Postmodern Gnostics: (a meditation on the Incarnation)

What do Alasdair MacIntyre, Wendell Berry and Richard Wilbur have in common? Read Roger Lundin's "Postmodern Gnostics" to find out.

Steve was listening to a Mars Hill CD the other day and afterwards laid a copy of Lundin's article in my lap. It made for quite a Christmas devotional.

"With the breaking of the bond between the self and truth in the late 19th century...the postromantic poet was left with no justifications for imaginative activity beyond those of preference and desire. With the losss of a belief in the psiritual and ethical significance of creation and the human body, the contemporary aesthetic temperament has found an easy justification for license. If nature and the human body are essentially amoral mechanisms to be used as a means to whatever private ends we have, then the human will is free to do with them what it will, confident that any activity may be sanctified as a legitimate manifestation of desire.

The doctrine of the incarnation challenges the amoral and utilitarian orientation of the modern gnostic self. It affirms that nature and the body are significant, not because they are the useful tools of imaginative, willful human activity, but because God has taken on human form and dwelt among us. Because "the Word became flesh," Christians may affirm the significance of creation and wait in hope for its transformation. The incarnation of Christ, in the words of Langdon Gilkey, "was of such a character that it established a new relation between eternity and time which...flattened the cycles of time out to become the linear stage of God's purposes."

In the work of theology, as in all cultural labor, it is essential to maintain a difficult balance--a balance between the demands of the present and the claims of the past and between the power of the human will and the ordered limits of creation. In Western culture since Descartes, there have been more than enough weighty forces siding with the mind against the body, with the creative power of the intellect against nature, and with the promises of the future against the authority of the past. THe works of MacIntyre, Berry and Wilbur are part of a growing minority tradition in contemporary intellectual life. Contrary to Coleridge and the poets and theorists who followed in his wake, these authors tell us that we do indeed receive far more than we give. For that very reason, these minortiy voices need to be heard as they seek to strike a balance by speaking of what is, in actuality a gift--a gift of grace in the given.

Without question, there are many elements in the given world that constitute burdens to be discarded, wounds to be healed, and wrongs to be righted. But there are also in that world gifts to be received. As we will see in the following chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most powerful of romantic voices, those who cannot discern grace in the given are unable to express gratitude for what they have received. This ingratitude, and its attendent resentment, are the distinguishing attributes of much of contemporary literary and cultural theory."