Recollections

As a high-school student I was very active on the speech and debate team. So active, in fact, that preparing for speech tournaments consumed what seemed like most of my waking hours.

This was not necessarily a bad thing. I credit speech and debate with giving me many valuable experiences as a teenager (including lots of cross-country travel) and with laying the groundwork for subsequent academic opportunities. But leaving debate was also, for me, an important step into a more mature adulthood. During my first year in college, I distinctly remember coming to this realization: On every Saturday afternoon, while I was studying for an exam or hanging out with friends, there were thousands of teenagers across the country competing at speech and debate tournaments, their lives consumed by speech and debate. Those tournaments, a year before, had also defined my life in countless ways. But now, from the outside looking in, their significance suddenly paled.

While the point seems obvious in retrospect, it struck me at the time as a revelation. All the awards I had so coveted in the debate world no longer exercised my thoughts and dreams. I now realized that those who had been “celebrities” in the debate world–the most legendary coaches, the most intimidating competitors–were unknown to “the rest of the world,” of which I was now a contented citizen. Every Saturday, in non-descript hotels around the country, the debate world lived on–an entire constellation of stars, a well-defined hierarchy of achievement, a dynamic and self-contained universe. But it went on without me, and the perspective I had gained from without allowed me to see that debate was not the world, but a world among worlds.

I think it was helpful that I came to this realization when I did, because it has also helped me see my professional life in proper perspective. In many ways, the academic universe is much like the debate world: it has its own baubles of fame and commendation, its own celebrities, its own conferences in hotels. At a debate tournament it was normal to scan name badges, normal to stare in awe and converse in hushed tones about certain teenaged champions. And at an academic conference, it is normal to do the same when in the presence of august scholars–even though those scholars would be no more recognizable or admirable to a person outside academia than a champion debater outside the bounds of Debatedom. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to denigrate the norms and protocols of either Debatedom or academia. I only mean to notice an important truth: that a profession, no less than an adolescent extracurricular activity, is not the world, but a world among worlds.

As a Christian, however, I make a startling claim about the church–that it is not just a world among worlds, but the community, the universe of discourse that finally matters. And I am supposed to proclaim this despite the superficial similarities that the “church” world has with academia and high-school forensics. Like those other self-contained universes, the church has its distinctive values, its particular histories, its own defining stories, its roll of saints and notables who are scarcely noticed by the rest of the world. Yet unlike any other particular community, the church claims to be the bearer of universal truths, a witness to the destiny of the world as a whole.

This is a challenging claim, to say the least. It is always possible for the skeptic in me to whisper that the church world, despite its totalizing claims, is really as contingent and particular as academia, which makes totalizing claims of its own on its members. I can see how it would be even easier for the outsider, looking in, to point this out. Slate columnist David Plotz, who has been Blogging the Bible, recently made this troubling observation while reading through the Levitical regulations on slavery:

Every so often … the Bible nods toward a universal brotherhood of men. These are the kumbaya verses that are quoted by modern judges and heralded by modern civil rights activists. But they are aberrations. Most of the time, the Bible conceives of a tribal world, a world of a Chosen Us, and a nearly sub-human Them–an Us who can never be slaves, but a Them that can be exploited ruthlessly, a Them that is property, a Them whose first-born can be smitten.

Much as I’d like to deny it, there is a sense in which this is true. The Bible does conceive, at least in the beginning, of a “tribal world,” and even though Christians believe that, in Christ, the walls of partition between worlds have been torn down, universal brotherhood came through a series of inclusions, rather than all at once. The gospel was preached, as even Jesus said, to the Jew first and then to the Greeks, the Us and then the Them. The gospel writers are not ashamed of this in the least: indeed, the point courses throughout the New Testament’s theology. The incarnation itself declares God’s decision to work through a particular lineage, in particular places, with particular means, in order to accomplish his a-particular, universal ends.

Today I started reading through an anthology of selections from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Early on, Barth confronts the particularity of Christian revelation, and he admits that to the world it seems like “naivety.” For the Christian to believe that Israel, and then the church, were The Elect, seems as immature, from the world’s perspective, as the high-school debater’s obsession with his own private universe of meaning. Yet the church proclaims that “the King of Israel,” in all His particularity, is simultaneously “the God who rules all things.” And “to apprehend and affirm [that] idea we have to think of definite periods in human history” as uniquely important to all humanity.

We have to think of definite places–the land of Canaan, Egypt, the wilderness of Sinai, Canaan again, the land on the two sides of Jordan, Jerusalem, Samaria, the towns and villages of Judaea and Galilee, the various places beyond in Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, and finally Rome. We have to think of definite events and series of events which according to the witness of the Old and New Testaments actually took place at this periods and in these places, relating them always to the spoken and actualised ‘I am’ (Selection, p. 33; CD, III, 3, p. 177f).

As Barth concludes, “in the biblical witness the divine world-governance is related to the King of Israel. From a philosophical standpoint the naivety with which it does this is highly objectionable.” That’s an understatement. This same naivety is also objectionable from a psychological standpoint, since, as I’ve explained, it seems like immaturity to think that one small world is really the world. And it seems objectionable from a sociopolitical standpoint, since from the perspective of some, it is precisely the exuberant attachment to the very concrete places and events that Barth enumerates which fuels the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Yet Barth also argues that “it is in this naivety that its real strength lies,” because the biblical witness never has to step outside of its self-enclosed world to make the case for its own legitimacy or for the existence of God. It proceeds from the particular to the universal, instead of from the universal to the particular. Still, the tension between the two is hard to reconcile, and it can only be embraced with faith.

This post makes it sound like my experiences of debate and academia–experiences which make me self-deprecating about the totalizing claims of both “worlds”–stand as an obstacle to my fully accepting the biblical witness. But maybe I should turn this around, just as Barth does. Maybe my experiences of these other small “worlds,” which seem(ed) so much like the only worlds that matter(ed), were less like outright falsehoods than like approximations of the truth–the truth that there is a world that is not just one among many, but the world. If it is easy to understand how one person could be king of a country, it is possible to understand one country’s God as the king of the entire world. If it is possible to understand how one small community could overwhelming claims on one’s identity and activity, then it is conceivable that one community, one world, could in fact be the truly significant One.

Still, the particularity of the Bible–its contradictory message of parochial universalism–is sometimes a stumbling block for me, for many of the same reasons it is to Plotz. Parochialism is not smiled upon in our late-modern or post-modern world; it strikes us, as my former life in debate now strikes me, as adolescent and vicious, the opposite of a mature and cosmopolitan worldview.

The Bible does not flinch at this, however. It says that to enter the kingdom–or even to entertain the idea that one kingdom is the kingdom–we must become like children. Perhaps I must become more like my teenage self again, a person willing to give unstintingly to one world and one cause. Perhaps I must, to paraphrase Barth, view the “naivety” of the biblical witness as its true “strength,” and embrace that naivety in my own “thinking and utterance.” If this is true, though, I must surely start with this prayer: “Lord, increase my faith!”