Review of Wolterstorff's 2019 Memoir
Of course, there are those of us, weirdos like me, who in some ways pine for exactly this kind of life. Ha! And of course, this is is a reduction of his actual life and its richness. It also misses the content of this reading and thinking hard. He also manages to hold on to his tradition while truly reaching out to people of other traditions. He says "my life-in-community has been an expansive opening-out from the community of the small village in which I was reared." And "The challenge I faced in describing this dimension of my life was to do so in such a way that those who are not religious, and those whose religion is quite different from one, would not be put off: that is, the challenge of being particular without being parochial. The reader will discover that my way of being religious is very different from the aggressive, aggrieved, and adversarial way that is presently so dominant on the American scene." (xv)
He grew up in Minnesota in the Christian reformed tradition. His mother died in childbirth when he was three. He and his twin sister were raised by grandparents, aunts and uncles. His father remarried when he was seven and was somewhat a distant figure. They were poor, his father working at a Grocery, but his passion was woodworking. That was what he did after hours until the last 25 years of his life when he was able to do it full time. Wolterstorff credits his relationship with craft through his father as affecting the kind of philosophy he did and his critique of higher arts as neglecting craft and handiwork.
Early on, while telling stories of his studies at Calvin College, he explains his tradition. I think its helpful especially because most people miss the first part of his explanation. Referencing Abraham Kuyper, he says "At the heart of that tradition ... is a distinctive understanding of the interlocking significance of creation, fall and redemption. When Reformed people survey the cosmos--along with human beings and their works within the cosmos--they see goodness, which they interpret as a reflection of God's goodness, God's excellence." (54) It is this goodness that people neglect to mention or realize, too quick to hear the word about evil and original sin.
"But when Reformed persons survey the natural world, they see not only goodness and gift, but also evil ... when they survey what human beings have done and made, they see not only goodness and gift, but also sin ... Always the goodness remains; but ... the ravages of sin" also. Thus "a dialectic of Yes and No ... both Yes and No to the deeds and works of human beings." What is more, Kuyper's strand is not for individual souls saved for heaven, not "go off by themselves somewhere to set up their own economy...polity...art world...world of scholarship. They are to participate, along with others, in the economy of their own country, its polity, its art world, its scholarship." (55)
Ok, back to philosophy, he does his doctorate at Yale and there describes briefly how logical positivism was big and since has imploded. Positivists purport that sentences about God are in fact meaningless. At its heart, "modern natural science is the only mode of inquiry that holds genuine promise for human progress ... To have meaning, they said, a sentence must be either empirically verifiable or analytically true or false."(67) Of course this is too narrow, ethics makes no sense with this constriction - "Murder is wrong,' for example--[is] neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true or false." Unfortunately for logical positivism, using this criteria for truth ruled out, not only religion, but also much of theoretical physics. (68)
He briefly taught at Yale after getting his PhD, but then took an offer to teach at Calvin. He had friendships with Richard Mouw and Alvin Plantiga. One of his students was Paul Schrader (Last Temptation, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver)! He headed a committee to reform the curriculum. He embraced feminism and was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.
Outside of school, he loved art and collected etchings (unique prints they could afford), bought land that eventually became the Wolterstorff Land Preserve in the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, planted a delight garden with multiple varieties of hostas. He was on the board for the Reformed Journal, which among other things "offer a coherent, yet supply expressed version of critical Reformed thinking in the Niebuhrian as well as Kuyperian tradition over against claims by such organizations as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition to speak for biblical Christianity." (137)
In 1975 he attended a conference in South Africa that changed his life. Apartheid was in full force. The black South Africans spoke up against the injustice. But the Afrikaners (Dutch colonists who settled in the region in 17th century) insisted that justice was not the issue. They were "a generous people; the goal of apartheid was the greater good of all South Africans ... that each nationality would flourish in its own unique way ... Some of the Afrikaner speakers went on to describe acts of personal kindness on their part to "blacks" and "coloreds" of their acquaintance: Christmas trinkets they gave to the children of their "black" workers, clothing their own children had outgrown, and so forth." Then the went on offense, addressing the black reformed speakers - "Why do you never express gratitude for what we have done for you? ... With tears in their eyes, one of them pleaded, 'Why can't we just love each other?' I saw, as never before, benevolence--more precisely, self-perceived benevolence--being used as an instrument of oppression." (168)
Now Wolterstorff began reading about justice and tackling that topic (I will be writing in multiple posts about his book Until Justice & Peace Embrace). He became friends with Allan Boesak and even was called to Cape Town to testify in behalf of his friend in 1985 who was being held on the charge of sedition. Separate from this, in 1978, he attended a conference on Palestinian rights where he was exposed to their mistreatment and proponent of the two-state solution in Israel. "When Palestinian resistance turns violent, Israel declares it will never negotiate under threat. When resistance is quiescent, it sees no need to negotiate. If the choice is between land and peace, Israel will choose land." (172)
In 1996 he published a book on John Locke which he wanted to title "When Tradition Fractures." Religious factions were at war with one another in Locke's day and "the possibility of peace depended on each party appealing to something that united them. That something was reason, properly employed." (182) and then he gives the conclusion of the book:
"Locke's proposal will not do. Our problems with traditions remain, however. Traditions are still a source of benightedness, chicanery, hostility, and oppression. And our moral, religious, and even theoretical traditions are even more fractured today than they were in Locke's day. [Locke and the thinkers of the Enlightenment who followed him] hoped to bring about a rational consensus in place of a fractured tradition. That hope failed. In my judgement it was bound to fail; it could not succeed.
Yet we must live together. It is to politics and not epistemology that we shall have to look for an answer as to how to do that. 'Liberal' politics has fallen on bad days recently. But to its animated vision of a society in which persons of diverse traditions live together in justice and friendship, conversing with each other and slowly altering their traditions in response to their conversation--to that, there is no viable alternative. (183)In 1980 his wife joined the Episcopal Church and in 1986 was ordained a priest. He has a chapter on the loss of his son, Eric who died in a climbing accident. His little book Lament for a Son is profound in its poetic incite into suffering. It "is not a book about Grief--it's a cry of grief." (199) He defines grief here - it "is wanting the death or destruction of the loved one to be undone, while at the same time knowing it cannot be undone." (204)
He was interested in the role of religion in political discussions and public life. "I was disturbed by the critical attitude of John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and their many followers, toward government in general and toward American liberal democracy in particular. I regard liberal democracy as a pearl of great price."
There is so much more in this memoir, he worked directly with an organization in Honduras on justice issues there and the lack of trust in police and government figures. He wrote and thought a lot about art theory and how it needs expanding to include memorial art and work songs. One of the most moving moments is when he is invited to lead a discussion of his book Lament for a Son with inmates at Handlon State Prison. Calvin set up a sister campus in the prison and offer accredited degrees. "I had never before discussed Lament in a class ... the men in the class were themselves in grief ... they were reading the book not so much as my expression of my grief but as an expression of their grief ... Their comments were articulate, emotionally intense, suffused by life experience, eloquent. They offered interpretations of my words that had never occurred to me. I was the student that day--they were my teachers." (312)
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