Volume 16, Issue 2: Spring 2022

S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 , VO L U M E 1 6 , I S S U E 2

featuring: Violence and the Cross ‘

by Will Bryant 24

also inside: CRISPR and the Christian

On Money

by Isaiah Menning 24

by Jack Brustkern 25

‘

‘

The DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.

Front Cover image - Photo by Jonathan Sumaili

Illustration by Anthony Fosu

T H E DA RT M O U T H A P O L O G I A SPRING 2022 VO L U M E 1 6 I S S U E 2

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Isaiah Menning D'24

On Money

12

Jack Brustkern D'25

A Glimpse of God

18

Najma Zahira D'24

Craving You

23

Elizabeth Hadley D'23

24

Will Bryant D'24

Store Up Your Treasures

32

Tulio Huggins D'23

Rebuilding Fellowship

38

Annie Ballard D'24

CRISPR and the Christian Imago Dei in the Age of Biotechnology

The Merits of Cryptocurrnecy

A Reimagination of Creativity

Poetic Exposition

Violence and the Cross A Response to the Problem of Evil

Christian Asceticism for our Materialistic Culture

The Individual and Community in the Body of Christ

C O N T R I B U TO R S Isaiah Menning D’24 (“CRISPR and the Christian,” p. 4) is from Salt Lake City, UT and is pursuing a major in Biology with a minor in Public Policy.

Elizabeth Hadley D'23 ('Craving You,' p. 23) is from North Caldwell, NJ and is pursuing a major in Classical Languages and Literatures with an English minor and is on the Pre-Med track.

Jack Brustkern D'25 ("On Money," p. 12) is from Denver, CO and plans to pursue a major in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Will Bryant D’24 (“Violence and the Cross,” p. 24) is from Hingham, MA and is pursuing majors in Quantitative Social Sciences and Religion.

Najma Zahira D’24 (“A Glimpse of God,” p.

18) is from Fruitland Park, FL and is pursuing a major in Economics with a minor in Public Policy.

Tulio Huggins D’23 (“Store Up Your Treasures,” p. 32) is from Mechanicsburg, PA and is pursuing majors in History and English with a concentration in Creative Writing.

Annie Ballard D’24 (“Rebuilding Fellowship,” p. 38) is from Atlanta, GA and is pursuing majors in Religion and Geography modified with Government.

E D I T O R I A L B OA R D Isaiah Menning D'24 Managing Editor-Elect

Najma Zahira D'24 Editor-in-Chief-Elect

Blake Whitmer D'23 Managing Editor

Drew Whitley D'23 Editor-in-Chief

Paige Pattison D'24 Editor

Chris Candelora D'22

Senior Editor

Whitney Thomas D'24 Programming Director

Hailey Hao D'24 Poetry Editor

Tony Perez D'23 Editor

Alice Little D'22 Senior Editor

Will Bryant D'24 Publisher

Michael Carlowicz D'22 Senior Editor

Emil Liden D'25 Art Designer

Anthony Fosu D'24 Art Director

Joseph Gyorda D'22 Technology Developer

A DV I S O RY B OA R D

Gregg Fairbrothers D’76 Eric Hansen, Professor of Engineering, Thayer James Murphy, Professor of Government Lindsay Whaley, Professor of Classics & Linguistics

SUBMISSIONS

We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia that seeks to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community.

We will consider all submissions from any members of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that align with our mission statement and quality rubric.

SPECIAL THANKS Council on Student Organizations The Eleazar Wheelock Society

email: the.dartmouth.apologia@dartmouth.edu

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

We deeply value your opinions and encourage thoughtful words of support, dissent, or other views. We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community. email: the.dartmouth.apologia@dartmouth.edu

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, Regardless of how you have come to read these words, wherever you may be, welcome to the Dartmouth Apologia. We are so glad that you have picked up our humble issue.

This Spring there is a liveliness around campus that I have not seen before. Winter recedes, the muddy snowmelt takes its course, the flowers bloom, people wear shorts again, and recreational sports take over the Green. It is a feeling of renewal, but that is not surprising—it is Spring, after all. This campus atmosphere is probably an annual experience, but it is still new for me. My junior year is quickly nearing its end, but I have only now been able to experience this renewal because of the pandemic. It is a beautiful feeling to be in Hanover, New Hampshire when the weather warms and the sun shines anew.

Renewal is also an important component of the Dartmouth Apologia’s vision, although it can sometimes be missed or overlooked in our more sobering or dense articles.

That is not the case here. I hope you will see, as you read these pages, that all of the articles in this cycle glimmer with hope for the future. After all, Christ gives us a lot to hope for. As aspiring apologists, it is part of our mission to pass on that hope as we apply the wisdom we find in Christ to every aspect of our lives.

In this issue, this hope manifests in many ways. It causes contemplation as we reflect on the paradoxical entanglement of perfect love and perfect suffering. It provides an invaluable ethic to guide the burgeoning worlds of genetic biotechnology and cryptocurrency. It expands our freedom to discover, explore, and express our own creativity.

It inspires us to examine the value of all the material possessions that we accumulate. It reminds us, especially in this virtual and socially distanced era, how important it is to live communally.

Springtime renewal also means transition. My Managing Editor, Blake Whitmer, and I have focused much of this past year on producing quality articles in quality issues.

We could not, however, have done this alone. We have presided over a talented team of committed and hard-working individuals. To all of them, we are both exceedingly grateful. We are very happy with the current state of the journal, but that is not to say that we are satisfied or ready to rest our laurels. With this issue’s culmination, my and Blake’s time in executive leadership will come to an end. Najma Zahira will succeed me as Editor-in-Chief, and I am very excited to watch the organization continue to grow under her direction. I wish her and the rest of the incoming leadership team a productive and prosperous year.

With that, dear reader, I leave the rest to you. Within these pages you may find encouragement, inspiration, food for thought, or a spark for debate. I hope you will find something that surprises you. Whatever you take away, I only ask that you approach these articles with an open heart and mind. What will you find here? Well, what are you seeking?

In peace, Yours truly,

The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2022 The Dartmouth Apologia.

Photo by Emil Liden

Drew Whitley D’23 14th Editor-in-Chief of the Dartmouth Apologia

Photo by Emil Liden

CRISPR AND THE CHRISTIAN

Imago Dei in the Age of Biotechnology

ISAIAH MENNING

O

n July 30, 2003, the Pyrenean Ibex recovered from extinction. Cloned from the last living individual, the Spanish mountain goat had returned only to suffer a second extinction moments later when the newborn died of lung defects.1 Despite this failure, de-extinction and its related moral questions are no longer relegated to Jurassic Park. Indeed, in September of 2021, Harvard biologist George Church unveiled Colossal, a de-extinction company aiming to resurrect the woolly mammoth. By genetically engineering an elephant embryo’s genome to function like that of its extinct cousin, Church optimistically anticipates that a calf could be produced in as little as six years.2 At the cutting edge of this new era of biotechnology is CRISPR/Cas9, a remarkable system that microbes have used for billions of years to edit their own DNA. Work from scientists like Jennifer Doudna, Emanuelle Charpantier, and Feng Zhang have made this system usable, allowing humans to manipulate the course of evolution with unprecedented precision and power. What manipulation is moral, however, cannot be answered under a microscope.

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Empiricism can determine the technical limits of our new biotechnologies but not their ethical uses. The spiritual question remains: how and when do humans have the authority to fundamentally change nature?

To answer this religiously-formed question, we need a religiously-informed answer. In this article, I will explore the doctrine of imago Dei to argue that the Christian story affirms the concerns of “playing God” while offering an ethical model for stewarding the creation in the pattern of Jesus. Christ’s life shows us that ruling the creation is a fundamentally restorative process that we can apply to biotechnology, allowing us to arrive at conclusions beyond the question of playing God. Indeed, applying a Christ-centered ethic for creational rule may involve a future with unintuitive conclusions, and it may even include woolly mammoths.

B E Y O N D D O L LY The core mechanism behind biology, its central dogma, is this: DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein.3 From E. coli to mammoths, this process creates all of life

(with a few exceptions). Recently-innovated CRISPR/Cas9 technologies effectively allow us to control the first component of this process: DNA. This is the basis of Colossal’s mammoth de-extinction project and many other exciting efforts. However, in this article, I will focus on three other applications that will almost certainly have profound effects on everyday human life in the near future: genetic engineering in agriculture, gene drives for pest control, and genetically editing humans.

Selecting for preferable genes in agriculture is an ancient practice, but genetic engineering allows us to orchestrate this process directly. While other crops have been genetically edited using older techniques, the first CRISPR-edited food hit the market in December 2021: a nutrient-enriched Japanese tomato.4 While they are not yet on the shelves, CRISPR-edited non-browning mushrooms and drought-resistant soybeans have received USDA approval.5 Crops like Golden Rice, a grain edited with bacterial genes to produce large amounts of nutrients specifically to provide for developing countries, may become much more easily innovated and available with CRISPR technology.6 If these trends continue, humans will be able to produce significantly more food with less resources in the near future.

New biotechnologies may also allow us to eradicate invasive species and fatal diseases through synthetic gene drives. Oxitec, a United Kingdom biotech company, is developing CRISPR insect sterility technologies for mosquito eradication, aiming eventually to eliminate malaria.

Here, two edits are key. First, scientists genetically modify mosquitoes to possess a gene that sterilizes female offspring and is simply carried in male offspring. Second, they insert a gene that codes for a CRISPR editing system, overriding any non-sterilizing gene that the offspring of the male carriers may inherit from their wild-type mothers.7 This way, nearly every mosquito descended from the originally released individuals will inherit the sterilizing gene. Smallscale lab tests have shown total population elimination within eleven generations. If successful, these techniques could apply to a host of species––from other insects to invasive island rats to Lyme disease-carrying mice.8 Through gene editing, we can now bend the fundamental laws of inheritance to eliminate entire populations.

In some sense, this phenomenon is not new. Humans have guided the evolution of plants and animals for 50,000 years through selective breeding––CRISPR simply enhances that process.9 And it also works on humans. Sickle cell anemia, a disease affecting four million people worldwide, is caused by a single letter mutation producing a malforWooly Mammoth Photo by Christopher Alvarenga from Unsplash.com

“Through gene editing, we can now bend the fundamental laws of inheritance to eliminate entire populations.” mation in oxygen-delivering blood cells. A CRISPR-based therapy, which introduces edited healthy adult stem cells, has seen remarkable success in treating this disease for at least one patient, Victoria Gray of Mississippi.10 Among other potential treatments for ailments like cancer and blindness, these are just a few of many groundbreaking opportunities for CRISPR-based healthcare.11 In adults, CRISPR-based changes in most somatic cells (non-reproductive cells) do not pass on to offspring. However, editing heritable traits is possible, and it has already been done. In November 2018, the Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced that his lab edited two implanted human embryos with genetic changes conferring HIV resistance.12 Despite the international uproar in response to He’s project—and his eventual incarceration—the technological barriers to broad applications of germline editing are relatively small. For genetic diseases caused by single-letter mutations—like sickle cell anemia or Huntington’s disease—current science may hold the tools to eliminate these conditions from the germline through editing either reproductive cells or embryos directly. With significant time and work ahead, the brave new world of genetic biotechnology could be free of nearly all genetic diseases.

Here we arrive at the question of “designer babies”.

Though certainly not without its critics, germline edits ensuring children never suffer from sickle cell anemia, cancer, or Huntington’s disease may pave the way for edits beyond clear health concerns. If it proves possible to identify traits from ancient mammoth DNA and engineer them into an elephant embryo, then performing analogous edits in human embryos would be feasible. The primary technological barrier will be determining which gene systems code for which traits. This is no small feat––decoding any genome is very difficult––but once this is accomplished, then selecting for children’s height, eye color, athletic ability, and even intelligence becomes technologically plausible.

As each of these possibilities approach reality, the question of playing God becomes particularly relevant. Is it an THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

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overstep to genetically modify plants and animals to feed a growing population? Is it within our moral boundaries to eliminate entire species from the face of the earth? Or bring extinct species back from the dead?

Perhaps most fundamentally, can we apply these tools to ourselves and our posterity? At the core of these issues is this question: what are the bounds of human authority?

Finding an answer requires at least a non-materialist framework. To investigate the question of human authority, I ask the reader to consider the responses given in the story that has undergirded Western civilization for the past 2,000 years. To do so, we must return to the beginning.

I M AG O D E I A N D S I C U T D E U S At the center of the Judeo-Christian creation story is a dilemma. The Genesis 1 creation narrative poetically describes God creating the world. In a crescendo of making different domains of the universe––light, sky, land, stars, and animals––the story pauses. In his final creative act, God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”13 Humankind, made in the image of God and yet separate 6

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from him, is appointed to rule the creation. That is the first story. In the second creation narrative of Genesis 2-3, the text reaffirms that humanity’s purpose is to rule the creation: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and care for it.”14 The humans also receive a particular instruction from God: a ban on eating from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” and the promise that eating from this tree results in death. Then, the snake arrives. The serpent tells the humans that God has lied; the snake promises that eating from the tree will not result in death, instead persuading the humans that after eating, they “will be like God.” Upon this suggestion, man and woman eat from the tree, and God pronounces the promised curse.The consequences are twofold: first, humanity will now experience pain in relationship with the rest of creation and each other; second, they will eventually lose life itself. Fortunately, this is not without a promise of resolution where a human would, despite injury, wipe out the serpent: “And I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; and he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”15 After considering these stories, the following question arises: if God created man in his own image and likeness, why is it an inclination to “be like God” that catalyzes humanity’s fall?

The twentieth-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer sought to answer this question in his lecture series “Creation and Fall.” In it, Bonhoeffer distinguishes two types of being human: the perfect imago Dei (image of God) of Genesis 1 and the fallen sicut deus (like God) of Genesis 3. To understand the fall from imago Dei to sicut deus, we must first establish Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the distinctions between God, humanity, and the world. First, God is uncreated. The creation story asserts that God alone is in the beginning: he is uncreated. Further, God is free. Totally unconstrained, at the moment of creation, God began to relate to his work. Creation is a relational act God directs towards the creature, fulfilling Bonhoeffer’s conception of freedom as “a relationship and nothing else.”16 But, Bonhoeffer argues, because creation is conditional and cannot willfully relate to anything, it is not free like God is.17 So, for God to see himself in his work, to create something that can willfully relate to its Maker,

God makes the paradoxical: humanity, the created yet free thing.18 Still contingent on their Creator, they are free for relationship with God, with each other, and with the rest of creation. God is uncreated and free. The world is created and not free. Humanity is where the world and the divine meet: it is created and free. Humanity, though created, can actively participate in relationship both with God in worship and with the world as its caretaker.

Bonhoeffer argues that in the fall, humanity incorrectly asserts itself as its own creator, tearing away from its true Creator and sustainer, reaping the natural consequences of destruction.19 As the uncreated Creator, God has sole authority over humans. Humanity can rule the world but only by the creation, sustenance, and mandate of God, who is authoritative over his creatures. Eating from the forbidden fruit, then, is to claim that humanity was not created, that it has the creational authority of the uncreated God to define good and evil. The serpent grounds his tempta-

“If God created man in his own image and likeness, why is it an inclination to “be like God’ that catalyzes humanity’s fall?”

Ice Age Fauna of Northern Spain by Mauricio Antón from Wikimedia Commons

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THE LIFE OF JESUS AND LESSONS FOR B I OT E C H N O LO G Y

tion in the claim that after eating the fruit, humans would have independently asserted themselves to be like the Creator: “You will not die at all. Instead, God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God and know what good and evil is.”20 This disobedience against God is a statement that humanity is uncreated, and when humanity desires to be separate from God, the sustaining and free relationship between God and man is fractured. This is fallen man—the “like God” sicut deus—who falsely claims to be uncreated, and in doing so, separates himself from the Creator.

To understand and return to the imago Dei, our hope must be in a human nature that recognizes its creation by submitting to God. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation solves this problem. In Jesus, created human nature fully unites with uncreated divine nature to complete this reconciliation: Christ is the prophesied snake-crusher of Genesis 3.21 In his letter to the Colossians, the apostle Paul affirms Jesus to be both God, the creator of all things, and human, “the image of the invisible God.”22 This paradoxical claim is fundamental to Christi-

If Jesus models the perfected imago Dei, then by examining his life, we can answer the initial question: what are the limits to human authority? The biblical gospels show Jesus’ life centered on restoring the fallen world. Beginning with miracles of mercy and ending with his defeat of death in the resurrection, the gospel story shows Jesus undoing the consequences of the fall. Jesus changes water into wine at Cana. He multiplies food to feed crowds. He stops a violent storm. In each instance, Christ exercises dominion over the natural world to provide for the human needs and wants that were met in the pre-fall world.26 In healing, he controls human nature. He heals innate maladies related to blindness, paralysis, deafness, and seizures in addition to infectious disease related to fever and leprosy. These are all examples of Jesus’s divine power, but each is also an instance of his human will ruling over the creation in accordance with his divine will. Insofar as we have dominion over the earth, this suggests that we should use our control in the same manner, using the life of Jesus as a model to restore Eden and relieve suffering. I will first apply this principle to the nonhuman world, exploring

anity, and its implications are profound: God became human to reunite humans with God. The early Christians articulated this belief by confessing that Jesus is one person with two natures and wills, uncreated God and created man.23 Jesus unites the rest of humanity with God because he does what neither Eve, Adam, nor we can do: his created imago Dei human will affirms its creation by rejecting the temptation of sicut deus and submitting to his uncreated divine will, even to death on a cross.24 It is through the cross that humans are offered a renewed imago Dei.25 In the human Jesus, God became imago Dei, freeing humanity from sicut deus to restore relationship with him.

restorative dominion in agriculture. In the original Eden, human needs were fully met. Jesus used his dominion to restore this reality. Jesus’s life shows us the perfected imago Dei freely controlling nature to provide food for the hungry and even wine for a wedding party. In multiplying food, improving fish catches, and fulfilling a want for festive drink, Jesus fundamentally changes pieces of creation. Likewise, if we, imperfect imago Dei, are to imitate the perfect imago Dei Jesus, we can use our dominion for similar acts of restoration even if imperfectly. When Jesus fundamentally changes the nature of bread and meat through miraculous multiplication, this approves our exercise of dominion to provide for more with less even if we directly alter nature.

In Christ, the world is ours to restore.

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And of de-extinction and gene-driven pest control? Of course, the gospels never record Jesus miraculously resurrecting extinct species or performing mosquito abatement.

We can, however, use the principles observed from Christ’s life and the Genesis story to develop a response. We have established that in the fallen world, imago Dei restores the original creation, even through performing acts that fundamentally change the fallen world. So, for actions without a clear Christological precedent, we must examine the idea of the perfect original creation. Before the creation was given to humanity, God called it “good.” So, resurrecting species that we stewards have needlessly eliminated is a clear example of restorative gardening. I will not speculate on whether woolly mammoths specifically fit these criteria, but it is within our imago Dei authority to restore the original creation, including the species that humans have driven to extinction.

However, when we consider mosquitoes and gene drives, a dilemma arises—surely eliminating a created species does not fulfill the true gardener role of imago Dei. Because the original creation is good, this should be our first impulse, but it is not necessarily a universally applicable principle. Even within Genesis, where God proclaims that agriculture is cursed after the fall, human interaction with the

good creation is corrupted in a world with fallen imago Dei. This is corroborated in the life of Jesus. When Jesus heals leprosy, he asserts control over an organism, banishing it from debilitating imago Dei. Originally good creation can be corrupted to cause great human suffering, and imago Dei responds. It is hardly a question that mosquito-borne illnesses, which kill over 500,000 people yearly, dishonor humanity like leprosy did.

If we have the genetic tools to banish similarly corrupted manifestations of creation safely––without devastating ecological impacts––then we can claim our authority as imago Dei to do so.

If we can claim authority over malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the name of creation restoration, can we similarly “garden” other humans suffering with conditions innate to Mammoth Skull Cover by Sotheby's

their body? The answer here is not obvious. The dominion declaration God gives to imago Dei in Genesis does not explicitly include other humans, yet Jesus regularly heals people who seek relief from blindness, deafness, and paralysis. The Christian tradition would say that just as children dying of malaria is not innate to true human nature, neither are these disabilities. In this tradition, Christians have practiced medicine for thousands of years, and I would argue that using CRISPR therapies to bring similar healings is justified as an imitation of Christ. Of course, because we share the imago Dei with all people, our relationship to other humans is one of equality and not dominion, so we should be defaultly hesitant in drastic actions toward fellow image bearers.

This brings us to germline edits—is it within our imago Dei dominion to edit future generations’ genome? Using the same theology of the original human nature, it would seem that if conditions like Huntington’s disease and blindness are foreign to human nature, surely passing on these debilitating genes to children is just as foreign. If Jesus restores human nature when he

heals, we could reasonably conclude that when Jesus heals the genetic causes of blindness in a man blind from birth, the healed man’s genes for blindness would not pass to his own children. If this is the case, and parents can consent for their descendants to not suffer from clearly debilitating conditions, then it is within the restorative authority of imago Dei to act.27 But, if parents can ensure their children do not suffer from debilitating genetic conditions, then there should be no independent moral problem with “playing God” when imago Dei enacts Christ’s restoration within the human genome.

While it may seem clear to most that Huntington’s disease is a candidate for acceptable germline editing, perTHE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

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forming genetic enhancements remains unclear. After all, one might honestly argue that according to my previous logic, it would be fitting for Adam and Eve to have been more athletic, more intelligent, and more beautiful than fallen humanity currently is. If these traits are innate to human nature and we can discern them, then by my logic, would we not have the same authority to restore this to our offspring? When imago Dei Jesus changes human nature, however, he never miraculously confers intelligence, beauty, or athleticism despite having the ability to accomplish just that. Jesus, who defines perfected humanity, regularly heals diseases when interacting with people, but he never performs miraculous enhancements. This advises caution towards exacting the types of “enhancements” that our fallen wills may believe to be innate to human nature. Neither Christ’s demonstrated dominion nor the dominion outlined in Genesis suggest a precedent, command, or principle to fundamentally change human nature towards the vain desires of individual people. This suggests that altering the human genome towards non-medicinal ends may be closer to the deadly sicut deus than to imago Dei. One may wonder, however, is this problem of humans asserting their fallen will not true for all applications of biotechnology? This is correct. Using CRISPR may realize remarkable acts of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and restoring the lost creation on an unprecedented scale, but the direct teachings of Christ communicate that even apparently good works accomplished with conceited motives can be deeply sinful. Genetic biotechnologies are no exception. While we can confidently claim these Christ-modeled uses of genetic technology, it is incumbent on everyone involved to examine the intentions of their own desires.

C O N C LU S I O N The genetic technologies now at our disposal allow us to change the components of life. A world where gene drives eliminate entire populations, extinction is reversed, and economic privilege is written in the genetic code may be morally contentious. But the issue of humanity’s authoritative limits will be a question that, for better or worse, we will soon answer.

A return to the foundational texts of Western civilization may hold relevant insights. The Judeo-Christian creation narrative views humanity as the God-appointed caretakers over the world––imago Dei. This same story, however, recognizes corruption and evil as a hubristic denial of our own creation and an embrace of sicut deus. The Christian claim, on the other hand, is that in the person of Jesus, uncreated God and created man, we know how ima10

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go Dei can affirm its creation through submission to God. In the life of Christ, a distinct pattern of love emerges. Jesus exercises full dominion over the created world, performing miracles that restore individuals and groups of people.

Likewise, with the same ethic, all humans, and especially Christians, can claim the use of powerful genetic biotechnologies to feed the hungry, remove pestilence, restore the diversity of life, and heal the sick.

Of course, CRISPR alone can never take us to a fully restored world. The fallen sicut deus nature of humanity will always corrupt our efforts, even if well-intentioned. For all applications of biotechnologies, we must continually ask whether we are acting in the image of God or a false image of ourselves. When guided by a Christ-centered created submission to the uncreated God, Christians can affirm the use of powerful genetic biotechnologies to properly garden, restoring the creation and fellow humanity in the pattern of the Savior.28 1. Carl Zimmer, “Bringing Them Back to Life - ProQuest,” National Geographic 223, no. 4 (April 2013), https://www.proquest.com/docview/1328046896?accountid=10422&parentSessionId=IjhzxI5cPFRuYb6l11Gltbg3YNM1V%2FP6FzemFpMyCPk%3D&pq-origsite=primo; J. Folch et al., “First Birth of an Animal from an Extinct Subspecies (Capra Pyrenaica Pyrenaica) by Cloning,” Theriogenology 71, no. 6 (April 2009): 1026–34, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.theriogenology.2008.11.005.

2. Catherine Clifford, “Lab-Grown Woolly Mammoths Could Walk the Earth in Six Years If Geneticist’s New Start-up Succeeds,” CNBC, September 13, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/13/geneticist-george-church-gets-funding-forlab-grown-woolly-mammoths.html.

3. Of course, this is a simplification. DNA and RNA carry the genetic instructions for making proteins, but the replication of DNA, the translation of DNA into RNA, and the transcription of RNA into protein products are all facilitated by already-made proteins.

4. Emily Waltz, “GABA-Enriched Tomato Is First CRISPR-Edited Food to Enter Market,” Nature Biotechnology 40, no. 1 (December 14, 2021): 9–11, https://doi. org/10.1038/d41587-021-00026-2.

5. Emily Waltz, “Gene-Edited CRISPR Mushroom Escapes US Regulation,” Nature 532, no. 7599 (April 1, 2016): 293–293, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.19754; Emily Waltz, “With a Free Pass, CRISPR-Edited Plants Reach Market in Record Time,” Nature Biotechnology 36, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 6–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0118-6b.

6. Oliver Xiaoou Dong et al., “Marker-Free Carotenoid-Enriched Rice Generated through Targeted Gene Insertion Using CRISPR-Cas9,” Nature Communications 11, no. 1 (March 4, 2020): 1178, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14981-y.

7. If the sterilizing genes were dominant to recessive wild-type counterparts, Mendel’s Law would predict that the first generation would have a 100% chance of inheriting the edit, while the second generation would have a 50% chance.

8. Beth Alison Shapiro, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature, First edition (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 215-259.

9. Shapiro, 2-8.

10. Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 245-247.

11. Isaacson, 249-250.

12. David Cyranoski, “What CRISPR-Baby Prison Sentences Mean for Research,” Nature 577, no. 7789 (January 3, 2020): 154–55, https://doi.org/10.1038/ d41586-020-00001-y.

13. Genesis 1 (NIV).

14. Genesis 2:15 (NIV).

15. Genesis 3 (NIV).

16. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3, ed. John W. De Gruchy, Martin Rüter, and Ilse Tödt, trans. Douglas S. Bax, Diet-

rich Bonhoeffer Works, v. 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 63.

17. Bonhoeffer, 60-61; Even though Bonhoeffer stresses that the creation is not free like God, he does acknowledge that the creation shares some attributes with its maker including independent existence and, in the case of life, the ability to create.

18. Bonhoeffer, 61-62.

19. Bonhoeffer, 120.

20. Genesis 3 (NIV).

21. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 476, http://www.scborromeo.org/ ccc/para/476.htm.

22. Colossians 1:15-20; also find explicit biblical claims of Christ’s full divinity and humanity in John 1.

23. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 467, http://www.scborromeo.org/ ccc/para/467.htm.

24. Philippians 2:6-11 (NIV).

25. Bonhoeffer, 146.

26. John 2:1-11; Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-15; Matthew 15: 32-39; Mark 8:1-10; Luke 5:1-11; John 21:1-14; Matthew 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41; Luke 8:22-25 (NIV).

27. Of course, there are independent ethical disagreements within the Christian tradition around the human reproductive medical practices that would be necessary for this to occur in practice.

28. I would like to thank Drew Whitley for providing valuable edits and feedback on earlier drafts. Additionally, I would like to thank Drew Whitley, Charlie Clark, Will Bryant, Blake Whitmer, and Jack Brustkern for insightful discussions that were critical for this piece.

Photo by Maud Beauregar from Unsplash.com

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11

ON MONEY

The Merits of Cryptocurrency

JACK BRUSTKERN

T

he last half decade has seen the precipitous rise of cryptocurrencies in the public eye. The voices of newscasters, op-ed writers, and peers make up a cacophony of opinions expressing grand praise or grave warning about the innovation. Such a cacophony is a consistent ordeal when new technologies are announced. New Silicon Valley innovations instigate a firehose of wide-ranging opinions. In these situations, it is difficult to tell whether the inventions in question will bring us toward a better or worse future. This question has been applied to cryptocurrencies recently, accompanied by the usual bombardment of abstract fragments and technical jargon, making it difficult for individuals to form an opinion. In light of this challenge, we can return to well-established ways of thinking as our barometer for the new. Out of all such systems, none is as established and expansive as Christianity.

Christianity often appears as no more than a moralistic parent, but it claims that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and that following Him leads to abundant life.1 Further, Christians believe God has provided humanity with timeless principles—discovered and expressed by the 12

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greatest Christian writers and thinkers of history and substantiated through centuries of successful use—that help us see the world clearly. We can use these principles to evaluate the merit of cutting-edge innovations. One such social principle of the church is subsidiarity: an organizing principle that describes the proper relationship between communities of a higher order and those of a lower order.2 By looking through the lens of subsidiarity, we can determine whether fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies are organized in such a way as to bring about greater social order.3 In this article, I will 1) explain the meaning and development of the principle of subsidiarity, 2) illustrate the current US fiat system and the alternative of cryptocurrency, 3) explain how cryptocurrency aligns more closely to subsidiarity, and 4) examine the value in the very nature of cryptocurrencies.

SUBSIDIARITY In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution and experimentation with capitalism and socialism raised new questions about what defined a just economic and social order.4 In 1891, Pope Leo XIII responded to these questions in Stars Photo by Paul Volkmer from Unsplash.com

the encyclical—a letter sent by the pope to all bishops of the Roman Catholic Church—entitled “Rerum Novarum.”5 One of the ideas first introduced in “Rerum Novarum,” and further substantiated since, is the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that describes the proper relationship between communities of a higher order and those of a lower order. It holds that “a community of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always in view of the common good.”6 In other words, human dignity and man’s purpose are at the core of any social order. All communities of higher order, like the state, should never replace the functions that those of a lower order are able to fulfill but exist to support these communities of lower order.

This is in line with the Christian understanding of the human person. Pope John Paul II affirms this explicitly in his encyclical entitled “Centesimus Annus”, writing that “man fulfills himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing he utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own. The foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership is to be found in this activity.”7 This is not to say that the primacy of the individual excludes the state from playing a role. Rather, the word subsidiarity comes from the Latin root “subsida” meaning “to help” or “troops in reserve.”8 Subsidiarity indicates that communities of higher order, like the state, ought to play a supporting role for communities of lower order, like individuals and families, in the areas that they are not able to handle alone. Based on this notion, John Paul II concludes that the state’s principle task is “to guarantee individual freedom and private property, as well as a stable currency and efficient public services.”9 Additionally, the state ought to break up monopolies when they create obstacles to development, assure Bitcoin Photo by Jeremy Bezanger from Unsplash.com

respect for human rights in the workplace, and provide a brief period of social assistance to those in exceptional need.10 When the state oversteps this principle, however, and makes itself a substitute for something individuals or groups could handle themselves, it leads to a “loss of human energies and an inordinate increase in public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”11 God’s dominion over us reflects this rightly ordered relationship. “God has not willed to reserve to himself all exercise of power. He entrusts to every creature the functions it is capable of performing, according to the capacities of its own nature. This mode of governance ought to be followed in social life.”12 This image illustrates the importance of safeguarding the respect of human dignity and freedom, and it bids us to ensure that social organizations also abide by subsidiarity.

With the principle of subsidiarity in mind—that individuals ought to be allowed to handle what they are capable of handling and the state ought only to support them in this—let us turn to a comparison between fiat currency and cryptocurrency to determine which aligns more closely with an upright social order.

ON MONEY The US Dollar and the fiat currency system have enjoyed such a long reign as the dominant currency system that we rarely consider the long history of money or the value of an effective currency.13 In order to evaluate our two contending currency systems with balanced scales, let us first take a step back to examine a more basic question: what is money?

Say that I am a painter and I paint my customer’s fence for a day. In exchange, my customer gives me a gold coin. This coin represents the value that I put into that job; it is tokenized time and energy. I am comfortable receiving this gold coin because I trust I can THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

13

POPE LEO XIII

POPE JOHN PAUL II

exchange it for a similar amount of value—time and energy—that someone else can provide me. Money is a store of value. It is tokenized time and energy. In the past, gold coins were used as currency, because they were the closest to containing what the St. Louis Federal Reserve describes as the six ideal qualities of a currency: divisibility, durability, portability, uniformity, acceptability, and scarcity, the quality of scarcity being the most difficult to come by.14 After the American Revolution, US currency began to be denominated by paper bills for increased convenience, but the value of these bills was pegged to a certain amount of gold.15 More recently however, during post-World War II economic instability, the Nixon administration severed all ties between the US Dollar and gold in 1971 and transitioned to a fiat currency.16

Fi at Cu r renc y

The value of a dollar of fiat currency comes from the supply and demand of the currency itself, rather than being tied to the value of a physical good, like gold.17 The Federal Reserve backs the US dollar, bolstering its legitimacy.18 The US shifted toward the fiat system because it provides the Federal Reserve with several tools to keep the currency stable in terms of its inflation rate.19 The two primary tools the Federal Reserve uses include open market operations (buying or selling US Treasury securities, which changes the money supply in banks) and changing the federal funds rate (which corresponds to loan interest rates at banks).20 These two monetary levers impact the amount of money in the economy and the speed at which it is transacted.21

Cr y ptoc u r re ncy

Since the rise of the internet, digital innovators have doubted the internet’s capacity to produce a trustworthy 14

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VITALIK BUTERIN

currency.22 While a digital platform could easily provide something that fulfilled the first five qualities of money— divisibility, durability, portability, uniformity, acceptability—everything on the internet can be easily “copied and pasted”, apparently making digital scarcity impossible.23 Additionally, hackers pose a threat to the security of an online currency.24 But in 2008, a whitepaper—published anonymously by a pseudonymous individual named Satoshi Nakamoto—explained how cryptographic innovations could create a digital currency that was both scarce and secure.25 Cryptocurrencies rely on a fundamental piece of technology called a blockchain.26 A blockchain is simply a public database that contains information.27 Each piece of information is stored in a block. These blocks are chained together, one after another, making them immutable.28 This immutability is guaranteed by a set of cryptographic hashes that chain each block together.29 Additionally, a blockchain’s decentralized storage allows for mutual validation of the information on the chain between all the computers on the network.30 Consequently, no user can fraudulently change the data in a block because all the computers on the network share a mutual agreement about its transaction history.31 The immutability of blockchain technology was then combined with a simple set of digital protocols, yielding a cryptocurrency.32 The high degree of transparency, security, and trust that cryptocurrencies provide have convinced many of its efficacy. This trust is reflected in the total value of the cryptocurrency market, which topped $3 trillion in 2021.33 Cryptocurrencies are valuable because they provide a scarce and recognizable store of value. The high degree of transparency and distributed nature of dominant cryptocurrencies bolster their security and trustworthiness.

A Crucifixion in the Time of the Romans by Vasily Vereshchagin from Wikimedia Commons Portraits from Wikimedia Commons

F I AT C U R R E N C Y V S .

C RY P TO C U R R E N C Y: T H E V E R D I C T In the US fiat currency system, the Federal Reserve dictates that the US Dollar is the primary currency and influences the value of the dollar with various levers. In a cryptocurrency system, individuals dictate which currency they use, and the aggregate demand for a currency naturally determines its value. The principle of subsidiarity holds that “matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.”34 Therefore the organizational structure of cryptocurrencies is more in line with just social order than that of fiat currencies.

As was mentioned earlier, Pope John Paul II warns that when a government unnecessarily intervenes and deprives society of its responsibility, it inevitably leads to a “loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies … accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”35 The current US fiat system struggles with these burdens, but the cryptocurrency system offers an alternative.

If citizens, representatives, and Federal Reserve officials remain committed to the fiat system and try to suppress cryptocurrencies with undue regulation, the side effects that Pope John Paul II warned of will continue. Fiat currencies are harmful because of two effects in particular: a widening of the wealth gap through the Cantillon effect and an increase in pathological value hierarchies that compromise our ability to perceive value.

El i m i nati ng the Can tillon Effect For a fiat currency to stay stable, governments need to inject money into the economy.36 The Federal Reserve does this with open market operations, effectively adding vast sums of money into the banking system.37 When this money lands in banks, bankers use much of it to purchase assets in the stock market. This leads to a massive influx of money in assets, which leads to “asset inflation”, or the outsized increase of an asset’s sticker value relative to other markets.38 Asset inflation leads to the Cantillon effect, in which those who own assets profit greatly because their assets increase in value simply due to the Federal Reserve’s constant injection of money into the economy.39 This means that those who are already wealthy enough to have these stakes of owner-

ship in asset investments have their wealth magnified arbitrarily, expanding the wealth gap. Further, the increased amount of money in the economy decreases the dollar’s buying power, which erodes the savings of those who cannot afford to put their money into assets.40 Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, do not require this arbitrary injection of money. Their natural scarcity and distributed verification process allows individuals to assign value and verify transactions naturally, without printing large amounts of currency to keep the system afloat. However, if the government ignores the principle of subsidiarity and continues to insert itself in the role of providing currency, the Cantillon effect and the increased inequality it yields will persist.

Reducing Pat hological Value Hi era rc h i es People act in relation to the things they value. Whenever a person buys something, it indicates that they value it enough to buy it at its price. In aggregate, this process generates a natural value hierarchy—an index of the cost of things—and provides an effective reflection of the value of each thing.41 Due to its effectiveness and the difficulty of always knowing the value of everything, humans naturally rely on this index of prices as outsourced intelligence of the value of things.42 When the central bank injects money into the economy, individual banks invest vast sums of this cash into the market.43 Some markets receive more of this money than others, and those who receive the most experience artificial inflation.44 In other words, though these markets have not increased in actual value, they have increased in numerical value, simply because the newly printed money needed somewhere to go. Over a long period of time, this transforms the once naturally occurring value hierarchy into a pathological hierarchy of value. Because we outsource our understanding of the value of things, we lose our ability to perceive the value of things as they really are.45 Conversely, cryptocurrencies abide by the principle of subsidiarity and let individuals value currencies and verify transactions independently.46 In doing so, there is no need for the artificial money injections that generate pathological value hierarchies. Instead, the existent value hierarchies

“The organizational structure of cryptocurrencies is more in line with just social order than that of fiat currencies.”

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15

of everything, from stock prices to commodities, will be influenced more singularly by the demand of individual consumers. Because individuals will be the more singular source of driving of this value, price hierarchies will begin to reflect a more accurate set of values and more faithful source of outsourced intelligence.47 In addition, because cryptocurrencies do not have centralized intermediaries artificially inflating prices, the demand of individual consumers and businesses will be the more singular determinant of prices. In aggregate, prices will readjust to a more accurate hierarchy of values for individuals to rely on.48 The evident downsides of the fiat system’s money injection make it less appealing on a practical basis, especially when cryptocurrencies function without such drawbacks.

This evidence substantiates the principle of subsidiarity as a lens that can help us judge whether new innovations will improve upon the shortcomings of older systems. Beyond this, let us turn to examine the fruits of cryptocurrency itself. Cryptocurrency not only provides an alternative to fiat currency, but also helps individuals live as they ought.

HUMAN CURRENCY Pope John Paul II writes that “man fulfills himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing he utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own.”49 Cryptocurrencies’ decentralized natures assign responsibility to individuals in a way that leads to this fulfillment. In the cryptocurrency system, individuals are given the responsibility for its three major components: creation, valuation, and validation.

For one, the cryptocurrency system puts the creation of currencies in the hands of the individual.50 Anyone who has an idea for a better coin can create that currency. This freedom has allowed for the creation of many new currencies that provide its users additional tools, like Ethereum’s programmability.51 This aspect of cryptocurrency not only yields more efficient and useful currencies, but also encourages individuals to use their intelligence and freedom in the process.

Individuals are also given the role of valuing cryptocurrencies.52 Each individual’s appraisal of the value of a coin contributes to their decision to trade for it or not. The effect of this supply and demand distributed to many individuals on the scale of the free market generates the numerical value of each currency, which is effectively the closest way to determine its actual value.

Individuals also perform the transaction validation process.53 Some cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, rely on a “proof of work” transaction verification process.54 The 16

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Simple but powerful principles like these provide practical help for bringing us toward the social order we are restless for. proof of work system gives a few individual computers a cryptographic puzzle to solve in order to verify whether a certain transaction is legitimate.55 If all the individual validators come to the same conclusion about its validity, they are given a small amount of Bitcoin as a reward for the work they put in.56 In addition to these three components, cryptocurrencies can be owned and accessed by individuals alone, unlike the “I owe you” promise of a fiat currency that necessitates intermediaries like banking structures.57 This increases a healthy sense of self-sovereignty that contributes to a greater sense of personal responsibility and self-agency.58 Further, cryptocurrencies provide the technological groundwork for other innovations that magnify its benefits. One such innovation is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), which is a business built on the blockchain.59 In a DAO, individuals own its assets, are compensated based on the value they add, and make up its governance structure.60 In other words, DAOs provide an efficient business structure for the free market system that allows for the democratization of company governance, ownership of the value one contributes to the DAO, and ownership of the productive assets themselves. Such a system realigns incentives and distributes responsibility in such a way that, like the cryptocurrency it is built on, it increases individual sovereignty, personal responsibility, and self-agency.61

A FINAL THOUGHT As cutting-edge technological innovations increase in size, speed, and complexity, we can rely on the principles of the Church to determine whether these innovations will bring us toward a better future. Cryptocurrency’s alignment with the principle of subsidiarity provides an encouraging sign that this innovation will usher in greater economic and social order. Its practical benefits further support the efficacy of subsidiarity as a method for determining the true merit of an innovation. Indeed, subsidiarity—and other Christian social principles—can be applied to many areas

besides cryptocurrency. We can use subsidiarity to evaluate everything from governance systems to company structures to family roles in doing chores around the house. Simple but powerful principles like these provide practical help for bringing us toward the social order we are restless for. Let us endeavor to employ their wisdom even more as we continue to chart our way forward in this age of innovation.

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Citeco, “Rerum Novarum: the Economic and Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church,” 10000 Years of Economy, accessed March 9, 2022, https://www. citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/industrial-revolutions/rerum-novarum-the-economic-and-social-doctrine-of-the-catholic-church#:~:text=Its%20 name%2C%20Rerum%20novarum%2C%20means,and%20subsequently%20 Marxist%20economic%20theories.

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John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus.”

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John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus.”

John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus.”

John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus.”

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 1997), 1884.

Rebecca M. Nelson, “The U.S. Dollar as the World’s Dominant Reserve Currency,” Congressional Research Office, December 18, 2020.

“Functions of Money,” accessed March 2, 2022, in Economic Lowdown, podcast, The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website, 8:39, www.stlouisfed.org. https:// www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown-podcast-series/episode-9-functions-of-money#:~:text=The%20characteristics%20of%20money%20are.

“The History of U.S. Currency: 2000s,” U.S. Currency Education Program, accessed March 2, 2022, https://www.uscurrency.gov/history.

Randall W. Forsyth, “50 Years after Nixon Ended the Gold Standard, Dollar’s Dominance Faces Threat,” Barrons, August 15, 2021, https://www.barrons.com/ articles/gold-standard-dollar-dominance-bretton-woods-51628890861.

James Chen, “What Is Fiat Money?” Investopedia, October 26, 2021, https:// www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp#:~:text=The%20value%20of%20 fiat%20money.

“Legal Tender Status,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, January 4, 2011, https:// www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx.

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“Monetary Policy Basics.”

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Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”

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John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus.”

James Chen, “Fiat Money,” Investopedia October 26, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp.

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless | 2021 Edition,” YouTube, August 9, 2021, video, 11:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpzFU7MW5y4.

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless”; Sean Ross, “How Asset-Price Inflation and Economic Growth Differ,” Investopedia, October 13, 2020, https://www. investopedia.com/ask/answers/032715/what-difference-between-assetprice-inflation-and-economic-growth.asp.

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless | 2021 Edition.”

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless | 2021 Edition”; The Cantillon effect was clearly seen in the S&P 500 in the past two years. On April 2nd, the day before the government started injecting money into banks (and into assets), the S&P 500 was priced at $2,470. Twenty months later, in December of 2021, the value of the stock has broken records currently sitting at $4,700—a 90% increase. The 500 most valuable companies on the stock did not just double in actual value, but on paper they did because of how much money the Federal Reserve has injected into the economy in the last 20 months and because so much of this cash is invested in the stock market.

Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”

Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless | 2021 Edition.”

Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”

Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”

Matthew Howells-Barby, “How Do Cryptocurrencies Have Value?” The Coin Offering, May 3, 2018, https://thecoinoffering.com/learn/how-do-cryptocurrencies-have-value/; David Floyd, “How Bitcoin Works,” Investopedia, November 19, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-bitcoin-works/.

Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”

Peterson, “Bitcoin: The Future of Money?”; In addition to these two improvements, the steadily increasing money supply under the fiat system leads to price inflation, increasing perceived scarcity in the world, and this perception encourages a short-term mindset. In contrast, mature cryptocurrencies allow individuals to value currencies and secure transactions with an almost negligible increase of the monetary supply. By acting in accordance with subsidiarity and allowing individuals to take on the role of the Federal Reserve, cryptocurrency will not encourage a mindset of scarcity like the fiat system has. In fact, if cryptocurrencies became the dominant form of currency, prices would go down due to the natural increase in efficiency of goods and services over time, encouraging an outlook of abundance.

John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus.”

Allie Grace Garnett, “How to Make a Cryptocurrency,” Investopedia, January 14, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/how-to-make-a-cryptocurrency-5215343#:~:text=Anyone%20can%20create%20a%20cryptocurrency.

“Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: What’s the Difference?” Investopedia February 21, 2022, Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/031416/bitcoin-vs-ethereum-driven-different-purposes.asp#:~:text=Ethereum%20Basics.

Howells-Barby, “How Do Cryptocurrencies Have Value?”

Hayes, “Blockchain, Explained.”

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Frankenfield, “Proof of Work.”

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless.”

Bankless, “55 - Welcome to Bankless.”

David Shuttleworth, “What Is a DAO and How Do They Work?” October 7, 2021, ConsenSys. https://consensys.net/blog/blockchain-explained/what-is-adao-and-how-do-they-work/.

David Shuttleworth, “What Is a DAO and How Do They Work?”

The interested reader may enjoy G.K. Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity or Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State.

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A GLIMPSE OF GOD A REIMAGINATION OF CREATIVITY

NAJMA ZAHIRA

“S

omehow, we’ve … collectively accepted this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked … Are you comfortable with that?”1 Elizabeth Gilbert, a journalist and the author of the international best-seller Eat, Pray, Love delivered these lines during a TED Talk in 2009. She discussed the plights of creatives—those in artistic domains, such as writers or musicians—and the faults present, not in the relationship between the artist and the outside world, but between the artist and their own creative process. The emphasis on the process behind any creative act, rather than its result, surprised me. There has been a reckoning in American culture regarding our posture towards creativity. A quick Google search will return pages of books and articles telling us how to embrace creativity to realize our best creative selves. Often, however, the emphasis is simply that we create. Gilbert’s TED talk reveals that this mound of literature lacks much discussion on how we ought to create. Gilbert’s emphasis on the process is a welcome one since it brings into light the vitality of the process behind any creative act. This 18

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process—how we understand and approach our relationships with our work—is at the core of creativity. It is the only thing that matters.

At the climax of Gilbert’s talk, she presents an alternative to the normative understanding of creativity in contemporary American culture. As it stands, societal expectations place enormous pressure on the creator to produce not only to satisfy their own creative desires, but also to satisfy their audience’s. Bearing this weight can be soul-crushing and, according to Gilbert, was a factor in the early and tragic deaths of many creatives in the late 20th century.2 As a solution, she draws on the Roman idea of the genius: a spirit that shares the burden of creativity with the individual.3 In this framework, the creative process becomes an act of co-creation with something (at least imagined as) external.

Although this understanding is for Gilbert a psychological construct rather than an immaterial spirit, there may be some truth to this framework. Her suggestion provides a promising launchpad for inquiry grounded in a Christian perspective. What we will discover is that creativity, and by Photo by Emil Liden

extension the creative process, is an act of co-creation be- God’s creation is more than aesthetic beauty. Furthermore, tween us and our Creator that enlivens our creative desires it is wrong to link creativity with aesthetic value because and propels them toward something greater. while the aesthetic value of art is linked to the product, the value of creativity is linked entirely to the process.

R E D E F I N I N G C R E AT I V I T Y Being created in the image of God does more than give Before we can consider the intricacies of our relationship with creativity, we must dispel some misconceptions. humans a creative nature—it also commands us to be creCreativity, which is simply the ability to create, is typically ators over the earth. When God made mankind he also thought of as nothing more than a personality trait like stated, “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, shyness or boldness. Our understanding of creativity, how- and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and ever, is much more rigid than these other traits: one can over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps 7 learn to be less shy or more bold but not more creative. on the earth.” The word dominion—in Hebrew, ‫( ָהדָר‬raCreativity seems to be reserved for those who can put it dah)—is often interpreted as “practicing dominion over,” to good use, typically in artistic domains like sculpting or but a more accurate translation would be “loving steward8 playwriting. Societally, we have come to recognize creativ- ship.” The command to radah then entails a deep love for ity as a valuable asset in professional life across all voca- the Earth (its land and species) that drives humans to mantions, but the idea that creativity is an innate trait for only age it carefully. The American Painter and author Makoto a select few still rings true. This understanding of creativity Fujimura draws on this interpretation of radah and emphais incorrect. Our understanding of creativity should derive sizes the necessary connection between loving stewardship and creativity.9 This means that to be proper stewards of the from our understanding of the One who created first.

Throughout the Bible, God does many things—he earth, we are commanded to “become poets of creation” 10 teaches, he lectures, he disciplines— but the first thing that and aim to mirror the way God created. All of our creative he does, as is revealed to us in the Bible, is create. “In the acts must then be for the benefit of the world and not just beginning,” the book of Genesis tells us, “God created the for aesthetic pleasure. This entails, according to Fujimura, heavens and the earth.”4 As the first creator, God originated creating for the New Creation. By this, Fujimura refers to the creative act. And yet, God’s creative power is infinitely the eschatological new earth hinted at throughout the Bible grander than ours. Since our very idea of creativity origi- but discussed most explicitly in the book of Revelation, in nates from God, calling him creative would be unnecessary. a passage that states: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new It is like calling The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Kaf- earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed 11 kaesque—intrinsic and apparent. Human creativity resem- away.” Attempting to ground this concept of creating for bles God’s since we are made in his image. As Genesis 1:26 the New Creation, Fujimura gives the following analogy: states, God created man “in our image, after our likeness.”5 when a son creates a work of art for his architect father, the This being the case, we must share some of God’s character- father uses the drawing to inspire something more suitable istics. These reflections led the Russian philosopher Nicolas for a building blueprint. Since the father is proud of the Berdyaev to conclude that creativity is fundamentally part drawing, he uses it to participate in a type of co-creation of human nature, because our nature “is the image and the with his son. In this way, he honors the original product 12 likeness of God the Creator.”6 There are no caveats here; while also purifying it. This, Fujimura argues, is how God every person is equally creative simply because all were will co-partner with us to form the New Creation, taking made in the same image. It cannot be that the trait is only inspiration and incorporating our ideas into something innate for a few lucky individuals.

Even though a professional painter may find it more natural to tap into their creative potential than would a policymaker, neither can actually be more creative because they both equally share the image-bearer status.

Contrary to what we often think, creativity is not only linked to aesthetic value. It is broader than that because

“How we understand and approach our relationships with our work is at the core of creativity. It is the only thing that matters.”

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“The creation story was not finished after those first seven days, and we are called to continue in this work of creation.” great. The creation story was not finished after those first seven days, and we are called to continue in this work of creation. As such, we collaborate with God by creating in the ongoing eighth day.13

R E I M AG I N I N G C R E AT I V I T Y Although creativity wonderfully invites us to participate in a collaborative process with God, our creativity can be tragic when we approach it from the wrong perspective.

Berdyaev discusses the role of tragedy in creativity in the following way: In its essence, creativity is painful and tragic.

The purpose of the creative impulse is the attainment of another life, another world, an ascent into being. But the result of a creative act is a book, a picture or a legal institution … Herein lies the painful and tragic contrast between the aims of creativity and the results of creating.14

The impulse that Berdyaev refers to is the desire within all of us to create, and that impulse is naturally driven towards inspiration for the New Creation. Every creative work contributes to the New Creation whether we know it or not, because that is the purpose of our appointment to loving stewardship over the Earth.15 Our appetite for creativity can only be satisfied when we set out with this understanding in mind. Furthering Fujimura’s earlier analogy, we create with the knowledge that our Father, the divine architect, will see our designs, appreciate them, and incorporate them into the blueprint for his new creation.

This is how we should understand creativity. Our creativity becomes tragic when we lack this understanding because we have not acknowledged, and thus can never satisfy, the appetite of our creative impulse. Let’s further the analogy again. Without the proper understanding, all of our designs go without the appreciation and higher purpose we yearn for them to receive. The appreciation we receive from humans for our work is estimable but fickle and fleeting, whereas the appreciation we receive from God is transcendent and complete. While our creations may have utility or please our aesthetic sensibilities, they should mean so much more. Berdyaev’s sense of tragedy is, as such, about how 20

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this failure of understanding leaves us empty when we tap into the creative impulse. Creating with the proper understanding invites hope into how we create. Yet even after we realize this, there are still three main ways in which we may fall short in our creative acts.

The first pitfall is an unhealthy individualism. Individualism, characterized by self-reliance and independence, is largely a positive attribute. Individualism does not inherently draw us away from fulfilling our creative purpose although it has the potential to when improperly understood. Since every individual’s creativity is a co-partnership with God towards the New Creation, everyone shares this same greater purpose; no one’s creativity exists in isolation.

We are still individuals, fully self-reliant and independent, but our purpose does not end with our own needs and desires. An unhealthy individualism lacks this understanding and can lead to a creativity that is isolating because it is void of the knowledge that we are creating for something greater than ourselves. Those who identify themselves in their individualism alone are not truly creative, since the creative power they seek deprives them of “that universal content, towards which, alone, creativity may be directed.”16 In other words, to create without an awareness of our higher purpose can lead us to make idols of our creation or our making abilities.17 The second pitfall combines two very related concepts: creating out of necessity and creating for utility. They arise when we buy into the idea that everything we create must have extrinsic value. Necessity arises out of a lack of something. Whenever I am hungry, I make myself a sandwich because I know that once I eat it, I will no longer be hungry (for a time). I will not make a sandwich simply to admire its beauty and intrinsic value—the sandwich only serves to satisfy an appetitive desire. This should not be our motivation because our model, God, did not act out of necessity when he created the universe. As Fujimura explains, God was fully self-sufficient and fully existent on his own [before he created]. He did not need us to be complete.18 God created because such is his nature, and we exist because of God’s unbounded love and creativity.19 When we create, we are supposed to emulate God’s perfect action of creation to our best ability. In short, we should create because we want to, not because we must.

Photos from Wikimedia Commons

BERDYAEV

GILBERT

FUJIMURA

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While necessity arises out of a lack of something, usefulness arises from a desire to receive something from a creation. If I make a sandwich, not because I am hungry, but because I know that I can trade this sandwich for a candy bar, I have adopted a utility mindset. I only created x to get y. This also should not be our motivation to create because, again, that is not how God created. After God created man, he did not say, “This creation will allow me to do x, y, z, therefore it is good.” He saw that “it was good,” because that is all that matters.20 When we create, we should do so because it is good, not because of what that creation might bring us.

The final pitfall, which is closely related to the second, is an overconcern for efficiency. We tend to create in a way that prioritizes the product over the process. This tendency is unsurprising, especially when we employ creativity in our work, because deadlines are an important part of society’s structure. And yet efficiency, like usefulness, forsakes the ultimate goal of creation. When God created the universe, he did not do so efficiently. Perfectly and precisely?

Yes, but it was not efficient, or at least not in the manner we would expect. In an instant, God could have created everything: the cosmos and all of the life on Earth—but he did not. Across the range of Christian beliefs about the origins of the universe, all agree that it did not all happen at once. Human beings were not made at the same time as the oceans were not made at the same time as the stars in the sky. God took his time when he created. He performed each creative act in a sequence with rests in between, to reflect on what he had done and acknowledge its goodness.

The perfect creative act was not short—it was long and laborious, so ours should be too. This is not a call to ignore deadlines but rather to act with care and patience. We are called to co-create with the Creator of the universe, to bring to life the New Creation, and we should take that seriously.

For God, creating was just as much about the process as it was the product, so the same should go for us.

rent creative process but a shift in purpose. Instead of creating for ourselves, for our work or for our desires, we will be creating for God. This removes “you” from the center of creativity, which should alleviate some of the pressure because the reason for creative act would no longer come from anywhere within. It comes from God, and it arises in cooperation with him and his creation. If engaging our creativity is already hard enough, what do we have to lose.

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Elizabeth Gilbert, “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” TED, February 9th 2009, Video, 19:15, https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_ creative_genius?language=en.

Gilbert, “Creative Genius.”

Gilbert, “Creative Genius.”

Genesis 1:1 (ESV).

Genesis 1:26 (ESV).

Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act (San Rafael: Semantron Press, 2009), 110.

Genesis 1:26 (ESV).

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 11.

Fujimura, 11.

Fujimura, 11.

Revelation 21:1 (ESV).

Fujimura, 35.

Berdyaev, 128.

Berdyaev, 119.

Fujimura, 32.

Berdyaev, 154.

Fujimura, 35.

Fujimura, 18.

Fujimura, 18.

Genesis 1:31 (ESV).

W H E R E D O W E G O F RO M H E R E ?

This framework is not the same as Elizabeth Gilbert’s conception of the genius. But it is similar in that we create in cooperation with something outside of ourselves, and we find our reason to create by looking outside of ourselves.

It does not insinuate that creating is only for those who have a deep understanding and knowledge of the process.

Creating is not, and should not be, an esoteric act. It is our responsibility as image-bearers to create, but it should be a joyful task, not a burden. Implementing this framework into our daily lives should not be an upheaval of our cur22

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Illustration by Anthony Fosu

Craving You Elizabeth Hadley

In moments like these, I crave Your love, Your perfect love that has no flaws, that is the definition of unconditional.

That is everlasting, that remains when nothing else does.

In moments like these, when the air I breathe in feels like pin needles, I crave Your embrace, I crave Your warm hands, I crave the comfort of You knowing me— every part of me— and loving me.

Of knowing that You, having survived the worst pain imaginable, can understand mine.

In moments when I just feel like collapsing, I remember that You stood up, and You will help me up.

In moments when I feel like disappearing to ash, I remember that You made me from dust, and You will again.

Illustration inspired by The Baptism of Jesus: Luke 3-9 by BibleProject

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VIOLENCE AND THE CROSS A Response to the Problem of Evil

WILL BRYANT

A

classic objection to Christianity goes something chock-full of exhortations to embrace and even enjoy suflike this: fering. James writes, “whenever you face trials of any kind, 1. If God exists, then he would prevent the consider it nothing but joy.”1 Nothing but joy! This comexistence of evil. mand is intense, even sadistic. In the same format from 2. Evil exists. above, this more powerful objection looks like this: 3. Therefore, God does not exist.

This objection, called the problem of evil, argues that the presence of evil in the world necessarily disproves the existence of God. If God is all-powerful, then he would be able to create a world without suffering; if he were all-loving, he would choose to create such a world. The reality that we do not live in a world without suffering seems to prove that God cannot be both all-powerful and all-loving.

To believe in the Christian God, so the argument goes, one must turn a blind eye to the suffering that consumes the world.

This objection, strong it may be, does not tell the full story. The problem of evil is the general version of a more specific—and more powerful—objection against Christianity. The issue is that Christians assert much more about suffering than its brute existence; the New Testament is 24

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1. God should prevent suffering.

2. God does not prevent suffering; he even encourages and embodies it.

3. Therefore, it is improper and unjust to accept God.

Note that this argument is no longer about the existence of God. Even if God exists, so the argument goes, it would be wrong to place faith in such a deity. In other words, the objection asks the following question: why does the Christian God seem to glorify and encourage suffering?

Is this not evil itself, or at least a depraved sort of masochism?

This objection is incisive. The cross, the fulcrum on which Christianity rests, is an instrument of torture, a horrible machine of suffocation. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger says of crucifixion, “It is a crime to bind Lake George by John William Casilear from Wikimedia Commons

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Christ of Saint John of the Cross by Salvador Dali from Wikimedia Commons

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a Roman citizen; to scourge him is a wickedness; to put him to death is almost parricide. What shall I say of crucifying him? So guilty an action cannot by any possibility be adequately expressed by any name bad enough for it.”2 The method was used to punish piracy, theft, and treason; the visible spectacle of a crucifixion served to frighten those who would threaten Rome’s economic and political foundations.3 Jesus died a routine, afflicted death, hung between two petty thieves. He was, for a moment, one of many nameless rebels crushed under Rome’s large, iron fist. How can we accept a religion that places its very identity in an instance of such hopeless depravity, a religion whose followers wear the instrument of their Savior’s death around their necks?

The Christian response to this objection comes in two parts. We agree with the objection in a sense: suffering is utterly central to the Christian faith. However, we also find a redemptive quality in suffering that transforms its ugliness into grace. In this essay, I will explore the pieces of this response in turn. First, we look to Ivan and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov for a detailed expression of this objection of suffering. Second, we turn to philosopher Simone Weil for a response. Her theory of violence offers an explanation for what happens when Christ suffers on the cross, and how his suffering is redeemed.

T H E I N J U S T I C E O F T H E C RO S S Ivan and Alyosha, two of the three eponymous brothers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, spend much of the novel in debate over Christianity. Ivan is the skeptic, Alyosha the believer. At one point, they explore our question from above about suffering, taking sides in the debate as one might expect. Ivan expresses his distaste for Christianity’s emphasis on suffering by way of illustration.

He tells the story of a young mother and her eight-yearold son who live on the estate of a feudal lord. The lord is a venerated general of a recent war and owns hundreds of hunting dogs. “One day,” Ivan describes, the “little child of eight threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the gen-

eral’s favorite hound.”4 The lord discovers that his favorite hunting companion was crippled by the poor serf boy, and so he takes the boy from his mother and locks him in the keep overnight.

The next morning, the lord gathers his court and hunting retinue outside, whereupon the young boy is brought up from the keep and presented to the assembly. He is stripped naked and exhorted by the crowd to “Run! Run!” The boy begins to stumble forward, shivering—“numb with terror,” Ivan says—at which point the lord commands his hunting dogs, “At him!”5 The general has set his whole pack of hounds, hundreds of them, on the eight-year-old child stumbling through the field. The hounds catch the boy, and “tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes.”6 Ivan then asks Alyosha, “What did [the general] deserve? To be shot?” Alyosha agrees. “To be shot,” he affirms.7 In response, Ivan calls out Alyosha’s hypocrisy in this answer. Alyosha’s Christianity, Ivan argues, commands him to look upon the general as a beautiful creature of God and forgive him. Alyosha’s Christianity seeks to explain away evil, to make it a nothingness and forgive it, no matter how grave the offense.8 Ivan cannot stand the thought of the boy’s mother forgiving the general. “The truth is not worth such a price,” he says, “I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs.”9 Ivan argues that this radical forgiveness is a deeper evil than the crime it forgives, because it is completely unjustified—the mother has no reason, no right to absolve the general! Ivan rejects this forgiveness. “For the love of humanity I don’t want it,” he says.10 With this point, Ivan makes a decent argument against Christianity, but it oversimplifies the Christian response to evil. Though Jesus does command forgiveness from the boy’s mother, he requires repentance from the general in equal measure. Murder is a sin, and for the general to receive absolution, he must lay down his pride and repent to the boy’s mother. Unfortunately, he does not do this, and so he is not absolved. The general does not get off scot-free, even if the mother forgives him. Within the terms of the

“ How can we accept a religion whose followers wear the instrument of their Savior’s death around their necks?”

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story, Ivan does not account for the full breadth of Christianity’s response to evil.

However, the story of the serf boy articulates a sharper objection—the one described in the introduction—against Christianity, only in allegorical terms. Ivan’s story of the boy and his mother analogize the story of the crucifixion.

The child is Christ crucified, an innocent man dying a horrible, undeserved death. We—humanity, that is—we are the general, committing wanton evil. And the mother is Christ resurrected, absolving us of our sin and embracing us as she would her own Son. The cross, the fulcrum of Christianity, is no better than the needless death of an eight-year-old boy. How can we accept this, never mind call it good? It is a crime of the highest order, an insult to reason and justice. Ivan is not a skeptic because he disbelieves in God; rather, he cannot stand this crime. As he says of the serf boy’s mother, “She dare not forgive the general!”—even if he repents.11 This is a gruesomely detailed expression of the objection from the introduction. Christianity, so the objection goes, is fundamentally unjust. The Christian cannot but nod her head when an objection arises that Christianity calls for the wrongful execution of an innocent man. Worse, Christianity crucifies its own God. How can it even be possible, never mind good, for God to die?

THE EMPTINESS OF AFFLICTION Somehow, the Christian claims that the cross is both the greatest suffering and the greatest good.

Ivan sees this contradiction and rejects it. He can see the “higher harmony” of Christ Tortured Statue Photo by Anthony Fosu, taken at the Evangelisches Augstinerkloster, Erfurt Germany

the cross but cannot accept its high price; he “hastens to protect himself, and so [he] renounces the harmony altogether.”12 Alyosha, on the other hand, embraces the paradox. He holds fast to Christ, the center of Christianity, and accepts that he died in our place.13 Whether you respond like Ivan or like Alyosha, there is undoubtedly a magnetism in the cross, a polarizing force. It pushes Ivan away but pulls Alyosha close. What could Alyosha possibly see in the crucifixion that redeems its violence?

To answer this question, we return to the cross. Time after time, Christ is made the object of violence and affliction. Before the resurrection, his suffering is plain as day.

From the Garden of Gethsemane and Pilate’s court to the cross, Christ is beaten, mocked, and abused. Even after the resurrection, the narrative retains its violence.

His friends deny and ignore him; the apostle Thomas simply rejects that Jesus could have risen from the dead.14 To prove them wrong, Christ shows them his wounds from the crucifixion and allows Thomas to place his hands inside them. In response to one afflictiondenial from his closest friends—Christ answers with another—the offering up of his own wounds for cross-examination.

At every step, Christ is reduced from His full humanity to a literal object, a body of flesh and bone that is abused and interrogated. As philosopher Simone Weil would describe it, Christ is “deformed by the THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

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weight of the force that [He] submits to.”15 For Weil, the key word is force—for our purposes, this is interchangeable with violence or affliction. Force is “that which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.”16 Worse, the agent of force suffers under it to the same degree that its victim does.17 To reduce another’s humanity, one must debase themself first. An act of violence implies that its agent has found themselves low enough to commit it. The victorious soldier, “possessed by war, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different.”18 Both the blood-crazed victor and the dead experience the inevitable effect of force: “they become deaf and dumb.”19 Force becomes “the sole protagonist”; both afflicter and afflicted suffer under it.20 The narrative of the crucifixion, from start to finish, is a story of this double-edged force. Christ, of course, is the victim of the force. He is transformed, in stages, into a bodily object. The Roman soldiers who beat and flog him treat him as nothing more than a body to be tortured. 21 The threat of death that they hold over Christ—a threat that all violence contains—is a prospective reduction of his humanity into an object.22 It anticipates his literal death on the cross. Christ is still alive, of course, but as the Roman soldiers know well, not for long. At the cross, finally, Christ reaches the limit of force. He is forsaken by his Father and dies.23 His guards cast lots for his clothes.24 The perfect Man, God in flesh, is reduced to an object. In this way, the crucifixion reaches the maximum of force: the greatest being, God himself, is emptied of existence.

The agent of Christ’s death is no better off; he suffers under the same force. After Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus and receives his reward of thirty pieces of silver, the disciple immediately feels remorse.25 He tries to return the ransom, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”26 The authorities refuse to take back the money, so Judas throws his reward away and flees to an empty field, where he hangs himself.27 In this case, the force that afflicts its agent is made manifest. Judas kills Christ and himself: both afflicter and afflicted suffer under the same force. This bilateral violence makes the crucifixion, fundamentally, a story of reduction.

VO I D A N D D I V I N I T Y Where does this leave us? How can Alyosha find redemption in the violent emptiness of the cross? Weil argues the following: the reductive power of violence opens an empty space into which divine grace can flow. She explains, “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there 28

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Crucifix Drawing by St John of the Cross from Wikimedia Commons

is a void to receive it.”28 This explanation motivates two questions. First, what does it look like to experience such a void? And second, how does grace flow into it?

To begin, Weil argues that this void is opened by suffering, by being subject to force. When we suffer, a space of self-denial opens to us that presents a choice. If the sufferer stops suffering, justifies her suffering with pale comforts and lies, or spreads it beyond herself by harming others, the void is closed.29 If, on the other hand, the sufferer does not do these things, the void is sustained.30 This is the key: the void continues to exist only through nonaction, complete renunciation of the self.31 It is not a matter of doing any one thing, it is rather the challenge of doing absolutely nothing. Weil then argues that once this void is achieved, “supernatural grace results.”32 For Weil, there is one-to-one correspondence between void and this divine grace; you cannot have one without the other.

No place is the renunciation of the void more visible than on the cross. During the crucifixion, Christ gives up his whole self. He is completely inactive. He abandons his physical body, his ability to save himself, and eventually his life. At any moment, Christ could have called down angels from heaven to save him from the cross, but he did not.33 He could have drunk the mulled wine offered to him to blunt his pain, but he did not.34 God himself, in his omnipotence, could have designed a way to save humanity that did not involve the death of his Son, and yet he did not.

By abdicating his will, God renounces himself. He “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. . . . he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”35 Christ literally empties himself of himself, of his life. On the cross, he is reduced “to a point he occupies in space and time—that is to say, to nothing.”36 Let us take a step back and evaluate Weil’s argument. It could be represented as such: 1. Void leads to divine grace.

2. In its extreme suffering and infinite renunciation, the crucifixion of Christ led to extreme void.

3. Therefore, the crucifixion led to extreme grace.

Weil’s argument is logically correct, but she does not explain the vital first premise: how is it possible that there is a correspondence between void and divine grace? The answer is unintuitive but simple: both are ineffable. Both suffering and divinity are too great to put into words.

To start, void is ineffable because suffering is ineffable.

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It cannot be named or explained. It can be given direct causes—I suffer because there is a nail in my foot, and because I have pain receptors in my skin—but these causes do not make suffering bearable to experience. If I was suffering from a nail in my foot, I would find no comfort in a friend who says, “Just get over it! It is only a nail in your foot.”

Even a full understanding of suffering and its causes do not nullify it. It is a monster that rests in experience and will not leave, even if you can describe exactly how it arrived.

The yawning grittiness of the experience of suffering is necessarily ineffable.

Divinity, too, is ineffable by definition. When we describe something as divine, we ascribe to it supernatural quality—literally “above” the natural world. As a result, divinity is necessarily beyond explanation; it has no natural causes. This is true of any religion’s deities: the function of a deity is to explain the unexplainable; therefore, the deity itself cannot be explained.

Thus, divinity and void bear a resemblance. Both are utterly different from explainable, mundane things. 37 It is because of this mysterious otherness that Weil describes divine grace as assuming the form of nonbeing. When we experience the void, we experience the ontological foreignness of divinity. In a sense, God reveals himself through void, by giving us clues to his ineffable holiness.

T H E V I O L E N C E O F LOV E How, then, are we meant to respond to Christ’s self-emptying display of love? He expects nothing from us, and yet there is an intensity in the crucifixion that we cannot turn away from. Alyosha, for one, responds to Christ in kind: he responds with love. It was for humanity that Christ died: Alyosha sees his complicity in this and submits. This submission is why Alyosha does not call Ivan’s argument incorrect or misguided; he only calls it “rebellion”.

By rejecting the crucifixion, Ivan rejects the depth of Christ’s sacrifice. To Alyosha, there is no greater crime than this. In terms of his story of the serf boy, Ivan is acting like the general who, after being forgiven by the serf boy’s mother, complains that the mother is acting illogically, and that she should not have forgiven him. This is horrible! If the general receives absolution from the mother, he must recognize the gravity of such forgiveness, his understanding of that forgiveness notwithstanding. Alyosha does not claim to understand Christ’s love for us, but he also recognizes that this does not matter.38 Our own knowledge is completely irrelevant; if we can see the insane, sacrificial love of the cross, we must submit to it.

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Alyosha does not reject all knowledge; he only recognizes that which he cannot know. In his white-knuckled attachment to Christ, he responds to the renunciation of the cross with a renunciation of his own. Alyosha cannot explain why such grace springs from the violence of the cross, but he recognizes that he is not meant to know. If an all-powerful, all-loving God exists—as Ivan accepts—why should we expect to understand him? Why should we expect to understand perfect omnipotence, or perfect love?

Alyosha recognizes that the paradox of the crucifixion forces us to silence.39 At the cross meets perfect love and perfect suffering, a vicious combination that tears at our guts. We have only two options: we either run away, or we hug the cross.40 1.

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James 1:2-4 (NIV).

Seneca, “To Marcia on Consolation,” in Moral Essays, trans. Frank Miller (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), 2:69.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Crucifixion,” Encyclopedia Britannica, October 12, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/crucifixion-capital-punishment.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2015), 303.

Dostoyevsky, 304.

Dostoyevsky, 304.

Dostoyevsky, 304.

Dostoyevsky, 306.

Dostoyevsky, 307.

Dostoyevsky, 307.

Dostoyevsky, 307.

Dostoyevsky, 307.

Dostoyevsky, 308.

John 20:24-29 (NRSV).

Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 28.

Weil, The Iliad, 6.

“Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting man into a thing is a double one, in its application double edged”; Weil, The Iliad, 22.

Weil, The Iliad, 22.

Weil, The Iliad, 22.

Weil, The Iliad, 22.

John 19:1-3 (NRSV).

Weil, The Iliad, 7.

Matthew 27:45-56 (NRSV).

Matthew 27:35 (NRSV).

Matthew 27:3 (NRSV).

Matthew 27:4 (NRSV).

Matthew 27:5 (NRSV).

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Kegan Paul (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 10.

Weil, Gravity and Grace, 10.

Weil, Gravity and Grace, 10.

“Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void”; Weil, Gravity and Grace, 10.

Weil, Gravity and Grace, 11.

Matthew 26:53 (NRSV).

Matthew 27:34 (NRSV).

The term often applied to this “self-emptying” love is kenosis, a Greek word that comes from the verb “to empty”. Paul writes of Christ using the verb form kenóō: “he emptied himself…” This concept provides the Scriptural basis for Weil’s understanding of emptiness and void; Philippians 2:6-8 (ESV).

Weil, Gravity and Grace, 12.

The interested reader may enjoy St. Thomas Aquinas’s “five ways” from his Summa Theologica; five arguments for the existence of God. In particular, Aquinas’s third way establishes God as the necessary being that exists in manner wholly unlike contingent beings; the nature of God’s existence is fundamentally unlike our own. This distinction is an interesting—though non-integral—addition to Weil’s argument for the correspondence of void and divinity; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.2.1-3.

This renunciation of knowledge includes a support for the correspondence between void and divinity. The objector might ask: how can you know that void and divinity are ineffable in the same way? What if they are both ineffable, but otherwise completely unlike? This is a reasonable objection, but it misses the point of ineffability. To truly experience the ineffability of void or of divinity requires a rejection of one’s ability to ask this question. We cannot probe the nature and limits of ineffability, by its very definition.

For more on this, please read the chapter “For He Whom We Must Love is Absent” in Gravity and Grace; Weil, Gravity and Grace, 109-113.

Many thanks to Blake Whitmer, Charlie Clark, Isaiah Menning, and Najma Zahira for ideas, advice, and edits on this article.

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The Crucifixion by Bartolomé Estebán Murillo from MetMuseum.org

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STORE UP YOUR TREASURES Christian Asceticism For Our Materialistic Culture

TULIO HUGGINS

B

urdened with the pressures of a fast paced and hectic life, modern American society pursues material goods in search of meaning. Given social media and societal pressures, Americans feel the urge to run the materialist race to the finish (materialism, as it appears in this article, is “a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project,” rather than the spiritual or intellectual image).1 In recent years, this value system has taken many shapes, such as the 2012-made Tumblr blog “Rich Kids of Instagram.”2 This page is dedicated to lauding various pictures of rich young people living extravagant lifestyles.3 A similar page “Rich Kids of the Internet” on Instagram is currently verified and has almost 370,000 followers.4 Even though a materialistic and hectic lifestyle is known to be detrimental to physical and mental health, a busy and overworked lifestyle remains aspirational. A 2017 study analyzed various Facebook posts and found that “individuals posting Facebook updates or writing letters about their overworked lifestyle are perceived as higher in status than individuals whose updates reveal more leisurely lifestyles.”5 Even though this lifestyle is praised in society, one

must not forget the numerous negative mental and physical side effects it has on a person.6 Though perceived as a rather radical lifestyle, Christian ascetic living is an alternative outlook on life that can benefit all.

Christian asceticism provides one with the opportunity to live a more fruitful physical, mental, and social life. It is the complete abandonment of worldly pleasures, usually to pursue religious or spiritual goals.7 Essentially, it is the antithesis of materialism—for ascetics the goal is to rid oneself of worldly things, such as excessive wealth or property, to pursue something beyond the physical. Before analyzing modern adaptations and merits of Christian asceticism, it is best to give context to the practice by explaining, how Christian ascetics have lived historically. There is no better place to start than the man who first popularized and perfected this lifestyle—Saint Anthony.

Saint Anthony was an Egyptian monk who came from a wealthy Christian family.8 After his parents died, he meditated on the words of Jesus, in particular Matthew 19:21, which says, “If you would be perfect, go and sell that you have and give to the poor; and come follow Me and you

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Photo by Ash Ismail from Unsplash.com

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shall have treasure in heaven.”9 Contemplating this radical generosity, Saint Anthony decided to live an ascetic lifestyle. He gave away 300 acres, sold any movable items, and gave the money to the poor, leaving some for his younger sister, who would still need his support.10 Though Christian asceticism existed before the time of Saint Anthony, his influence caused the practice to flourish.11 Another important figure in the history of the Christian ascetic movement was Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan during the mid to late 300s.12 In his sermon “On Naboth,” he criticized the covetousness of the rich and their neglect towards the impoverished around them.13 In the first half of the sermon, he asks, “Who among the wealthy does not make every effort to drive the poor person out from his little plot and turn the needy out from the boundaries of his ancestral fields?”14 Throughout the sermon he criticizes the rich and those who sin as a means to wealth, saying that the rich man “can produce nothing but death, and his kingdom should be among the dead and his headquarters should be hell.”15 As is evident through sermons like this, Saint Ambrose was extremely critical of excessive material wealth.

The Christian historian Sozomen did an excellent job encapsulating other instances of this radical lifestyle in his ecclesiastical history of the Christian church from 324 to 440 CE. According to his history, ascetics did not have many possessions since they sought only to control “the passions of the soul.”16 By living in poverty, they left their needs up to God. 17 Not only that, but they also saw the importance of Jesus’s words about turning the other cheek. They practiced extreme pacifism and did not avenge themselves if injured by malicious parties.

The ascetics of this time did not emphasize worldly things, such as wealth, power, or revenge. Instead, they focused on assisting those in need, hoping to emulate Jesus’s life in all they did.18 This radical lifestyle, though prominent in the early days of Christianity, at first glance does not seem to hold in the modern world. How can one adhere—at least partially—to an ascetic lifestyle in a world that values materialism and overworking oneself no matter the cost? An even better question: why would one want to? One may find answers simply by engaging with two Catholic Dominican priests:

Father Jordan Lenaghan, O.P. and Father Timothy (Tim) Danaher, O.P, who sat down for interviews on their ascetic lifestyles.

Father Jordan is the Executive Director of Religious Life at Quinnipiac University where, serving as the Catholic chaplain, he helps students “engage actively and intentionally with the world’s religious traditions and communities.”19 Father Jordan has been ordained for over 26 years, serving parishes from Appalachia to Saint Petersburg, Russia.20 Father Tim is the current director and chaplain for the Aquinas House, the Catholic Student Center at Dartmouth College.21 Ordained in 2018, Father Tim has recently worked in Philadelphia and Colorado and has often worked in Spanish ministries.22 Both Father Jordan and Father Tim are a part of the religious order called the Order of Preachers, or the Dominican Order. Saint Dominic founded the order 800 years ago after his time spent preaching around southern France.23 The Dominican Order was approved by Pope Honorius III in 1216.24 The Order of Preachers is known for two things: preaching and teaching.

They were a “porridge just right” type of group, as described by Father Tim. Not only did they have their chants and contemplative activities, but they still worked in the modern world in universities or cities.

Ascetism for both Father Tim and Father Jordan is an essential aspect of their lives, given that all Dominican Friars take vows of poverty. All their money is pooled into a common purse, meaning the money that all Dominican Friars make is given to whatever community they are currently living with, similar to what the early Christians did in the Acts of the Apostles. Father Jordan sees his ascetic lifestyle as one of simplicity and detachment, rather than self-denial. “I have some nice things,” he says, “but I don’t fill my life with them.”25 This level of simplicity allows him to learn to work with what he has, and it opens the door for new experiences. It also allows him to risk forming relationships with people since, as he puts it, “If you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” For Father Jordan, this moves the focus “from things to people, and from objects to experiences.”

“How can one adhere— at least partially—to an ascetic lifestyle in a world that values materialism and overworking oneself no matter the cost?”

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“As Father Jordan puts it,‘where your hand is, there your heart will be.””

When one judges oneself by material standards, it can cause one to judge others based on their material status.

One can become prideful and elitist by thinking that having a lot of money, cars, or houses means one is inherently better than others. Not only that, but sometimes others can become a means to achieve these goals. Father Jordan quotes Aristotle, noting how relationships become “friendships of utility”, meaning selfishly befriending someone for the sake of one’s own benefit. By refraining from assigning value to others based on their material status in comparison to one’s own, one can reprioritize their values. Putting others above oneself points an individual towards healthy relationships that are founded on the betterment of others.

Father Tim shares a similar mindset. In the United States, he believes Americans suffer from and struggle with luxury. “We live like emperors,” he says. Just like Father Jordan, Father Tim believes this sort of lifestyle leaves one with skewed priorities. Father Tim mentions a scenario of a delayed flight—how passengers on the plane would complain about the inconvenience. In making these complaints, however, the passengers would fail to appreciate the miracle that is how humans could get on a machine and travel across the country in a few hours. Living like emperors leads people to occupy themselves with these little inconveniences rather than acknowledge and understand the poor—those who truly suffer. Living in ivory towers at a prestigious college, it is easy to forget about those who physically struggle to put food on the table due to the day’s manual labor. An ascetic lifestyle leads one to open their heart to the silent populations of people who are oft overlooked. As Father Tim says, “this is a widespread struggle we should be sober about.”

This does not mean that a practicing ascetic must forgo all worldly things—to pack one’s bags, sell all they own, and join a religious order as Saint Anthony did. Both Father Tim and Father Jordan recognize the necessity for possessions in everyday life and the important temporary relief they can bring. Father Tim golfs once a week, one of his favorite pastimes. Father Jordan is happy using a new MacBook for his daily work, though it has many trappings and functions he does not need, and a simpler Chromebook 34

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would suffice. He is also happy buying a good book that he would like to read though he does not need it. The problem is not with material goods or with having money. Rather, it is with the mindset one puts themselves in when immersed in material wealth—when one’s identity and goals are founded in their possessions.

Father Jordan notes that asceticism is not an easy lifestyle to lead since, in a certain sense, all humans need possessions on some level. Therefore, Christian asceticism for him is not a total removal from all possessions, but rather a perspective shift. It is exactly for this reason that Father Jordan uses three words from the New Testament that pertain to Christian conversion and describe the shift to an ascetic lifestyle: metanoia, chuba, and metamelomai. Metanoia means “to change one’s way of thinking” or, as he describes it, “a paradigm shift.” Chuba, translated from Hebrew, means “to turn.” Metamelomai means “to change up your values and priorities.” These words reflect the experience of beginning an ascetic life because the process shifts one’s attention, values, and priorities away from the temporary and the material and towards relationships with others. As Father Jordan puts it, “where your hand is, there your heart will be.”

Rather than focus on accumulating material wealth, Father Jordan prefers to prioritize his time by investing into these relationships with others, since they are much more profound and important than any material good. As Father Jordan aptly puts it, when one buys a brand-new car, one is careful not to let even a single McDonalds’s French fry in.

After five years, however, that car will become quite messy, and after fifteen years it may be in a junk yard. Father Jordan sees it as important not to let those material things define oneself because “they will let you down because those things pass away.” Often, one leans into material things in an effort to fill some personal hole that will only become vacant again, since these materials eventually fade away. In a similar way, Father Tim discusses how technology fails at filling this void.

Communicating through technology, as many students and workers have witnessed these past two years, is simply not the same as communicating in person. Everyone Gluttony by Jacques de l’Ange from Wikimedia Commons

feels the difference between a Zoom conference and one in person. Father Tim notes the importance of maintaining a healthy boundaries of personal life and community life. This mix between of deeply personal life and life in community is essential to human nature. As a human race, there is an innate tendency to commune, and remaining ascetic from technology properly fulfills this desire. “Staying inside a house in cloister and going out into the world by way of computer is not the proper mix,” Father Tim notes, since “it causes people to be more sedentary, more depressed, more extreme.” Father Tim rather humorously recalls that, when he was a child, he loved watching Full House. Whenever his mom called him down for dinner, he would often ignore her, causing her to get angry and chase after him, and he felt the whole mood of the house change after that. Now, this does not mean a proper abandonment from technology altogether is a satisfying way to live either.

Father Tim still enjoys watching Red Sox games and using his espresso machine. He does not mean to advocate living a life technology-free, but rather living a somewhat technologically ascetic life, for “mere sanity is at stake for the environment in which we choose to live.” If one chooses to live predominantly in a cyberspace that leads to a lower quality of mental life, this low quality will follow them into the real world. Conversely, if we spend time in books and with real people at the right times and in technology at other times, the positive of this radiate from us and lead into the environments around us.

Father Tim further notes the importance of asceticism and self-discipline in being a human being. Most people are not morning people, yet they must force themselves to get up every morning to go to work. Some people feel too overwhelmed to text everyone back, yet some make the effort to do so. These quotidian examples of self-discipline reflect the ascetic rejection of selfishness. Furthermore, asceticism is critical for improvement in any activity. Father Tim remarks how Cristiano Ronaldo and other great athletes force themselves to eat healthy, exercise, and focus on proper recovery to achieve a greater level of excellence in their respective sports. Similarly, parents sacrifice immense amounts of sleep to take care of children to achieve what is best for them. Father Tim notes that “proper asceticism is towards something better, something good.”

These benefits of the Christian ascetic life do not just yield spiritual and intellectual betterment. They also improve one’s practical and scientific health. A materialist lifestyle’s negative effects on mental health are undeniable.

According to Sarah Ketchen Lipson, a Boston University 36

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researcher, the mental health crisis has a variety of factors, one of which is a shift in societal values.26 The shifting values she points out are the change from being intrinsically motived (which she describes as “being a good member of the community”) to being extrinsically motivated (which has focuses on things like money, career, and influence).27 Another study found the “materialistic mind-set orients the individual to competitive concerns about relative standing, producing corresponding feelings of anxiety and dissatisfaction, and disinclination to trust other people and engage with them in deep, collaborative ways.”28 Essentially, materialism is not conducive to a healthy community, just as Father Jordan affirmed.

This article is not a call to pack up and live a drastically ascetic lifestyle like Saint Anthony or Saint Ambrose.

Rather, it is a call to reflect on the role materials play in our everyday lives. “Every single one of us is unstable, and we are too distracted to notice,” Father Tim believes. Asceticism is a perspective shift, a shift that comes from self-reflection and experience. Father Jordan requests readers of this article reflect on “the stuff that you have and your own acquisition of those material goods” and how those things inform our interactions with others.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Monika A. Bauer, James E. B. Wilkie, Jung K. Kim, and Galen V. Bodenhausen, “Cuing Consumerism: Situational Materialism Undermines Personal and Social Well-Being,” Psychological Science 23, no. 5 (May 1, 2012): 517–23, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611429579.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter, “Smug Shots and Selfies: The Rise of Internet Self-Obsession,” The Guardian, December 6, 2013, https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/06/selfies-status-updates-digital-bragging-web.

Cosslett and Baxter, “Smug Shots and Selfies.”

Rich Kids of the Internet (@rkoi), “Instagram Photos and Videos,” accessed June 26, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/rkoi/.

Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” Journal of Consumer Research 44, no. 1 (2017): 118–38, https:// doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw076.

“Impatience, Hostility, and High Blood Pressure Risk,” WebMD, accessed June 21, 2021, https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/impatience_and_blood_pressure.

Don Thorsten, Pocket Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2018), 18.

St. Athanasius of Alaxandria, “Life of St. Antony of Egypt,” in Medieval Hagiography, trans. David Brakke, ed. Thomas Head (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1-5.

St. Athanasius, 2.

St. Athanasius, 3.

“Desert Fathers | Description, History, & Legacy,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed June 8, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Desert-Fathers.

“Saint Ambrose | Biography, Writings, Patron Saint, & Facts | Britannica,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed July 14, 2021, https://www.britannica. com/biography/Saint-Ambrose.

St. Ambrose of Milan, On Naboth, Hymns and Chants, accessed July 14, 2021, https://hymnsandchants.com/Texts/Sermons/Ambrose/OnNaboth. htm.

St. Ambrose, 1.1.

St. Ambrose, 6.28.

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Sozomen, The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen: Comprising a History of the Church from A. D. 324 to A. D. 440, trans. Edward Walford (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), 6.29.

Sozomen, 6.29.

“Desert Fathers | Description, History, & Legacy.”

“Office of Religious Life,” Quinnipiac University, accessed August 12, 2020, https://www.qu.edu/student-life/spiritual-and-religious-life/office-of-religious-life/.

Father Jordan Lenaghan, O.P. in interview “Meet Our Staff,” Aquinas House: Catholic Student Center at Dartmouth College, accessed June 30, 2021, http://dartmouthcatholic.com/?page_ id=44.

Father Timothy Danaher, O.P. in interview with the author, June 30, 2021.

“History of the Order of the Preachers, the Dominican Friars,” Dominican Friars Foundation, accessed June 30, 2021, https://dominicanfriars.org/ about/history-dominican-friars/.

“History of the Order of the Preachers, the Dominican Friars.”

Father Jordan Lenaghan, O.P. in interview with the author, June 22, 2021.

Kat J. McAlpine, “Depression, Anxiety, Loneliness Are Peaking in College Students,” The Brink, Boston University, accessed June 15, 2021, https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/depression-anxiety-loneliness-are-peaking-in-college-students/.

McAlpine, “Depression” Bauer, Wilkie, Kim, and Bodenhausen, “Curing Consumerism.”

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REBUILDING FELLOWSHIP

The Individual and Community in the Body of Christ

ANNIE BALLARD

I

n April of 2020, Easter was primarily celebrated online. Along with nearly every aspect of life so drastically changed by COVID-19, this break from 2,000 years of Christian tradition dramatically changed the relationship between the individual and the community. As the pandemic limited churches’ in-person gatherings, many transitioned their services to online formats hoping to maintain a sense of community that could no longer exist in a physical, sacred space. No longer able to meet in person and share communion, many Christians began to rely heavily on individual forms of worship or abandoned religious practice altogether, experiencing tremendous grief at the loss of a community that fed them spiritually. Even after the pandemic’s peak has passed, data suggests that church attendance has dramatically decreased since March of 2020. According to a study published by the Barna Group, “one in three practicing Christians is still and only attending their pre-COVID church.”1 Overall, “in-person church attendance is roughly 30% to 50% lower than it was before the pandemic.”2 Of course, this pattern of spiritual decline during the pandemic is not ubiquitous. My faith has grown tremen38

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dously since arriving at Dartmouth. Before, my religious practice primarily rested on my individual relationship with God through personal devotion, but through finding a close community at Dartmouth, I have come to appreciate the importance of fellowship with other Christians who help me work through my own faith questions, inspire me to live virtuously, and deepen my relationship with God. I have found great growth at the point of proper relationship with the individual, and the community and, as the pandemic wanes, broader society and the Christian church must rediscover this dynamic. The Christian tradition itself can offer a mechanism to propel the individual and the community towards a flourishing of the rest of humanity.

Christians confess that through Jesus, individuals gather strength from each other. Especially now, this dynamic is difficult to realize fully. After understanding that both individual and communal worship are inextricably linked, however, this dynamic will provide us with a vision for the operation of healthy communities that will emphasize the respective strength of both social solitude and collective cohesion.

Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli from Wikimedia Commons

“Jesus is the centerpiece of the love that guides our lives.”

T H E I N D I V I D UA L To make sense of the Judeo-Christian tension between the individual and the community, we must understand the individual in light of Christian theology. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German-Lutheran theologian in the early twentieth century, the origin of individual worship in the Judeo-Christian tradition comes from the call of discipleship. According to Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, discipleship is found where Christ himself “cut us off from all direct contact with the things of the world.”3 In his ministry, Jesus individually called his disciples, who left their livelihoods and families, to follow him. According to the gospel of Matthew, both James and John were in a boat “preparing their nets” when Jesus called them.4 In response, they immediately “left the boat and their father and followed him.”5 The disciples serve as a model for the willingness Christians should have to answer Jesus’s call. At the core, Bonhoeffer argues that every person is called separately and must follow.6 It is through this call that a person becomes an individual. As an integral component of the personal mission that Jesus calls each Christian to, the individual is key to Christianity.

Furthermore, Christians recognize that the individual interacts with the world only through the mediation of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer argues that it is mistaken to think we have any direct relationship with things of this world.

Instead, Christians must understand that we can only receive the world and connect with those around us through Christ. According to Bonhoeffer, a life built on the foundation of Jesus reveals “that our relation to the world has been built on an illusion.”7 This illusion falsely proposes that our relationship to the world and those around us is separate from Christ. Thus, this misconception obstructs our ability to obey and carry out God’s will. Instead, by dedicating our lives to him, we recognize God’s role as the mediator between ourselves and the natural world. This recognition means that “we cannot establish direct contact with our neighbor except through Him, through His word, and through our following of Him.”8 Further, the only way we can “rightly acknowledge the gifts of God” is

by acknowledging Jesus as the mediator through whom we receive these gifts.9 As Bonhoeffer proposes, “the same Mediator who makes us individuals is also the founder of a new fellowship. He stands in the center between my neighbor and myself. He divides, but He also unites.”10 Christ divides us through the personal calling, and in doing so, he separates us from our neighbor. Yet, simultaneously, he allows us to seek others through him. Jesus is the centerpiece of the love that guides our lives and the only way we can truly love others is through his mediation. In this way, Christ unites us. “Although the direct way to our neighbor is barred, we now find the new and only real way to him––the way which passes through the Mediator.”11 In the call to discipleship and submission to God, Christians are individuals in solitude: we must be willing to leave all behind to follow him. By its nature, however, this journey is communal. Accepting Jesus as our sole mediator presents us with the gift of relationships with God and neighbor that are built on the purest form of love.

Moments of solitude can increase our acceptance of Jesus as the sole mediator. The way that we learn to love like Jesus begins with growing our relationship with him through practices of personal piety. Personal piety emphases can look very different across Christian traditions: Eastern Orthodox Christians engage in weekly fasting; Roman Catholics pray the Rosary; Anglicans use the Book of Common Prayer; and evangelical Protestants stress personal Scripture reading and prayer. Though these practices may differ based on tradition, their role is consistent: they are, in Bonhoeffer’s words, a “daily service we owe to God.”12 Perhaps more importantly, these sacred moments of personal piety build a foundation for what Bonhoeffer calls “the Day Alone.”13 The Day Alone refers to the time when a follower of Jesus enters the broader world. In these moments, one can truly see the effectiveness of personal piety. These times, often entrenched with different temptations, require the Christian to draw from the God-given strength gained in personal piety and apply it. Here, God presents us with a moment to demonstrate our strength and dependence on him. The Day Alone reveals “whether the Christian’s meditation has led him into the unreal, from which he awakens in terror when he returns to the workaday world, or whether it has led him into a real contact with God, from which he emerges strengthened and purified.”14 These individual practices and personal choices on the Day Alone play an essential role in building a relationship with God, shaping the foundation of our values, and building strength and THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

39

purity. In turn, it is the expression of the God-derived values that tie our bonds of fellowship with the rest of the Christian body.

Aloneness and solitude are a crucial part of the Christian life. The individual’s characterization in the Judeo-Christian tradition reveals that our sacred practices of personal piety are inherently tied to the wider world and the local church. As Bonhoeffer emphasizes, “[o]ne who returns to the Christian family fellowship after fighting the battle of the day brings with him the blessing of his aloneness, but he himself receives anew the blessing of the fellowship.

Blessed is he who is alone in the strength of the fellowship and blessed is he who keeps the fellowship in the strength of aloneness.”15 In this way, the actions and choices of the individual directly depend on and influence the wider body to which they belong.

COMMUNITY IN THE BODY

body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about the perfected fellowship of God’s spiritual-physical creatures.”17 Naturally, we must ponder how this body is intended to operate.

In his essay “Membership,” C.S. Lewis drew from the Pauline letters to argue that the Christian community is distinct from other organizations because it recognizes each individual’s unique and necessary role.18 The Apostle Paul was once a persecutor of Christians, but after a shocking metaphysical interaction where the risen Jesus called him individually, Paul converted to Christianity and dedicated his life to spreading the gospel across the Roman Empire.

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul explained that Christians are connected to one another through the body of Christ: Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.19

Christianity is the practice of worshiping and following Jesus, the Mediator between all things, both individually and as a community. Through baptism, the Christian tradition teaches that we are connected in the body of Jesus Christ.16 Beyond the flesh and bones of Christ, the body is also the church with Christ as the head. According to Bonhoeffer, “[m]an was created a body, the Son of God C.S. Lewis extended Paul’s metaphor for the Christian appeared on earth in the body, he was raised in the body, in community as the body of Christ to organs in the human the sacrament the believer receives the Lord Christ in the body. The organs, he explained, are “essentially different

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The Last Supper by Leanardo Da Vinci from Wikimedia Commons

“...the church depends on the active involvement of the members in the body of Christ.” from, and complementary to, one another” that differ “not only in structure and function but also in dignity.”20 A key part of this distinction maintains that if any one member is subtracted, the entire structure has been injured, much like a family dynamic. Thus, according to Lewis, unlike a secular collective in which the members are replaceable and interchangeable, the organs in the body of Christ each play a unique role essential to the overall function. Bonhoeffer agrees with Lewis. In his book Life Together, he stressed that it is a privilege for Christians to live among other Christians: community is a gift given by God. “It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s Word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing.”21 So, it is necessary that we comprehend our relationships with others as a gift of grace from God and something that should not be taken for granted.

In Life Together, Bonhoeffer argues that community provides for three fundamental human needs. First, community and fellowship help the Christian maintain faith in moments of weakness. When experiencing times of doubt or disbelief, other Christians can help remind us of God’s presence and grace. Aligned with the teachings of Proverbs and the New Testament letters, Bonhoeffer emphasizes how Christ can strengthen the doubtful Christian through the fellowship of another: “[f ]aithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.”22 Second, a community centered on Jesus allows us to know fellow men. Because he is “our peace,” without him, “there is discord between God and man and between man and man.”23 Jesus, true God and true man, is the only hope to unite his followers not only to God, but also to each other. Third, the body of Christ consists of all Christians throughout time. Only in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, have we “been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.”24 This central Christian focus on the resurrection and eternal life expands the limits of temporal community. The Christian fellowship includes those united to Christ who have already died. In his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ creates a community where we can hold one another accountable,

where we can know each other and God, and where we are connected to past and future Christians in an eternal unity.

Once one joins the Body of Christ, it is important to understand what it means to be an active and dutiful member of that body. According to their pamphlet for the ecumenical group The Ekklesia Project, which is titled “Church Membership: An Introduction to the Journey,” John McFadden and David McCarthy point out that roughly half of new churchgoers will stop actively participating within two years of joining because they never sought out active and purposeful membership in the community.25 According to McFadden and McCarthy, active membership rests on five main pillars. First, the discipline of corporate worship insists on regular church attendance.

Routine helps to establish firmer connections within the congregation beyond shallow interactions. Second, the discipline of friendship enables us to seek God’s kingdom by developing intimate relationships that serve the wider community. Third, the discipline of service asks church members to utilize their gifts (whether singing, writing, teaching children, or anything else) to worship and glorify God. Instead of assuming a passive role, Christians actualize their individually critical role as members of the body. Fourth, the discipline of housekeeping maintains that the church’s physical space should be taken care of by its members, often through financial means. Fifth, the discipline of Christian ministry asks that we think of the church as a “whole from which we carry out our individual ministries in the world.”24 Thus, the church as a community of people and a sacred space for worship acts as a “servant, witness, and sign—committed to being Christ to a world that suffers the pain of pride, violence, ill will, and ignorance”26 In this way, the Church organizes the specified gifts of individuals to serve a wider community and world intended to glorify God. Between corporate worship, friendship, service, housekeeping, and ministry, the church depends on the active involvement of the members in the body of Christ.

I N T H E PA N D E M I C Based on close readings of scripture and Christian thinkers, there is a complementary relationship established THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

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between both individual and communal worship through the Jesus’s mediation. They are separate, but neither can exist without the other; what happens in private directly impacts broader fellowship, and vice versa. But one thing is certain: the Christian life is not a journey entirely alone.

This realization is particularly pertinent given the modern-day reality where COVID-19 and its aftermath has greatly impacted our social, political, and religious spheres.

Looking ahead as we emerge from the pandemic, it is necessary to restore and rebuild Christianity’s communal aspect in a way informed by its own theological traditions.

When Christian groups prioritize community-dependent individuals and individual-dependent communities, beneficial outcomes arise. According to his study published in Psychology Today, Harvard sociologist Dr. Tyler J. VanderWeele found that churchgoers are less likely to be depressed or drink heavily.27 Similarly, his research reveals that people who regularly attend church indicate higher levels of human flourishing and feelings of life satisfaction.29 Beyond the demonstrable societal benefits of individual and communal religious life, though, the most fundamental reason for a Christ-centered balance is a theological claim, not a sociological one.

Christians confess Jesus at the center of individual life, community life, and the interactions between them. The Christian life is based on Jesus’s call to the individual, and it is Jesus the Mediator who unites individuals in community.

When Christ is the foundation of our social organization, a collective body is formed through its individually necessary components working together as an instrument of love.

This dynamic is not only for Christians; it is desperately needed in a pandemic-wrought world. With the recent increased rates of mental health issues and widespread feelings of isolation and detachment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains ever important that Christians must return to and rebuild communities of Christ-centered fellowship to fulfill our individual calls to serve as the body of Christ. Pointing to Christ the Mediator, followers of Jesus must not only rebuild their own communities in the pattern of love, but they must also be a beacon of hope for the hurting world, inviting all, Christians and not, to join.

1.

2.

3.

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“One in Three Practicing Christians Has Stopped Attending Church during COVID-19,” Barna, Barna Group, July 8, 2020, https://www.barna.com/ research/new-sunday-morning-part-2/.

Janet Adamy, “Churches Changed during the Pandemic and Many Aren't Going Back,” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, November 12, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/church-pandemic-covid-online-11636728162.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 79.

THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2022

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Matthew 4:21 (NIV).

Matthew 4:22 (NIV).

Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 78.

Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 80.

Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 80.

Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 82.

Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 84.

Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 84.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper, 1954), 86.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 88.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 88.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 89.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 81.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 19-20.

C. S. Lewis, “Membership,” in Transposition (Québec: Samizdat University Press, 1949), pp. 27-36.

1 Corinthians 12:12-14 (NIV).

Lewis, “Membership,” 30.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 18.

Proverbs 27:6 (NIV).

Ephesians 2:14 (NIV); Bonhoeffer, Life, 21 Bonhoeffer, Life, 23.

Bonhoeffer, Life, 21.

John McFadden and David McCarthy, “Church Membership: An Introduction to the Journey” (Eugene, OR: The Ekklesia Project, 2002).

McFadden and McCarthy, “Church Membership,” 14; emphasis in original.

McFadden and McCarthy, “Church Membership,” 14.

Tyler J. VanderWeele, “How Religious Community Is Linked to Human Flourishing,” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, February 25, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/human-flourishing/202102/ how-religious-community-is-linked-human-flourishing.

VanderWeele, “Religious Community.”

Photo by Chang Duong from Unsplash.com

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A P R AY E R F O R DA RT M O U T H This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging at the entrance of Parkhurst Hall.

O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power.

Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live.

Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

— The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.

NICENE CREED We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”

We [I] believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

We [I] believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstanstial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son], who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the Prophets.

We [I] believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We [I] confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and we [I] look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

G E T T I N G I N VO LV E D The Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives within an academic setting, and we do this through our biannual publications, lecture series, and weekly reader groups where we read and discuss the works of exemplary apologists such as G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis.

We at The Dartmouth Apologia invite people from all intellectual, religious, and spiritual backgrounds to join us in our discussions as we search for truth and authenticity. If you would like to get involved, please feel free to email us at the.dartmouth.apologia@ dartmouth.edu or check out our Instagram or Facebook @dartmouthapologia. To subscribe to the journal or to check out past issues of the journal, visit our website at www.dartmouthapologia.org.

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Inside cover image - Photo by Emil Liden

DA RT M O U T H A P O L O G I A . O R G Back cover image - Photo by Emil Liden

[1 Peter 3:15]