a reason why chord theory matters for guitarists--translating a traditional tune into a bottleneck technique arrangement requires you to know your chord forms

Decades ago when I was in college and studying basic harmony and voice-leading I recall a fairly usual concern  coming up, "When are we ever going to use this?"  What's the point of learning root, first inversion and second inversion chord formations? At the time the instructor of the course said, "Well, there's no practical use to it at all, unless you want to be a musician."  That was the simplest answer a professor could give but as a guitarist I have had time to encounter, in my own experiments as a guitarist, plenty of real world reasons why knowing chord theory matters.  Let me give a for-instance that shows why you have to know your basic root, first inversion, and second inversion chord forms in order to do anything with bottleneck technique (more after the break).

William Byrd--Mass for 5 voices, performed by The Cardinall's Musick

Let no one think that because I linked to a recent microtonal choral work by Toby Twining I don't have any love for the monuments of choral music past.  I am more of a fan of Elizabethan era choral music than I am of microtonal music and I am particularly fond of Byrd and Tallis. 

Here's the Kyrie from Byrd's spectacular Mass for 5 Voices, just to make sure that today's posts to musical links get some of the earlier eras of music besides contemporary.  I like contemporary plenty but contemporary still builds upon the past and in Western contexts building on a past that includes William Byrd is, I think, always a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgudFQ6-IE

Guitar Quartet Anemone perfoms "Bulgarian Rock 2020" by Ourkouzounov

As I recall, one of the comments Ethan Hein made about European music education is that it's more open to mixtures of "traditional" and "popular" styles than U.S. based music education can often be.

I "translate" that comment as an observation about work that develops fusions of "classical" with "not classical" styles, such as classical fusion with jazz or classical fusion with rock or classical fusion with whatever folk materials are at hand.

That's by way of coming back to the music of Atanas Ourkouzounov, whose "Bulgarian Rock 2020" for guitar quartet is contemporary "classical music", to be sure, but which is a charmingly rambunctious 7/8 Bulgarian prog rock dance for guitar quartet.  Link after the break

Toby Twining--Chrysalid Requiem, Dies Irae

Not that I'm really at all committed to composing microtonal or extended just intonation music myself (the classical guitar is in its most conventional form the most stuck-to-equal-temperament instrument an instrument can be), but I do like to listen to music that's composed without being tethered to equal temperament.  String quartets by Haba, keyboard music by Wyschnegradsky or Ben Johnston, especially the string quartets of Ben Johnston, I find that I can enjoy microtonal music.  Johnston's been my favorite because, to put it bluntly, Johnston was the microtonalist/extended just intonationist composer who didn't forget that tunes have to be in the music, which is not necessarily the case with, say, Easley Blackwood (although, frankly, I don't dislike the Blackwood string quartets, I just don't come back to them as listening experiences the way I repeatedly have with Johnston's quartets).

Anyway, having read Kyle Gann's wonderful recent book on the history of tuning systems I learned about Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem.  So, fair warning to people who aren't into microtonality or extended techniques in choral singing, don't click on the link but if you are ... a link to the Dies Irae from Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem is after the break

Francis Poulenc--Vinea mea electa from 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence

A beautiful little choral work by Poulenc I remember from my college choir days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RrbSOce1Uw

yet another semi-incubation period

I've been writing a bit less in light of recent developments irl, i.e. the whole global pandemic has led to lockdown conditions in Washington state that have ... to borrow a phrase Brain said to Pinky in a charming episode "... that would alter our plans ... ". 

So there's some projects I meant to have gotten  to by now that I haven't gotten to yet because things happen.

That said, I am still incubating a pretty long-form project that's been near and dear to my heart called Ragtime and Sonata Forms.  I'm only a few thousand words into the project as yet and it's probably only fractionally done.  When I finally, Lord willing, finish the project, I plan to post the whole thing in a series of posts here at the blog.  The key concept is demonstrating on formal and theoretical grounds how easily ragtime lends itself to sonata forms and how, as a genre of popular song in the 1890s through 1910s that is now better-known as a style of piano music, any fusion of ragtime as popular music (whether song or dance) and sonata forms has practical applications for post-ragtime styles of American popular music (which, in the United States, is functionally nearly every type of popular music style ever since 1897).

I've intended to eventually get around to Win Your War but there's nothing quite like a pandemic to help clarify how unimportant Mark Driscoll has thankfully become. He can peddle self-help books to the quasi-prosperity-charismatic scene and that is disappointing in light of what he has not really dealt with from his time in Puget Sound, but while I still consider it potentially important to eventually get around to addressing the ways in which his approach to spiritual warfare demonized dissent from getting his way back in 2008 and how his newer book recycles large swaths of that he's ... just not very important now. 

By contrast, I've finally had time to get the blog to the music and music history and musicology related stuff I wanted the blog to be about from the beginning, way back in 2006.  I'm still open to comparing notes with people on Mars Hill history stuff, however, which is why there's a big separate page with indexed posts and I notice that much of the traffic (such as it is) to the blog is related to that.  Glad to be of help to those who want to explore the history of the place but, as mentioned above, my incubating project for the blog this year is Ragtime and Sonata Forms.

Which still roundaboutly gets me back to something I noticed in chronicling the peak and demise of Mars Hill Church, which is a point I feel I have to stress a bit, that despite certain accounts that Mars Hill was taken out by liberal secular media or by Christians shooting their own depending on the podcast or interview context, the demise of Mars Hill involved a wide swath of people including Buddhists, secularists, and, yes, Christians with confessional convictions and political convictions ranging across what's popularly thought of the left-right spectrum.  My tendencies as a self-identified moderate actual conservative (as opposed to a neoconservative or reactionary) are sufficiently rehearsed here I hope I have merely to allude to them, but my hope is that pursuit of truth and knowledge can be conducted in such a way that whatever our various differences we can nevertheless find some common ground. 

My convictions are still Christian although I have come around to repudiating various forms of Christendom ... not that I want to bore you with that if you aren't already familiar with it, just that I have in the history of this blog taken time to stress my objections to modes of Christendom that have been embraced not only by the religious right that is more easily identified but forms of triumphalist Christendom that saturated the mainlines in earlier eras. 

So I'm not exactly sure when Ragtime and Sonata Forms will be ready to go but at least a good chunk of the writing has begun.

I also still want to get around to blogging about:

Matiegka's Op. 31 guitar sonatas

Angelo Gilardino's guitar sonatas (which are magnificent)

Dusan Bogdanovic's four guitar sonatas

Koshkin's two big solo guitar sonatas
plus the second half of his preludes and fugues although, honestly, likely to put that off until Selyutina records Volume 2

So, anyway, it's not that I anticipate not blogging so much as that the kind of writing I'm doing requires more time and care to put together.  The Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll comparison post, for instance, took quite a while to put together.  So I might post once or twice a week, maybe, but have the posts be several thousand words long.

music for Holy Saturday, Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night ... " and Mahalia Jackson's performance of the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8AuYmID4wc

if you want to hear an equally glorious version with the words of the hymn, you can hardly do better than Mahalia Jackson singing "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground on Which my Savior Prayed"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI1KsNPXwcs

Hindemith, Mathis der Maler Symphony, movement 2

Yes, I know, Paul Hindemith fans are few and far between nowadays (and maybe in the past) but I really do actually like a good chunk of the music of Paul Hindemith.

Mathis der Maler was an opera Hindemith composed on the life of a painter and ... skip it.  The symphonic suite is pretty cool, though, one of my favorite orchestral works, and this second movement corresponds to a panel from the Isenheim altarpiece that depicts Christ in the tomb.  So pretty suitable music for Holy Saturday.  There's a tradition at Wenatchee The Hatchet to link to music that was composed for Holy Saturday or thematically corresponds to the day. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvD6Mds9kE

Bach - Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from St Matthew Passion BWV 244 | Netherlands Bach Society

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGq-9pC_5AM&vl=en

I've loved J. S. Bach's Matthew Passion for decades and this baritone aria is one of my favorite passages in the work.  If I thought I could pull off the feat of transposing this for voice and solo guitar ... I'd transpose it down into A major first, because even I'm not that uncompromising about key signatures.

Penderecki, Luke Passion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G41KmDsN5s&t=88s

Because it is Good Friday (in the Western rite) and because Penderecki died recently. 

Norman Lebrecht relays concerns that UK orchestras are in critical condition which is yet another reason I doubt that the future of "classical music" is likely to take a symphonic form now that a pandemic is gutting concert life as we've known it in the classical scene

via Slipped Disc
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/british-orchestras-are-in-critical-position/

relaying the following:
https://www.musicweek.com/opinion/read/viewpoint-association-of-british-orchestras-director-mark-pemberton-on-why-classical-musicians-need-more-support/079416

With the global pandemic situation gutting concert life it's not a surprise that Bachtrack has closed shop
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/backtrack-shuts-up-shop/

Sympathetic as I am to the cause of continuing what's generally called "classical music" I have had my doubts, and posted them here at my blog, over the last year or so that whatever the future of classical music is that it will necessarily take the form of the symphony.

I.e. the name Future Symphony Institute might put too much stock in there being symphonies in the future.  I don't think for a second that "a renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity".  That seems like the kind of "fine art makes you a fine person" kind of manifesto that Richard Taruskin has spent his entire professional career, more or less, arguing emphatically against.

On the other hand, per some pieces by Jay Nordlinger at the Future Symphony Institute website, that were published in The New Criterion (back when I bothered to even read that magazine, come to think of it), mentioned way back circa 2004 some points raised more recently at On an Overgrown Path back in 2014 (there's too much classical music in terms of market saturation):
https://www.futuresymphony.org/tending-the-gardens-of-music-part-ii/
...
We have a glut problem, however. Horne recalls saying fully twenty-five years ago, “We should close all the conservatories for five years,” just to give the job market a break. And “now the situation is worse!” For woodwind and brass players, life has always been tricky: Zarin Mehta tells me that, for a recent tuba opening in the Philharmonic, over 120 people applied. [Editor’s note: A current tuba opening at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has over 180 applicants.] One result of all this redundant talent is that players tend to be quite good, everywhere. David Delta Gier, a conductor with wide experience both in America and abroad, says, “You should hear some of the players in Sioux Falls!” (The orchestra there is the South Dakota Symphony.) The sad part of our cornucopia is that many musicians wind up disappointed. Gier knows many fellow conductors – or would-be conductors – who have not had careers, or satisfying ones, simply because of the number of podiums available (versus all those who want to stand on them). “You get into a great school, you study with a great teacher, you work hard, you do everything right, and you think you ought to be rewarded. But a lot of people have been made to realize that that’s not necessarily the case.”

In a pandemic scenario even an orchestral conductor has pointed out the obvious, that symphonic music is not necessarily "what we need" these days.  Chamber music may be better able to withstand the current tide of policies that have curtailed concert life.  

Actually, that kind of gets me back to why I think Douglas Shadle is basically wrong about the idea of canceling the nineteenth century.  In a global pandemic we might want to actually revisit the Biedermeier era of in-house music-making.  I'm a classical guitarist interested in solo guitar music and particularly chamber music that includes the guitar so, of course, I don't see any reason we should "cancel the nineteenth century" when it was during the 1810 to 1845 period or thereabouts that guitarists were writing the kind of DIY music for amateurs playing solo and chamber music of the sort that we could learn from if the global covid-19 pandemic situation has led to policies that may 
permanently damage concert life at the orchestral and symphonic levels.  You can still play Chopin or even Beethoven (or Dussek or Hummel) in the privacy of your home, just like you can play blues, jazz standards or ragtime.  

When the Thirty Years War raged along Heinrich Schutz didn't make a point of staying at the production level of the grander larger-scale works he did in his earlier career.  He stripped everything down to little sacred concert music pieces.  His Passion settings shifted into voices-only for liturgical but also practical reasons.  

The guitar music of Mauro Giuliani is still fun to play even if snooty classical music critics at The Guardian have referred to it as silly trifling music.  Frankly, as a guitarist I find it easier to bridge the gap between American popular styles (i.e. ragtime from a century ago) and classical music by way of having studied Carulli, Giuliani or Legnani.  For that matter a Bohemian guitarist composer like Matiegka also wrote works that have given me inspiration to bridge the gap between American vernacular styles and sonata forms but Italian and Bohemian and Spanish guitarist composers are generally so far off the radar for mainstream musicology it's never been a surprise to me if in the turf wars of academic music studies pop vs orchestra or salon traditions have persisted.  If there's something we guitarists could potentially do the world over, it could be to develop ways of thinking and composing and writing about music that could potentially bridge this chasm, which musicology-as-usual in the last century and a half, even including New Musicology, has rarely seemed to be interested in remedying.   If a string quartet from Haydn might even seem hard to stage these days Haydn is public domain, try transcribing.  There are ways to learn from and to continue what we find beautiful in the old even if the received ways of playing that music can be kept from us due to the exigencies of dealing with a pandemic.  

Some ideas for consideration. 

Alan Jacobs compares R. R. Reno on the novelty of the covid-19 response to Agamben's statements on the normalization of states of exception

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-post-truth-thought-leaders-at-work/

Giorgio Agamben: 

The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity. 

Rusty Reno: 

That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical professionals who fully understood the spread of disease and methods of quarantine. Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death. They bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives. 

I find this convergence quite interesting, and wish I had the time to trace the intellectual genealogy that led a post-Heideggerian, quasi-Foucauldian continental philosopher and a traditionalist Catholic to make precisely the same argument. Reno’s contemptuous dismissal of the value of “physical life” echoes Agamben’s “purely biological condition,” his famous concept of “bare life,” while Reno’s attack on “a perennial state of fear and insecurity” echoes Agamben’s “perennial crisis and perennial emergency,” his equally famous “state of exception.” (One common ancestor, I think: Carl Schmitt.)

But for now I’ll just note that perhaps the strongest obvious link between them is indifference to the truth of their historical claims. What Reno got wrong about the American response to the Spanish flu I mentioned in an earlier post; for a refutation of Agamben’s claim that a sense of emergency in plague time is a new phenomenon, see, for instance, this post by my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins, and Anastasia Berg’s critique. When the facts get in the way of the narrative, print the narrative.  ...

Comparing a contemporary traditionalist Catholic take (a la Reno) on the covid 19 situation to Agamben is ... interesting ... .  Jacobs floats the idea more implicitly than explicitly that we live in a strange time when figures on the religious conservative side of our era so readily recapitulate arguments made by Marxists in a previous century.

Having done some comparative reading in Theodor Adorno and Roger Scruton I would venture to say that paradox is not only not very irony these days but practically seems to be a norm.

Something else Jacobs has written about lately is:
https://blog.ayjay.org/motte-and-bailey-and-coronavirus/

Nicholas Shackel: 

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed.

Scott Alexander has done a great job of explaining the widespread relevance of the motte-and-bailey tactic. And it is a tactic that is getting a heavy workout these days, especially from certain parts of the Christian Right (especially its Catholic-integralist, nationalist-fundamentalist, and snake-handling Baptist wings.) 

...

Alexander writes, “So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement” — or perhaps a statement that’s widely accepted in your social circle — “so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.” And that’s how it goes with the Ours-is-not-a-spirit-of-fear crowd too. 

...

The "motte-and-bailey doctrine" seems less like a doctrine and more like a tactic, although of course it should be mentioned that in geopolitical policy a doctrine generally works out in tactics and strategies but I digress.  As a rhetorical tactic, whatever "motte-and-bailey" pans out to be seems weirdly familiar to me after a decade or so of observing how people like Mark Driscoll have wielded social media. 

But I wonder if the "doctrine" as it plays out in social media depends on social media "reach".  To be plain, Mark Driscoll can imply by way of those rhetorical question titles that, ironically, more often can appear in the blog posts of watchdog bloggers, that in asking "Was Nebuchadnazzar demon-possessed?" in the title the answer has to be "yes" or the blog post would never have been written in the first place.  "Did abuse happen at Church X under the leadership of Pastor Y?" in a watchdog blog context is very often simply an uncertainty gambit that substitutes for what a journalist would report as "Allegation of abuse at Church X under the leadership of Pastor Y". 

some thoughts having finished Richard Taruskin's Cursed Questions, more on my own dissent from art-religion and the binaries of the Cold War era

One of the fun parts about blogging can be when writers can bounce ideas off each other and, whether they necessarily always agree, spark interesting discussions.  There was a time between about 2011 to 2015 that this blog was mostly known as a stopping point for people who wanted to read about the former Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  During those years I would occasionally get some angry comments to the effect that "all" I ever wrote about was Mars Hill stuff or about Pastor Mark (Driscoll). 

That was never the case but for people locked into a brand loyalty that could have seemed to be the case.  I didn't have any problem writing about Pixar movies I liked (and I admit I like quite a few, having wanted to be an animator when I was a boy and having never lost my respect for the craft and skill it takes to make even what I would now consider badly made cartoons).  I also occasionally wrote about music and now, of course, music is often what I write about.

Perhaps it's because of my time at Mars Hill Church and witnessing more second-hand than first-hand what seemed dangerously cultish about it, in other words having seen the various ways that what would be called actually religious religion can do significant harm, I have basically zero sympathy for what in academic circles and arts circles is considered the better, nobler and truer religion a la Richard Wagner, namely Art.  There's a couple of reasons for my acquired skepticism about art-as-religion being an ennobling thing.  First, I admit to being the sort of Calvinist Presbyterian who takes seriously the idea of the Fall and original sin and that the first warnings we must heed from those doctrinal traditions is what it means about "me" before any of us get around to "you". That leads rather quickly to what has been one of Richard Taruskin's key arguments against the art-of-religion in connection to the Holocaust. In actual religious traditions there are plenty of warnings that you can have the right dogmas and still be evil.  Didn't James warn in his epistle that you may say you believe in God but even the demons can make that profession.  As Richard Taruskin has noted many a time about George Steiner, Steiner was perplexed by the reality that the humanities did not humanize. 

The way I've put the topic in the past has not necessarily been to do with the Holocaust but with a different situation, the revelations of Weinstein's conduct in the #metoo era, which from within the streets of Hollywood itself confronts us with what could be a Donatist controversy for advocates of art-as-sanctifying sacrament. The post was very unsubtly named

"the post-Weinstein #MeToo era as a Donatist controversy for Western art religion"


Taruskin, for his part, has written many articles arguing against the idea of art-as-religion or we might be able to call high art traditions as sanctifying sacraments.  I considered seminary at one point decades ago so it's fairly easy for me to switch back and forth between art jargon and theological jargon.  So all of that may be by way of introduction to anyone who is reading this who has not read what either I or Taruskin have written in our very different scenes and platforms about the idea that loving the high arts or fine arts of the Western traditions makes people better people. 

Bryan Townsend has been reading Taruskin's Cursed Questions, too. He may struggle more with Taruskin's often withering take downs on the notion that loving the right kind of art makes one the right kind of person. 

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/03/there-is-no-hope-for-art.html

I've got my own differences of perspective from Taruskin about, for instance, George Steiner, but it's more a matter of emphasis.  I only heard about Steiner because John Borstlap took In Bluebird's Castle to be a wholesale summary of the death of Western culture because it did not stop the Holocaust and now we have to live with it, whereas Taruskin's take is more that Steiner presumes a justified dominance, for want of a better phrase, of the West as the West that is partly justified because George Steiner feels ambivalent about how Western arts didn't stop the Holocaust.  Many a Western secularist would refer to the commanded slaughter of the Canaanites and trot out the old claim that religion always makes people evil.  Well, in that case, all the more reason to reject any kind of art taking a comparable place to religion.  Last I checked Star Trek fans need to get that memo.

The older I get and the more I mull over what the Native American half of my ancestry ran into dealing with state and federal authorities the more it seems to me that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, whatever the average blue state white progressive might think of it as embarrassingly low genre goofiness or aspirational utopian sci-fi, the possibility that Star Trek embodies an LBJ era form of American cultural imperialism is generally not up for consideration. 

I wrote the following a while back before I'd finished the book.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/03/richard-taruskins-new-book-cursed.html

I've also exchanged thoughts with Bryan and others at his blog.

I've put my cards on the table that I am, at nicest, skeptical to the point of unbelief about art as religion.  If religion doesn't ensure that people are better people there's no reason for me to believe that either art or politics will ensure people are better people, either.   I have read a bit too much about Soviet history to regard Marxism as exempt from atrocity because Anglo-American leftists want to no true Scotsman Stalin or Beria out of being "real" Marxists.  On the other hand, perhaps thanks (?) to having half my ancestry being Native American I don't really have a huge incentive to presume the best about American continental expansion and yet (in case you didn't catch that I mentioned being a Calvinist!) I also don't think that blue state white guilt about the way Native Americans were treated (badly) exempts Native American cultures from being found wanting for what in some regions (the Pacific Northwest) was the pervasiveness of a callous and inhumane approach to slavery in the generally nomadic PNW tribes that even white racists from Missouri found somewhat galling.

Or as some authors in the Bible warned us, there is none that is righteous, not even one.

One of the key arguments Taruskin has made over the course of his career is to keep highlighting that loving the arts does not make us good neighbors.  Art as religion is no better at making us better people than religion generally is.  What low church Protestants might say the problem often is is a form of sacralism and a conflation of church and state, some post-Gelasian  doctrine of the two swords being invoked to make the church and the state of one accord and that this error, for those Christians who regard it as a terrible error (hint) it's possible for the magisterial Reformers to see the problem in post-Constantinian Christendom and yet magically not see their own bids at replicating Christendom and the sacralized states on their own Protestant terms. 

So, I guess that's my way of saying as a Christian that what I appreciate about Taruskin's polemics against Western art-as-religion for its long history of abuses or failure to rein in the lesser impulses of humans resonates with me because, well, my own years of chronicling what I came to regard as the graft and abuse of religious leaders in the former Mars Hill might, as the saying goes, overlap on a Venn diagram. 

It's somewhat paradoxical that I only got around to reading George Steiner and Theodor Adorno because of John Borstlap.  Borstlap has proposed that the Holocaust may have happened because people failed to live up to the best ideals of Enlightenment and the West.  Well, okay, but if that's the formulation it's what Americans call the informal fallacy of no true Scotsman, a temptation that we need to resist whatever team we're on. 

So I don't happen to agree with the idea that art can make us better people.

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/art-as-religion.html
....
But art and music have very special potential benefits that most other activities do not. There is a long and rich history to explore with all sorts of aesthetic and social implications. There is the challenge of performance which rewards not only the artist, but the audience as well. There is the challenge of understanding music from the point of view of the listener and the analyst. Writing about music is another multifarious challenge.

As religions go, you could do a lot worse than choose art and music.

Woody Allen once said that Mozart was proof for the existence of God. I lean more to Bach myself. Here is the Magnificat in D major with Concentus Musicus Vienna and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt:

One of the things I've discovered in my musical life is saying I think Mozart is kind of boring and lame but that I love, love, love the music of Haydn turns out to not be an orthodox view within classical music.  It's a bit more of an accepted orthodoxy to say that Beethoven had some great musical moments but could be a bloviating self-important blowhard.  I still love Beethoven's Op. 111, mind you, I just hate his choral music.  I'd take choral music by Poulenc and Rachmaninoff over Beethoven any time any where. 

What came up recently at Bryan's blog is that Richard Taruskin came by to articulate what I've found and liked in his work:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/all-kinds-of-brows.html

Richard Taruskin said...

Hello Mr Townsend, and thanks at long last for reading me so seriously and commenting so seriously on what I've written. You are of course right: I love classical music and high art as much as anyone (even as much as you, I'll bet). My question is whether I am entitled by my love for it to regard myself as a morally superior person. I of course say no, and the piece on which you are commenting is my lengthy justification for my refusal to pat classical music lovers on the back. It's the sober academic version of that Musical Mystique piece from the New Republic a dozen years ago, about which people got rather exercised. But neither piece was an attack on the music or anyone's love for it.
All good wishes, Richard Taruskin

April 7, 2020 at 3:24 PM

That's it in a paragraph.  There's a world of difference between loving classical music and saying that one's love of classical music, or a specific subset thereof, is proof positive of being a more enlightened and noble soul.  

What my own experience has been, and I could only simply guess that Taruskin has had to deal with a more vitriolic intra-scholastic variation, is that making an argument that love of the fine arts does not make you a better person can often be met with the charge of being a cultural relativist or an aesthetic relativist.  I don't identify as being in either of those camps.  But neither do I regard Theodor Adorno as being anything other that catastrophically wrong in his assessment of American popular music and popular song but that's a topic I want to get to at some other point in the future.  

But by way of a detour, I want to share something a friend from the Mars Hill days once told me he'd heard from a former staffer.  There was a staffer who, so it was told me, said that Mars Hill leadership found Wenatchee The Hatchet a bit of a puzzle for a time because week after week wildly incriminating leaks of sensitive information about elder resignations might come up on this blog and various critical blog posts would show up taking issue with, say, Mark Driscoll's handling of biblical texts.  Then all of a sudden there'd be thousands of words about The Powerpuff Girls (the glorious original 1990s cartoon, not the reboot). As much as I love the string quartets of Haydn and his Piano Trios I have no problem turning around and watching Samurai Jack or Batman: the animated series or The Powerpuff Girls or The Venture Bros or even Princess Unikitty.  One of the arguments that is a side effect, if you will, of Taruskin's arguments about how the fine arts don't make us finer people is implicit, that the axiomatic lowbrow arts don't make those people who love pulpier stuff worse people.  If Mark Driscoll at one time declared his favorite movie was Braveheart I leaned toward another movie that came out about the same time, Toy Story.  Whatever you may think about animation as a medium you're not going to convince me that Braveheart had the less cartoony take on masculinity and conflict than Toy Story.  Even Gibson at one point expressed regret about how simplistic his account of William Wallace was.  Had Gibson ever learned of the antics of William Wallace II would he have felt he'd set a good example?  Rather moot, I suppose.

Being the Generation X member that I am (as these things go) I came of age as the Cold War was ending and one of the things that struck me about the Cold War from my childhood years was hearing the manic dread that we were all likely to die in an atomic holocaust set off by either Reagan or ... mostly just Reagan.  That didn't happen.  I also noticed, being ex-Pentecostal that I am, that every variation of the futurist dispensationalist timeline for being Rapture Ready failed.  I began to discover as I came across postmillenialists that it was far too easy to just assume that the only worst of it tendencies in American Christianity were from the Rapture Ready sort--the old postmillenialist triumphalism played a role in how a bunch of white Americans decided it was okay to disenfranchise Native Americans in the way that they did and my skepticism of both the presumptive leadership of American mainlines and the relatively recent vintage of the Religious Right that has merely co-opted the cultural mandate entitlement that was at one point wielded by the mainlines is about equal.

Perhaps affirming Christianity while rejecting the spectrum of Christendoms is as impossible to accept among advocates of Christendom as attacks on a more secular or panentheistic/pantheist art religion could be seen as an attack on there being anything good about Western art in general or classical music in particular.  I've only rarely been charged with operating from a position of aesthetic or cultural relativism mainly by people who don't know me in person.  I've beaten this drum at this blog in the past but I do worry that in the age of POTUS 45 one of the mistaken responses artists and arts communities have embraced is to treat any and all forms of populist motivation in the most pejorative way possible.  That someone who got elected fit into what Jacques Ellul mapped out as the methodology of the populist agitator doesn't mean that every populist impulse is necessarily bad.  Even Charles Rosen granted that Haydn managed to create genuinely popular music in his late symphonies that didn't sacrifice learned technique.  I.e. if in the history of classical music there was someone like Haydn who managed to be technically accomplished populist it seems dubious to presume that no such balance between "high" and "low" can ever happen again.  

It's less likely to happen now that musicology, for instance, has balkanized in the last forty years into turf wars between pop music historians and classical music historians.  I still don't get why we can't have the Haydn string quartets right alongside Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.  Rather than waste any time on Brian Ferneyhough's guitar music that uses extended techniques can't I just keep listening to the more brilliant blues of Tampa Red, Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson, Lonnie Johnson and Robert Johnson?  It's not that I don't enjoy avant garde guitar music.  I have actually had fun listening to guitar music by Maurice Ohana and Alvaro Company recently, I just think George Walker had a point when he advised music students to study Stravinsky and Hindemith because, though he had issues with them, new music students would be better off picking up where Stravinsky and Hindemith left off than by going the Elliot Carter route.

Finally, I've made this point as a hobbyist guitarist and composer in the past but when I see the skepticism on the part of musicologists with more of a pop music  than a classical background I can be sympathetic to that skepticism.  Why?  To keep things on the theme of art-religion, the problem I have with art-religion is that like more than less of the Western religions the canon is closed and there's no need for new divine revelation, what some music educators refer to as the problem not being the musical canons themselves but the ossification that comes with canonism, which brings us back to, yep, the Western Matthew Arnold style art religion that Taruskin has set his sights against for decades.  

It's sort of hard to believe I zipped through all of Cursed Questions in just a couple of weeks but it's a great read.  I'm happy to see that whatever we may differ on that Taruskin and I both have a very positive experience with the work of Leonard B. Meyer. 

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Mark Driscoll 2.0 but for the progressive Christian American

Strip away the confessional specifics of popular Christian self-help literature and large stretches of it can begin to seem as indebted to the work of Joseph Campbell as to any biblical text or theological tradition.  What was Joseph Campbell’s signal message from the twentieth century?  He’s best-known for formulating what has been called the monomyth or The Hero’s Journey but this is to misunderstand what his stated aims were and what his overarching intent turned out to be.  The Hero With a Thousand Faces turns out, if you actually read it, to be a kind of self-help book.   

Originally published a bit more than sixty years ago, Joseph Campbell’s book asserted that all of mythology the world over spoke a special truth that the ossification of rigid dogmatism obscured. What was this message?  We can hardly do better than to quote Campbell at length:

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

NEW WORLD LIBRARY

original edition copyright (c) 1949 by Bollingen Foundation and published by Pantheon Books

ISBN 978-1-57731-593-3

ISBN 978-1-57731-593-3

pages 30-31

The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery, but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is "the king's son" who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power--"God's son," who has learned to know how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.

page 135

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principle questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching.

Did Campbell say “hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life”?  Well, Campbell may have used “all” in a kind of Calvinist soteriological way where all can’t literally mean “all” because elsewhere in his famous book Campbell wrote that

page 196

Not everyone has a destiny; only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again--with a ring.

So, not everyone has a destiny, for all that, only the hero.  Had Campbell spelled more explicitly the “you” who may ever have read his book who is not “the hero” the book might not have become as popular or influential as it has since it was first published.  The hero (or heroine, even if that aspect of the monomyth tends to get ignored by those who try to defend Campbell from those who would try to have The Hero’s Journey be a Heroine’s Journey), has to be someone special:

page 275

Jesus, for example can be regarded as a man who by dint of austerities and meditation attained wisdom; or on the other hand, one may believe that a god descended and took upon himself the enactment of a human career. The first view would lead one to imitate the master literally, in order to break through, in the same way as he, to the transcendent, redemptive experience. But the second states that the hero is rather a symbol to be contemplated than an example to be literally followed. The divine being is a revelation of the omnipotent Self, which dwells within us all. The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one's own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to a precise imitation, the lesson being, not "Do thus and be good," but "Know this and be God."

page 315

The mighty hero of extraordinary powers--able to life Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe--is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the king within.

Campbell slightly backed away from his theorizing about the extraordinary hero a bit to highlight what he regarded as the problem of his era and by implication ours.  Self-actualization of a post-Maslowian kind that emerges only from the individual tended, in Campbell’s estimation, to lead to egoism and egotism.

page 334

The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group--none in the world: all is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.

page 335

Nor can the great world religions, as at present understood, meet the requirement. For they have become associated with the causes of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-congratulation. (Even Buddhism has lately suffered this degradation, in reaction to the lessons of the West.) The universal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious organizations into such a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual, position that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week.  Such a monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world requires; rather, a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so that through every detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and effective in all of us may be somehow made known to consciousness. 

Campbell, by his own account, was grappling with how to find a solution to identity predicated on social connection and cohesion in an era that he regarded as having fragmented into individualism and individuation that left individuals adrift.

If in the hands of a Joseph Campbell the self-help manual could take on a distinctly panentheistic Pelagian cast, in popular level Christian self-help confessional standards are still expected.  What is also frequently expected is that the discovery of the self is still expected to be found in the metaphorical and literal embrace of the other.  In conservative American Protestant settings God is “imaged” and the Trinity is “imaged” in many an inspirational account by the love between husband and wife. 

But it would be a serious mistake to imagine that this idea of a sacramental revelation of the divine in the sexual relationship isn’t found across the spectrums of red and blue, conservative and liberal, orthodox or mystical.  What has made the reception of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s self-help manual on marriage and sex, Shameless, curious, is the extent to which those who reviewed the book almost solely in terms of its niche market.  The plaudits heaped upon the book by those who endorsed it read as though what Nadia Bolz-Weber did was different and revolutionary.  Having documented the peak and demise of the former Mars Hill Church in Puget Sound what stands out about Nadia Bolz-Weber’s public persona in general and her book Shameless in particular is how much this cussing pastor with a history of stand-up delivery resembles Mark Driscoll, a celebrity pastor with a history of cussing who “got real” about sex decades ago.

This is not to say that Mark Driscoll and Nadia Bolz-Weber would agree on anything much more than that Jesus rose from the dead.  But the similarities are nevertheless striking.  Take a feature in The New Yorker that described how humble the beginnings were of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s church.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/the-lutheran-pastor-calling-for-a-sexual-reformation

The Lutheran Pastor Calling for a Sexual Reformation

By Eliza Griswold

February 8, 2019

...

In 2007, Bolz-Weber started her church with eight people in her living room, and it has since grown to include six hundred members. Last July, Bolz-Weber left the organization. She wanted to avoid “founder’s syndrome,” she told me, so that the church could flourish without her. “It’s awful,” she said. She misses her church, especially on Sundays, when she feels rootless. Yet she also wanted to pursue life as a public theologian. Last May, she put out a video of a mini-sermon about forgiveness that has been viewed nearly forty million times, and she often shares stages with figures like Lance Armstrong, whom she interviewed at a conference on Nantucket, in 2018. “I see from my notes you took drugs you weren’t supposed to and then you lied about it,” she recalled starting her interview with Armstrong. “Oh, my God, I did that shit so many times.”

A nationally famous church started by a pastor in a living room that has since grown to include six hundred members.  Well, that’s six hundred instead of six-thousand or fourteen-thousand but the parallel to Mark Driscoll starting his church in his living room seems obvious enough.  Perhaps to Bolz-Weber’s fans her use of profanity is not a sign of worldiness but of a special kind of honest spirituality, the kind honest enough to use the swear words to reveal a lack of fakeness.  This was, for those who witnessed the rise and peak and fall of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll’s place in that scene, nothing especially unique.  Mark Driscoll decades ago preached that if anyone told you there was salvation apart from faith in Christ that person was preaching a God-damned lie, the kind of cussing pastor moment that got the attention of Donald Miller.

Bolz-Weber’s blue-state bona fides ensure that on paper she is opposed to almost everything Mark claims Jesus taught, but what’s all the more striking if you read both her work and his and listen to them both talk for cameras, is that the cussing hipster aesthetic permeates them both.  If Mark Driscoll saw fit to crash The Strange Fire conference to distribute copies of his 2013 book A Call to Resurgence, Bolz-Weber opened Shameless with her own story of how she decided to do something public, a form of protest, to address what she regarded as an injustice.

SHAMELESS: A SEXUAL REFORMATION

Nadia Bolz-Weber

Copyright (c) 2019 by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Published in the United States by Convergent Book, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC

ISBN 978-1-60142-758-8

ebook ISBN 978-1-60142-760-1

pages 1-2

The week Prince died, I was flying to Charlotte, North Carolina, to speak to a group of Methodists. That same week, the state legislature of North Carolina voted in the so-called bathroom bill, which stated that people must use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their driver's license. As I stuffed my carry-on bag beneath the seat in front of me, I thought of this hideous bill and the little plan I had concocted to protest it. My bag contained a roll of Scotch tape and half a dozen sheets of paper, all which bore--in huge purple print--the androgynous symbol for Prince's name.

The plane took off, and I looked out the window. We were traveling over the dry plains of eastern Colorado, thirty thousand feet above a dot matrix of green and brown circles that revealed the geometry of industrial agriculture. As a city girl who doesn't know a thing about farming, I've always found those green circles puzzling. Why would farmers plant circles of crops in lots that are square? 

When I looked into it later, I discovered that in 1940, just twenty-nine miles from the spot where my plane made its way into the crisp Colorado sky, a man named Frank Zybach invented the center-pivot irrigation system, essentially revolutionizing farming in America. In his system, the watering equipment turns on a pivot, allowing sprinklers to water crops in a circular pattern. The crops aren't planted in circles; they're just watered that way. The water never gets to the crops in the corners.

When I arrived at the Charlotte airport, I went about my project of taping the purple Prince symbols over bathroom signs that read "Men" and "Women." Then I went to church.

In contrast to Mark Driscoll’s publicity stunt of crashing The Strange Fire conference to distribute copies of his book, Bolz-Weber’s political protest was of a sort where if she did it quickly and discreetly nobody would catch her doing it and she could share it in her book as though it were actually a significant form of protest.  The kind of stunt that fourteen-year olds might do just for the transgressive fun of it is, in Bolz-Weber’s account, a principled political protest of what she regards as an unjust law.  Setting off to the side that matter of that law, her form of protest was of the kind where her telling us about it at the start of her book sends us a warning, a warning that a whole lot of the content of Shameless is inextricably mediated through Nadia Bolz-Weber. 

Now, maybe, we’re all entitled as Americans to view ourselves as the central protagonists of our own lives but I have met pastors, for instances, who have taught that through Christ we recognize that we are not the protagonists in the story of the cosmos.  Read a couple of books by Bolz-Weber and a couple of books by Mark Driscoll and you may find that what they have in common is that they have a relentless capacity to present what they see as the Gospel of Jesus Christ that doesn’t just so happen to fit a Jesus they have reverse-engineered into being for the things they are for.

Let me give an example of Bolz-Weber’s pastrix meets comic shtick routine:

page 23

I grew up in a religious tradition that eschewed all alcohol consumption--a practice that is called "teetotaling," which I always took to mean that tea was the totality of what we were allowed to drink. ...

As preacher jokes go this is about on par with Mark Driscoll’s old joke about wanting to put the fun back into fundamentalism. They both have enough sense as comedians to not laugh at their own jokes but they do us the disservice of thinking they’re being witty. To this one had best reply, “Yes, doubtless you are the people and all wisdom will die with you but I am not inferior to you.”  Figures like Bolz-Weber and Driscoll, whether they admit it or not, sell their books on the premise that there are things they have figured out that their target audiences have not.

In Mark Driscoll’s case, he insisted, twenty years ago, that Song of Songs was translated by “cowards”.  Let’s revisit something published at Wenatchee The Hatchet a few years back, the raw text of William Wallace II (aka Mark Driscoll’s) thread conversation called “Using Your Penis”:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-raw-text-no-pun-intended-of-william.html

Author  Topic:   Using your penis 

 William Wallace II

 Member   posted 01-08-2001 10:59 PM             

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is His penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.

 While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wandering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.

 Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another mans home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home. Paul tells us that your penis actually belongs to your wife, and once you are married she will trade you it for her home (I Corinthians 7:4), and every man knows this is a very good trade for him to make.

With his penis, the man is supposed to please his wife and learn how to be patient, self-controlled and be educated on how to keep his home happy and joyous (I Corinthians 7:3). The man should be aroused by his new home, and his wife should rejoice at seeing his penis rise to greet her (Song of Songs 5:14b).

...

William Wallace II

 Member   posted 01-09-2001 09:20 AM             

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 That verse in the Song of Songs was translated by some cowards. She likens her husbands penis to hard white ivory. In your NIV the footnote at the botton says it's the "lapis lazuli" which is the penis. The Bible translators are so skiddish they couldn't actually say what the author said. They do the same thing with the woman's body in Song of Songs 7:2 where they say that her belly button is round, red, and moist with a sweet taste. Guess what, it's not her belly button. Very sad, I'd have to say that if you can't just say what the Bible says but need to make it G-rated then you've got a low view of Scripture.  [emphasis added]

 IP: Logged

William Wallace II

 Member   posted 01-18-2001 11:13 AM             

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Christian pornography. Christian phone sex. Christian cyber-sex. Christian lap dances.

 Someone recently asked me about these issues. And, they are quite valid.

 The problem with many unfaithful unmanly unmen is that they have heads filled with desires and dreams, but they marry a Christian women raised on a steady diet of gnosticism (so she hates her body) psychology (so she thinks too much before she climbs into bed) and guilt ridden don't have sex because it's a dirty nasty thing that God hates and makes you a slut youth group propaganda from hell/Family Books.

 So the poor guy is like a starving man who is told he can only eat once ever couple weeks and his restaurant only has one crummy unspiced bland item on the menu and he either eats it or starves to death.

 Bummer for that guy.

 What the guy wants is to see a stripper, a porno, and have some phone and cyber sex. What the guy needs is a good Christian woman. The kind of woman who knows that men like unclothed and sexually aggressive women. Why? Because they are breathing. As long as a man is alive he is ready for sex every minute of every day.

 Ladies, listen closely. The guy will never get the big dreams out of his head. He can either explore them with his wife, become bitter and sexually repressed, or sneak off to Deja Vu or log on to the net and escape in a moment of adventure. Birds fly, ducks float, dogs bark, and men think about sex every minute of every day because they have a magical ability to continually think of two things at one time, one of which is always sex. Any man who denies this is a liar or has broken plumbing.

 So it would behoove a good godly woman to learn how to strip for her husband. Some nice music, a couple of drinks, candlight and a wife who has thrown her youth group devotionals to the wind would be nice. Most women do not do this because they are uncomfortable with their bodies. Know that for a man there are two variables with a woman's body. One, what does she have to work with? Two, how does she use it? Now I will tell you a secret, number two is the most important.

 How about a Christian guy who wants to watch porno? Maybe his wife should get a Polaroid and snap a few shots of her in various states of marital undress and bliss and sneak them into his Bible so that when the guy sits down to eat his lunch at work and read some Scripture he has reasons to praise God. Or, maybe if the lady would plug in a camcorder and secretly film herself showering, undressing, making love to her husband etc. she could give it to him when he's on the road for weeks at a time, or maybe just so the poor guy can see his wife as some undressed passionate goddess. I have yet to find a wife take me up on this be rebuked by her husband. [emphasis added]

 And what guy breaking his stones on the job every day wouldn't like a hot phone call from his wife now and then telling him in great detail what awaits him when he gets home. Or how about the occasional instant explicit message from his wife rolling across his screen giving him some reasons to expect that dessert will precede dinner that night.

 Do you know why the adult entertainment industry is raking in billions of dollars? Because people like to have sex and have fun. Does it lead to sin? Yes. Can it lead to worship. Of course. If you resist this message, please stay single until you get your head straightened out. If you are married and fully constipated, bummer for you and your upcoming divorce.

…

When Nadia Bolz-Weber, for her part, tells us on pages 170-171 of Shameless that “Sheila” was a sexually liberated woman whose poetry was credited to King Solomon her basic stance is that Song of Songs is Hebrew erotica that the Church fathers got squeamish about.  That far, there’s literally nothing in her position on Song of Songs to distinguish it from Mark Driscoll’s views quoted at length above. 

Bolz-Weber lets us know in Shameless that Augustine of Hippo had hang-ups, big hang-ups, about sex.

page 42

Augustine was a North African bishop and theologian from the fourth century whose writings have deeply influenced Christian thinking to this day. The world around him was changing, and he himself was changing, so like many of us, he looked to scripture for guidance. His own version fo the Garden of Eden story goes like this: God created paradise for humans to live in, but Eve messed it up for everyone by eating a piece of fruit that God told her not to eat, and this caused a fall from grace. So now all of humanity is cursed, and this so-called original sin of Eve's became sort of, I don't know .... a sexually transmitted disease. According to Augustine, every person born after Eve inherited her original sin, and so it is essential that men should be dominant--controling women so they don't screw over humanity any more than they already have.

pages 42-43

It is important to know, as we consider the origin of the church's beliefs about sex and bodies and gender, that Augustine's theology and interpretation of the Bible stories were rooted in his own shame. Augustine felt shame about his own sexual proclivities and regret about his licentious behavior before converting to Christianity. 

Augustine's shame reportedly took root when, as an adolescent, he got an erection while at a Roman bath.  Embarrassing, yes. But Augustine was so consumed with the shame of not being able to control his erections that he spent a decade writing a theological treatise. In the treatise, he set out to prove that the main condition of paradise before the fall was that Adam could control his erections with his own will. Then Eve messed everything up. 

I feel for him. Augustine, like all of us, had [i]issues[i].  And it was more than fine for him to take his own concerns into the creative project of biblical interpretation.  He is allowed, just like we all are.

But we must stop confusing his baggage and our baggage and our pastors' baggage and our parents' baggage with God's will.  Because while many of Augustine's teachings have been revered for generations, when it came to his ideas around sex and gender, he basically took a dump and the church encased it in amber.  But instead of realizing this was one guy's personal shit, we assumed it was straight from God.  We ignored the harmful impact these teachings have had on actual people ... .

Let’s compare Bolz-Weber’s take on Augustin in 2019’s Shameless and compare it to the take Mark (and Grace) Driscoll had on Augustine in Real Marriage from 2012. 

Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together

Mark and Grace Driscoll

copyright 2012 by On Mission, LLC

ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0

Augustine (AD 354-430) was sexually active before his conversion and later decided that sex within marriage was not sinful, though the lust and the passion associated with it was sinful. Because of this, he often commended married couples for not engaging in sex and referred to it as a form of animalistic lust.  (page 115)

This was back when Mark Driscoll was claiming to be a Calvinist so he moved along in a few pages on page 118 of Real Marriage to praise the Puritans (i.e. Calvinists, or even super-Calvinists) for having healthier views of sexuality than Augustine had.  Bolz-Weber used more four-letter words in her version but the basic take that “Wow, Augustine was messed up about sex and I’m so glad I don’t have his baggage about it!” is more or less the same. 

How about Origen, one of the fish that swim in the barrel of historically influential figures in early Christianity that contemporary authors like to shoot at once in a while for his take on sex?  Bolz-Weber can’t resist:

from Shameless:

page 170

Origen had a few lifelong hang-ups himself.  (Surprise, surprise) He was so tortured by his own sexual desires that he took matters into his own hands, literally.  Origen took seriously the Platonic notion (often repeated in some of Paul's writings) that the spirit is of a higher plane than the flesh, that the body is the enemy of the soul.  So rather than be plagued by sinful sexual desires, he castrated himself.  That's committment. 

Self-castration for the purpose of avoiding temptation seems so extreme, and yet it differs only in degree from insisting that women hide their bodies so that they do not tempt men, telling hormone-soaked boys that they have to avoid even thinking about sex ,and describing sex as sinful and dangerous and toxic outside of heterosexual marriage.  All of it smacks of the bullshit Cindy's pastor barked about "transcending our sinful bodies." 

By 2012, with his megachurch rep secured, Driscoll put it more tersely in Real Marriage on page 115, “Origen (AD 185-254) was so convinced of the evils of sexual pleasure that he not only allegorized the Song of Songs but also took a knife and castrated himself.”  For Driscoll, perhaps, the terror of a man castrating himself might be enough to speak for itself.  Bolz-Weber felt obliged to linger, so to speak, over the blood stains on the floor.  Mark was like that … twenty years ago but we’ll get to that in a while. 

For the moment it’s worth noting that there are very basic points in the sexual prosperity gospel of Nadia Bolz-Weber that are fundamentally the same as those expressed by Mark Driscoll.  They would appear to be on opposite sides of a lot of issue that they are, really, on opposite sides about, but look past the “what” they disagree on to “how” they sell what they do believe in and it becomes easier to see that Mark Driscoll pioneered the gimmicks that have defined Nadia Bolz-Weber’s public persona.

Even on the matter that Song of Songs should be understood chiefly as Hebrew erotica that should not be interpreted as having any typological reference to the love of God for the people of God. Bolz-Weber can’t even lay any claim to having a racy or new take on Song of Songs.  Her shtick depends on the assumption that even mainlines aren’t comfortable with racy content yet Mark Driscoll took his Song of Songs as erotica theme to the pulpit as far back as 1999. If you don’t believe me go listen to all seven of these sermons Mark Driscoll preached on Song of Songs called Sacred Romance.

http://download.marshill.se/files/1999/

Those sermons are some of the earliest that Mark Driscoll clearly thought were good enough to preserve by way of recording and since his take on Song of Songs has been one of “the” touchstones of his entire public ministry career it makes sense.  For instance, let’s take a sermon Mark Driscoll preached in 2007, the year that Eliza Griswold reported was the year that Nadia Bolz-Weber started her church.  As we saw from his writing on the Mars Hill php forum Midrash in 2000 Mark Driscoll was extolling the basic viability of the concept of “Christian porno” in the “Using Your Penis” thread.  By 2007 the Driscoll brand of selling sex was more developed:

about 23:05 (content warning as this is the notorious 2007 Edinburgh, Scotland sermon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws&feature=youtu.be

"Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest," she says, "is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade and his fruit is sweet to my taste." What is she talking about? Oral sex on her husband. That as he stands, she likes to be beneath him and his taste is sweet. It is a euphemism for oral sex, in your Bible. The Jews wouldn‘t even let men read this until they were married or thirty. Now you know why. You‘ve got Jewish boys under the blankets at night with a candle. [Laughter from audience.] Men, I am glad to report to you that oral sex is biblical. Amen? [Minimal response from audience.] No, you can do better than that. [Laughter from audience] The wife performing oral sex on the husband is biblical. God‘s men said, Amen. Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They do. So, serve them, love them well. It‘s biblical. Right here. We have a verse. The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath

24:17

I'll tell you a story if you don't tell anyone else of a man who started attending our church because of oral sex. Right? So many women go to church. In your country it's sixty or seventy percent. "My husband won't come to church. He doesn't have any interest in the things of God. He doesn't understand why church would apply to him." We had a woman like that in our church. She became a Christian. Her husband was not a Christian. He hated the church, wanted nothing to do with the church. She kept browbeating him about Jesus. "You need to get saved. You're gonna burn in hell."

He had no interest in that. 

And so, finally, I was teaching a class on sex and she said, "Oh, so oral sex on a husband is what a wife is supposed to do?" I said, "Yes." She said, "My husband's always wanted that but I've refused him." I went to 1 Peter 3. I said, "The Bible says that if your husband is not a Christian that you are to win him over with deeds of kindness." I said, "So go home and tell your husband that you were in a Bible study today and that God has convicted you of sin.  And repent and go perform oral sex on your husband and tell him that Jesus, Jesus Christ commands you to do so." The next week the man showed up at church. He came up to me, he said, "You know, this is a really good church." That handing out tracts on the street thing, there's a better way to see revival, I assure you of that.

28:29

--you say, "Won't that make me dirty?" No, it'll make you a good wife, and ladies, let me assure you of this, if you think you're being dirty he's pretty happy.

Nadia Bolz-Weber may have temporarily caused a stir by endorsing porn consumption as long as the porn is “ethically sourced” but as I’ve demonstrated from Mark Driscoll’s public statements, one could go so far as to say that sacred porno was inextricably part of Mark Driscoll’s message.  Jessica Johnson did not call her monograph on Mars Hill Biblical Porn for nothing.  Driscoll has repeatedly publicly repudiated pornography as a profession and yet to observe Mark Driscoll’s cumulative claims about what he was okay with, it’s hard to shake a sense that he thinks that pornography that is made as a strictly, er, mom and pop amateur industry in which the consumers are the producers is basically a good thing. 

Which is to say that even on what might seem to be the raciest and most daring aspect of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s public persona is an also-ran compared to her red-state forerunner Mark Driscoll.

That Bolz-Weber and Driscoll regard the sexual bond as something holy isn’t even really a point of difference in general, the differences come in what kinds of sexual relationships Bolz-Weber is willing to call holy that Mark Driscoll believes are still prohibited by the Bible.

from Shameless:

page 20

... But holiness is not something we earn, or create, or strive to become. It's not about self-improvement. It's just something we bump up against by happenstance, something that jars us into ourselves and out of ourselves at the same time. Holiness happens in those moments when we are blissfully free from our ego and yet totally connected to our self and something else.  It is in the smell of a newborn's head and the exhaustion of a laboring mother. The moment during a celebration when you are sharing a cake with those you love, and you take the first bite and every pleasure sensor is firing [i] holy holy holy[i]. Holiness is the thing I never saw coming that makes me catch my breath because I know the sacred has interrupted my isolation.

And--I insist on this--when two loving individuals, two bearer's of God's image, are unified in an erotic embrace, there is space for something holy. What was separate has come together. Two spirits, two bodies, two stories are drawn so close that they are something together that they cannot be alone. There is unity.

So if the bond between two loving individuals is a space for something holy that could seem like a variation of Jesus’ words about how “What God has joined together let no one separate”.

About that …

from Shameless:

pages 58-59

My husband of nearly twenty years and I didn't know how to connect. It wasn't his fault. He is a good man and a great father.  But there was a part of me that was shut down for a very long time. It was hell for both of us, but finally we were able to face reality and walk with our family through an amicable separation and divorce. 

When I started seeing my boyfriend, I felt connected to him and to my body and my desires and my erotic nature in a deep way.  It was like an exfoliation of my entire spirit. It softened me and opened my heart and cleared away the gunk in my head.  It was [i]good[i]. Not perfect. Good.  Good like bodies.  Good like chocolate cake.  Good like when God saw what God made, and God looked at it and said it was good.

Those of us who wondered, however briefly, why Nadia Bolz-Weber expressed no interest in discussing how Tony Jones dealt with his ex-wife, we might now have an explanation for why Bolz-Weber wasn’t the sort to speak up against pastors divorcing spouses.  She had gotten divorced herself.

In The New Yorker feature on her we read the following:

… Four years later, she began attending community college. By 2003, she had transferred to the University of Colorado, Boulder, and in 2005 she graduated and enrolled in a seminary. She had married a Lutheran pastor in 1996; in 2016, after two decades of trying at a marriage without much physical intimacy, she got up the courage to get a divorce. Six months later, she reconnected with an old boyfriend named Eric, and, from the start, the sex was amazing. “It was like an exfoliation,” she told me. Through better sex, her spirit softened, and she found herself closer to God, which led her to rethink the relationship between sex and religion. Bolz-Weber discusses these events in “Shameless,” which is both a theological text and a personal one. Until now, she’s never spoken about her abortion, but she believes that it’s time to begin a new conversation about abortion and religion. The story embodies her mode of preaching as taboo-breaking, which she calls “screw it, I’ll go first.” …

Two decades of marriage without much physical intimacy.  Kids happened.  Kids being born tends to suggest that some kind of sex happened, at least enough sex for actual human reproduction to happen.  That Bolz-Weber, however she worded it, conveyed that she sex wasn’t very frequent or very good is, once again, a reminder that whatever the blue state and red state differences, there’s something at the core of Nadia Bolz-Weber as a celebrity Christian and motivational speaker that resonates with Mark Driscoll’s gimmicks. 

Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)
page 164

As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I cam to the conclusion that the cure for a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex with my wife, I simply told her. Yes, it's that simple. [emphasis added] For years, when I would endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural inclination was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each other, and I know that connecting with her like this is important. But sometimes I was just too frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her feelings. The truth was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my life, and we needed to discuss how that could happen.

To make matters worse, seemingly every book I read by Christians on sex and marriage sounded unfair. Nearly every one said the husband had to work very hard to understand his wife, to relate to her, and when he did that to her satisfaction then, maybe, she would have sex with him as a sort of reward. After many years I finally told Grace that I needed more sex. I asked if we could have sex more days of the week and try a variety of positions. She'd be the one to decide exactly how we would be together. Grace said that helped her think about our intimacy throughout the course of the day, which helped prepare her mind and body. To our mutual delight, we discovered that both of us felt closer more loved and understood, and were more patient with each other if we were together regularly in some way. And whether my depression was testosterone-induced or not, I just generally felt happier.

So where Mark Driscoll resented his frigid wife for a decade but eventually came up with a theological and personal rationale for getting more sex from her that was anchored in sex being the cure for his moodiness and depression; Nadia Bolz-Weber decided to divorce her husband of twenty years, take up a boyfriend, and formulate a theology in which sexuality in Christianity needs a reformation that looks suspiciously like what Bolz-Weber wants for herself and others. 

from Shameless:

page 158

As I have talked with my friends and my spiritual community, I have realized that many of us need a space where we can grieve lost or twisted sexuality. Do you, too, need this?  If so, I invite you to let the unprocessed trauma that is stored in our bodies find its way out.  Maybe with a trusted friend.  Maybe alone.  Maybe in a church.  Let's tell the truth about those scares.  Not because they define us, but because we can define them. Let us grieve that we were not taught to love and respect the inherent dignity of our own human bodies. Grieve the decades we avoided sex when we could have been enjoying sex. Grieve the pain. Grieve the abuse. Grieve the loss. Grieve the harm done to us by the messages of the church. Grieve our own sins and mistakes. 

Our scars are part of our story, but they are not its conclusion. ... . 

If Bolz-Weber divorced because she wasn’t getting the frequency or quality of physical intimacy she wanted and she said so for the record to a reporter writing for The New Yorker it’s going to be impossible for Bolz-Weber to position herself as having a practically different perspective than Mark Driscoll’s.  Why?  Because both celebrity Christian motivational speakers seem to have reverse-engineered the kind of theology about sex they needed to be able to live with the decisions they made that other people now have to live with. Expressing my convictions as a lay person I can’t shake a sense that Bolz-Weber and Driscoll come across as people who have built entire theological systems that they alternately invite and require people to live by to get what they want from their sex lives.  They also both managed to parlay these processes of personal negotiation or ultimatum-giving into self-help books and in neither case have I come to the end of their books having any confidence that anyone should build any aspects of their lives on the advice of these two people.  Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll have written pop Christian self-help books targeted toward people who, whatever their real differences on what we would now call blue-state and red-state issues, nevertheless tend to be people who believe they have a God-given right to get laid that they aim to make congruent with Christian confession as they understand it.

Ultimately Bolz-Weber and Driscoll have far more in common in the “how” of their public personas than their fans would wish to realize.  They differ in the “what” that they affirm the Bible teaches, obviously, but that makes their underlying similarities both harder to detect for their already sold fan bases and easier to spot for those who read widely enough across liberal and conservative, secular and religious literature to see what’s going on.  These two celebrity Christian motivational speakers with careers as pastors who have sought out the role of “public theologian”, and they both have self-help books about sexuality, sex and (sometimes) marriage to sell.  In the decades since Joseph Campbell developed his one-size-fits-all Americanist approach to global myth and religious thought, self-help literature in the United States has been able to proliferate in ways that can transform every kind of story, if you have the courage to see that it’s about you, is about you.

What makes endorsements of Bolz-Weber seem staggering to me, watching as I have the way that Mars Hill Church rose and fell on the reputation of Mark Driscoll, is that Bolz-Weber’s publicity stunts, penchant for a cussing pastor shtick, and vague invocations of tales in which she’s the reasonable heroine of her story who is gobsmacked that people don’t see things the way she does is that this was Mark Driscoll’s shtick at Mars Hill for about twenty years.  What makes it all the more remarkable is that someone like the late Rachel Held Evans would writing a gushing endorsement blurb for Shameless. Was this the same Rachel Held Evans who once said that Mark Driscoll was a bully and that we should stand up to him?  Having read works by Driscoll and Bolz-Weber the similarities in persona are more striking than the real differences on political platform and doctrinal points regarding sex.  Why?  Because, to put it in the harshest way possible in the hopes that readers will have gotten this point already, the celebrity Christian self-help book can be the product of self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing people even when we factor in the good old red-state and blue-state differences.  As Adolf Schlatter put it in his commentary on Romans:

Romans: The Righteousness of God

Adolf Schlatter, Hendrickson Publisers (c) 1995

The individual is godless if he fabricates religion in his own interest, for the sake of his own happiness. God must be worshipped for the sake of God.

... Paul emphasizes the absurdity of idolatry. It is absurd to put the individual, under the law of death, in the place of God, because in doing so it is not even the human and the animal that are worshipped, but only their likeness. This likeness is no reproduction of living beings at all, it is merely able to copy the outline of the form, the lines shaping their figure.

page 40

... it is a lie arising from selfish covetousness, if the individual makes his image to be God's image and his lust to be God's will.

page 43 (ibid)

Bolz-Weber and Driscoll can both reverse-engineer the Jesus who will give them the sex lives they think they’ve deserved and, more crafty still, they’ve figured out that by seamlessly weaving their own personal stories into their assertions about pop Christian self-help theology, they can make it seem impossible to engage with the laziness of their theological enterprises by wrapping themselves in personal narrative that protects them from being pressed on the issue of why they are so convinced that what they think Jesus wants for them so often seems to be what they already seemed to want anyway.  Per Schlatter, if the individual celebrity Christian self-help merchant makes his or her own image to be God’s image and his or her own lust to be God’s will then that’s that.  God has spoken, and if anyone has any questions about selfish covetousness, well, then we get back to stuff about how you shouldn’t touch God’s anointed, especially not the self-annointed.

Where this good news goes all the way to the bank is where Bolz-Weber and Driscoll have sold sexual prosperity gospels in which they will assure you, dear reader, that the twenty to twenty-five dollars in U.S. currency you may have spent to get Shameless or Real Marriage will bring to you the author’s hard-won wisdom that it’s your God-given right to get laid and that this is one of the highest and holiest things you can do as a Christian.  Anyone who might tell you that in the real world there are responsibilities and disappointments to any path you choose in life, well, that must be from Satan and Satan is a liar.  The “good news” in books on sex by writers such as Bolz-Weber and Driscoll is only good news on the reader’s presumption of a divinely given right to have a sex life, albeit within some vague, generalized confines of what they consider Christian ethics.  But in some crucial ways,  I think, these kinds of self-help books from popular level Christian authors are variations on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, a Jesus formula that paradoxically authorizes the kind of egoism and egotism that Campbell thought he was writing to correct that he paradoxically amplified. 

To put the point more strongly still, the self-help genre in the twenty-first century United States may be an industry populated by narcissists writing for narcissists who have, through the alchemy of appropriating mythology, folklore, religious literature, natural science or social science (whatever the mark needs), figured out how to sell you what they have figured out you are already willing to buy.  Self-help can promise you a better life and if you don’t get that better life you at least bought the opportunity to vicariously live your best life now through the merchants of dreams whose book you were just sold.  

Bolz-Weber’s Shameless has the illusion of edginess that is ultimately someone else’s set of shopworn gimmicks and that someone else is Mark Driscoll.  Nadia Bolz-Weber is Mark Driscoll 2.0 for blue state residents who object to what Mark Driscoll thinks the Bible teaches, but will eagerly buy up the racy gimmickry he used if it’s used to sell the Jesus who has been reverse-engineered to rubber stamp the kinds of Americans they already happen to be.