some thoughts on Yoel Greenberg's "bottom-up" approach to sonata forms as applied to ragtime sonatas--respect the modularity of the themes rather than try to impose 18th century galant syntactic norms upon the material

Back in 2019 I posted a link to this piano sonata by the composer Richard St. Clair, I'm sharing it again because I have finally gotten around to listening to the work but also studying the piano score.  Longtime readers already know that the prospect of synthesizing ragtime vocabulary with sonata forms has been a passion project of mine and you go to the music page and scroll down to see a table of contents for Ragtime and Sonata Forms, which was mostly written in 2020 and has become an intermittent, ongoing blogging project here at Wenatchee The Hatchet.

Christian Nationalist spiritual warfare concepts as the worst of Unger and Wink without their actual good points, a preliminary thought

In reading the way Wilson (do I need to say Doug Wilson) and some writers in his orbit seem to define Christian Nationalism it is as if he wants to retain the fundamentalist demonology of Merrill Unger but breed it with a postmillennialist variant of Walter Wink's exousiology.  Walter Wink contended that the powers and principalities were created good; the powers have fallen; but the powers can be redeemed.  Now for a mainline liberal Protestant writing at the end of the Cold War and through the Clinton administrations I get how a mainline Methodist would hope the United States would/could play a positive role in the global scene.  It was the era of Fukuyama declaring the "end of history" back then, too.

G B Caird suggested that Paul's thought on the powers evolved to include the possibility that part of the mystery of Christ included that the powers would be reconciled to Him in some mysterious way.  Caird took actually Pauline authorship of Ephesians for granted.  Once you consign Ephesians to deutero-Pauline status can you make a case that Paul thought the powers could be reconciled to God through Jesus?  I find it more contentious, but then the question of whether the prince of Persia in Daniel could be redeemed is the big glaring question that goes unanswered.  Caird left his speculation at the level of speculation.  Wink attempted to formulate a more formal theology of the powers in which the powers that be can be redeemed. 

I am pretty sure Walter Wink was not envisioning even a first Trump term, let a lone a second.  In my reading of theologians and pastors from Ghana and Kenya I have seen a pretty systematic and trenchant criticism of Wink's basic approach.  Whether there's a kind of panentheistic variation on demonism implied in the claim that the spiritual powers have no existence separate from their physical manifestations (wa Gatumu) or an observation that mainline Protestants have tended to focus on systems of evil at the cost of ignoring personal sin (Acolatse, Ewusie Moses), Wink's project has been viewed by African theologians and biblical scholars as a useful but incomplete presentation of the Pauline materials.

I think a more bluntly geopolitical assessment is in order.   Wink's exousiology was written by an American for American theologians.   To say that spiritual powers have to be instantiated through physical forms such as networks of people has the problem of seeming to not be fundamentalist demonology but opening the door to what a bunch of German Protestants were already letting happening in World War II, or for that matter what was done in Indian boarding schools in the United States.  Liberal and progressive scholars don't have to think that hard about the problems implicit in Wink's ideas where genocides are concerned, but an evangelical critique has been that Pauline writing suggests that the spirits in spiritual powers and principalities have been ignored.  

Unger's demonology was tethered to a dispensationalist eschatology and a fundamentalism that admonished cultural withdrawal.  If you're waiting for the Rapture to happen and the world is under the power of the evil one (1 John 5) you're not interested in cultural take over at all.  Unger's early view was Christians could not be demonized because nobody who had the Spirit could have demonic influence.  That was in the 1940s.  By the 1970s he reconsidered because if the first messiah of Israel was King Saul then not even an anointed king of Israel was precluded from being afflicted with an harmful spirit from the Lord as punishment for high-handed disobedience.  Unger was enough of a biblical scholar to concede he needed his previously held dogmatics corrected by a more careful consideration of biblical texts across the canon.

One of the most basic issues with Unger's demonology can be seen in his stringent biblicism.  You will never arrive at a single cohesive demonology based on the canonized texts alone.  As Emil Brunner put it in his Dogmatics, the actually canonized biblical texts are equivocal and vague about the nature of the spiritual powers of evil and demons but they are loudly univocal that Christ conquered and overcame them all.  Unger's work isn't thereby completely null, but I think it is necessary for liberal and conservative scholarship on spiritual forces to get cross referenced, which is what African biblical scholars I have read have already been doing.  Suffice it to say that American appropriations of Wink and Unger tend to be drawn to one or the other and not dig too deeply into shortfalls in both approaches.  

What the Christian Nationalists seem to want these days is an Unger/Wink hybrid but one in which they get to redeem the powers and principalities on the one hand, while precluding any notion that they could be even potentially satanic instruments on the other.  I am not sure that the CN types care about the scholarly issues and concerns in either the Unger or Wink theologies, they're just grabbing for whatever is already off the shelf for their purposes. The trouble with the Winkian exousiology is not exactly what I intend to discuss here in what is supposed to be a short post.  There are a number of biblical scholars/theologians from Ghana and Kenya who have done a good job articulating the strong and weak points of Winkian theology of the powers.  

My guess at the moment is that the Canon Press type Christian Nationalist seems to want a chimera theology where useful bits of Unger and Wink are taken up and selectively retrieved ... the irony here could be that it's the same problem Victor Anderson saw in Black liberation theology as he described it in his book Beyond Ontological Blackness--you have a group of niche theologians with a very selective reading of both the Bible and history so as to valorize themselves as liberators when there's no real-world evidence they have done much except establish an intra-scholastic theological club.  Anderson even name-checked Adolph Reed's blistering book about Jesse Jackson, in which Reed said that Black church self-valorization took credit for a lot of political work that they did, in fact, host and facilitate, but did not necessarily actually do.  

Wink's theology as an actual political theology I am finding pretty unpersuasive but if powers and principalities are defined in terms of aesthetic dogmas such as ontological whiteness or blackness I think Wink's exousiology could prove immensely helpful as a concept to take on in looking at the way gatekeepers and purists try to enforce separations between Black vernacular musical styles and "classical music" as somehow incommensurate incompatible.  

If self-styled Christian Nationalists weren't so busy trying to frame imaginary states that exist only in their own minds in terms of ethnic distillations Wink's exousiology could be really useful as part of a broader case for aesthetic pluralism that draws on Dutch Reformed theological aesthetics and Anglican and Catholic reflections on aesthetic pluralism as a form of Christian hospitality, and Lutheran and Reformed committments to vernacular practices in liturgy.

But why would the Wilsonian types want to actually devote gray matter to that kind of stuff if they can keep trolling the libs week after week? 

In a  sense the current Christian Nationalist movement has all the entitled smugness the mainline Protestant liberal denominations had during the Cold War without actually having the institutional heft and inertia the mainlines actually had in American culture to justify the sense of entitlement.