19AR24-48

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AR 24:48 - Bonhoeffer, "forced into the mold of evangelicalism"

In this issue:

BONHOEFFER, DIETRICH - the "deep flaws" in evangelical endorsement

CULTURE - a secular view of "decadence" in the 21st century

GENETICS - the "political consequences" of Genomic Prediction

Apologia Report 24:48 (1,456)

December 3, 2019

BONHOEFFER, DIETRICH

The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump, by Stephen R. Haynes [1] -- in his review for Themelios (44:2 - 2019), Joel D. Lawrence explains that Haynes "has been the leading surveyor of the cultural reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the United States." There has been significant dissonance among the martyred theologian's biographers.

In 2004, Haynes "mapped out the territory of Bonhoeffer reception, indicating the ways in which various theological traditions tend to focus on particular works of Bonhoeffer while downplaying others, and demonstrating that Bonhoeffer's theology has been notoriously easy to bend towards the readers' predilections." With this book he has focused on "the evangelical reception of Bonhoeffer in the era of Trump, analyzing how Bonhoeffer has been utilized in the political and cultural battles raging in the lead up to and during the first stages of the Trump presidency."

Haynes "tracks the evangelical engagement with Bonhoeffer in the years before the presidency of George W. Bush. In doing so, Haynes analyzes how the reception of Bonhoeffer's theology among evangelicals moved from a period of reservation about Bonhoeffer's liberal theological education and worry about concerning aspects of his theology to a full embrace of Bonhoeffer as a moral hero. ...

"Haynes then turns to evangelical reception of Bonhoeffer during and after the Bush presidency, with the hinge figure in this story being Eric Metaxas <ericmetaxas.com>, who established a new audience for Bonhoeffer in popular evangelicalism.... Metaxas offered a full-throated endorsement of Bonhoeffer as a foil to the liberal cultural dominance of the Obama years, providing a picture of Bonhoeffer as one who was aligned with the evangelical cause and so able to guide evangelicalism through the sense of being under attack in the American culture. ... Haynes offers a searching critique of this populist Bonhoeffer, demonstrating the incompatibility of this figure with the historical Bonhoeffer. ...

"While there is plenty in his theology that evangelicalism can and should utilize, we must honestly recognize that Bonhoeffer is not an American evangelical. Metaxas's book has deep flaws, and Haynes is right to query evangelical devotion to Bonhoeffer if that devotion is based on him being one of our tribe. He is not. Haynes offers insight into how and why Bonhoeffer has been forced into the mold of evangelicalism, and how this has resulted in evangelicals being unable to grasp Bonhoeffer's own theological commitments and purposes fully. ... Rejecting the populist Bonhoeffer doesn't mean rejecting Bonhoeffer; rather, it means having a more nuanced, and so more honest relationship to Bonhoeffer, and a better understanding of the ways he can be a resource for evangelical theology." <www.bit.ly/2R0lWgF>

This may well end up being a good lesson to keep in mind with all of our studies. - RP

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CULTURE

Our previous issue <www.bit.ly/2LfPWBF> included commentary by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat ("The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity") regarding a recent Pew Foundation report. The article likely reflects research that Douthat, a Roman Catholic, did for his latest book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success [2], (expected in February).

Library Journal (Aug 19 '19) explains that the book "looks at America and sees a country that has stopped moving forward despite great wealth and technological accomplishment owing to economic and political stagnation, cultural waywardness, and demographic decline - he's worried about our birthrate." [4]

Simon & Schuster plays it as "a powerful portrait of how our age in human history, so superficially turbulent, is actually defined by stagnation, repetition, deadlocks, and decay. Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing - how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of 'sustainable decadence,' a civilizational malaise that could endure for longer than we think."

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GENETICS

"G Whizz" (The Economist, Nov 9 '19, no byline) -- "Sometime next year, if all goes to plan, a gay male couple in California will have a child. The child in question will have been conceived by *in vitro* fertilisation. ... Of the resulting embryos, the couple will choose one to be implanted in a surrogate mother."

The parents, "in conjunction with a firm called Genomic Prediction <genomicprediction.com>, will pick the lucky embryo based on a genetically estimated risk of disease. ...

"Much fuss was made last year <www.bit.ly/2P0nVix> about a researcher in China, He Jiankui, who edited the genomes of two human embryos in order to try, he claimed, to make them immune to infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. What Genomic Prediction proposes is different. No editing is involved. There is thus no risk of harming a child by putting it through a risky experimental procedure. Whether Genomic Prediction's particular technique will actually deliver super-healthy children remains to be seen. ... [T]he tool that has made that possible is called GWAS [Genome-Wide Association Study]. ...

"GWAS [works by] looking not just at the effects of individual genes, but across the whole genome..." The Economist piece gives examples that "foreshadow how the sort of genetics made possible by GWAS can have political consequences. [This in regard to the] implication ... of a genetic elite that deserves its success, rather than being the lucky winners of a genetic lottery."

A discussion of heritability gives percentage-likelihood figures for everything from health-related concerns to "television watching" (45%) and even "being religious" (30-40%) or "getting divorced" (13%).

"To some historians, this looks horribly familiar. They fear the old spectre of eugenics risks rising in a new guise."

Other concerns, such as genetic stratification, polygenic scoring, and pleiotropy - the phenomenon of the same piece of DNA influencing several apparently unrelated traits - are also discussed. The piece ends: "Genetic tinkering may sometimes improve things. But by no means always."

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump, by Stephen R. Haynes (Eerdmans, 2018, paperback, 213 pages) <www.amzn.to/2Dwtyzm>

2 - The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, by Ross Douthat (Simon & Schuster, February 2020, hardcover, 272 pages) <www.amzn.to/2L4Xabx>

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