it with the ca-pacity to undergo change, just as he gave the body the capacity to suffer, undergo corruption, and be wholly dissolved. The other possibility is that from the beginning God, in his foreknowledge, formed the soul in the aforesaid way because he foresaw the coming transgression, so that by suffering and experiencing evil on its own, the soul would come to an awareness of itself and its proper dignity, and even gladly embrace detachment with respect to the body.17

What we find in both Maximus and Gregory, then, is a willingness to sequen-

The division of humanity into sexes is thus not part of what Gregory [of Nyssa] calls God’s eternally intended “first creation”

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tially place various effects of the Fall pri-or to their cause. One is free to find this line of speculation uncompelling, but it cannot be called foreign to patristic tra-dition.18 And while, admittedly, Gregory and Maximus never extend their specu-lations quite far enough to accommodate today’s Darwinian data, it seems obvious that they open the door for post-Darwin-ian Christians to do so responsibly. Once literalism regarding the sequence of the Fall and its consequences is understood as non-crucial, there is ample room for theology to understand itself in light of evidence of prelapsarian death.

The fourth and final point to keep in mind is perhaps the most important of all, inasmuch as it demonstrates that even if one is committed to a literally se-quential Fall into sin and death, there is nevertheless still room for Darwinism in patristic theology. For a sizable majority of the fathers, it was not from an actual state of immortality that Adam fell, but a merely potential one. According to one venerable Greek patristic tradition, man was created “between mortality and im-mortality,” as the bridge between animal and angelic creation. This notion runs at least as far back as Irenaeus, who thought Adam and Eve to have been cre-ated as naturally mortal spiritual chil-dren en route to immortality. In ‘falling,’ Adam turned away from this upward tra-jectory and toward his “naturally” mortal trajectory of sin and death.19 As Athana-sius writes in On the Incarnation, “[God] gave [human beings] a law, so that if they guarded the grace and remained good, they might have the life of paradise … be-sides having the promise of their incor-ruptibility in heaven.”20 Similarly, John of Damascus avers that God gave Adam the commandment in Eden “with the prom-ise that should he let reason prevail, rec-ognizing his creator and observing his Creator’s ordinance … then he would

become stronger than death and would live forever.”21 Conversely, if Adam failed to observe the commandment, “then he would be subject to death and corrup-tion.”22 Damascene finishes by explain-ing that “it was not profitable for [man] to attain incorruptibility while yet untried and untested”23 as did the angels (since this would result in his being eternally trapped in sin after the Fall).

The significance of this common-

place patristic teaching—that “[God] did not make [man] mortal, nor did He fash-ion him as immortal”24—lies in the fact that it leaves wide open the possibility, perhaps even probability, that the an-imal creation below humanity was not graced with immortality upon the world’s creation. After all, for most of the Greek fathers, animalistic passions were inex-tricably tied to mortality and sexual pro-creation. If animals procreated sexually prior to Adam’s fall, there is every logi-cal reason to think that they died or at least were mortal before it as well (though Augustine’s conjecture that prelapsarian animals died in a less predatory way than they now do remains plausible). And if animals were mortal before the Fall, there is no inherent problem with the sugges-tion that homo sapiens arrived at the end of a naturally mortal hominid chain with the potential for immortality—a potential that homo sapiens lost when it tended to-ward matter rather than God.25

Even if one is committed to a literally sequential Fall into sin and death, there is nevertheless still room for Darwinism

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The foregoing ought to indicate that Darwinism poses no necessary threat to patristic theology, even if one is commit-ted to a sequential reading of the Fall and its consequences. The fathers’ thought is more than capacious enough to accom-modate whatever biology, geology, and prehistory tell us about our lineage. And while this essay has necessarily only presented the thought of the fathers on the Fall in a cursory way, it has hope-

fully succeeded in opening up vistas for meaningful conversation between con-temporary Darwinism and patristic the-ology. Such conversation serves not only to help us better understand the natu-ral world we inhabit, but also the theo-logical vision passed down to us by the fathers—a vision which we are called to both preserve and keep vibrantly alive from age to age.

1 And really, even this form of dualism ap-pears to be little more than a sheltered and subtle variation of nihilism. To postulate, as the Manicheans did, that two coeternal, co-existent, and equally ‘real’ forces exist along-side one another — one ‘good,’ the other ‘evil’ — is really just to deny that either force truly transcends the immanent frame of finite re-ality. These warring forces may function as two big and powerful beings among littler and less powerful beings, but neither is ‘real’ in a unique or self-subsistent way. As such, these forces can conceivably exist only within an ontological frame larger and therefore ‘more real’ than themselves, a frame which exists beyond and hence transcends them both. And this commits dualism to belief in a nihilistic,

fundamental plane of reality beyond both good and evil.

2 See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Ba-sil Blackwell, 1990), as well as David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003).

3 David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rap-ids: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005), 60-61.

4 I happily acknowledge that this claim (if cor-rect) rules out the possibility of any extreme

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NOTES

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brand of Calvinism being true. For if, as Calvin claimed in Book III of his Institutes, God coer-cively foreordained the Fall for his own “plea-sure” and eventual “glory” — and thereby also ordained all the deaths, rapes, disasters, and infant-damnations which are its consequenc-es — then the Christian saga of creation, fall, and redemption is really just one, hideously enormous fiction (i.e., fantasy), and the divine and human actions which occur within it are really just instances of one, hideously enor-mous act of divine self-gratification.

5 Gregory, On the Making of Man, 16.15

6 Maximus, Ambiguum 8. This short work can be found in its entirety on pgs. 75-78 of On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writ-ings of St. Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crest-wood, N.Y.: St. Vladmir’s Seminary Press, 2003).

7 Augustine, On the Trinity, XIV, 21, trans. Ed-mund Hill.

8 St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, trans. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 51. Empha-sis added.

9 Ibid., 99-100. Emphases added.

10 Ibid., 156.

11 Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerd-mans Publishing Co., 2002), 171-172.

12 Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 102.

13 Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and the Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerd-mans Publishing Co., 2010), 399.

14 Unless otherwise noted, parenthetical cita-tions below are to this text.

15 Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, 391.

16 The perplexing question this raises, ob-

viously, is whether Gregory’s view does not somehow implicate God in the Fall. Gregory and Maximus both wrestled indefinitely with this question, but, as far as I’m aware, arrived at no final answer. See On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 75n.17 Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 76.

18 Space didn’t allow for another example in the paper, but John of Damascus speculates further along these lines in On the Orthodox Faith II, 30. Troublingly, but importantly for our purposes here, he suggests that Eve was created due to God’s foreknowledge of the Fall.

19 See Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, 379-380, as well as M.C. Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2008), 121-123, 126.

20 Athanasius, On the Incarnation: Saint Atha-nasius, trans. John Behr (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 52. Empha-sis added.

21 John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, II, 30. Emphases added.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid. Emphasis added.

24 Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Gene-sis, II, 17. Quoted on pg. 59 of Hymns on Par-adise.

25 Again, see John of Damascus, On the Or-thodox Faith, II, 30. There is also every reason to think, in light of both Romans 8:19-22 and the cosmically-geared theology of Maximus, that humans had the potential (and now, in Christ, again have the potential) to lead not only themselves but ultimately all creation into deification and immortality. Their fall re-sulted in a gradual corruption of both their own race and the cosmos (cf. Gen. 3-11, as well as Athanasius’ elegant narration of the Fall in the early chapters of De incarnatione), but the second Adam has come and re-opened the door that the first Adam failed to enter.

In a vast ballroomWith quartz gardensGrowing upside downI began to tend to the gardensAnd harvest the quartz yearly

Floating on the bass line currentI did not have to tread theFluidity of the violet photons They help me, held my hands

Each time I take communionI remember the first timeI took of theBread-bodyWine-bloodAnd did not choke

All currents flow towards youDo this in remembrance of me

The art deco luminariesAre omnipresentAbove all, watching

I don’t think I need violet lights,The feeling of floatingWithout fear of drowningDo this in remembrance of me

But I do floatAnd find rest in the crafted violet baptismThe currents always cause meTo arrive at youDo this in remembrance of me

ASCENSIONAMANDA LAKY

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