Tag: evangelicalism

All Spirit, No Body: Evangelicalism's Gnostic Problem

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

The Evangelical Manifesto has pretty much come and gone. (It’s domain name has actually expired.) It was supposed to give evangelicalism, sagging with the worries and fears of the Religious Right, a face lift. And then along came Sarah Palin and the chances for evangelicalism finding a prettier face happened, but not the way the Manifesto’s writers had intended.

Even so, recalling the way that EM defined evangelicalism is useful for reminding confessional Protestants why born-again Protestants don’t get us and why they leave us scratching our heads. The defining features of evangelicalism, according to EM, are first a devotion or experience of reverence: being evangelical at its core “is always more than a creedal statement, an institutional affiliation, or a matter of membership in a movement.” This means that evangelicalism cannot be limited to “certain churches or contained by a definable movement.” It is “diverse, flexible, adaptable, non-hierarchical” and takes many forms. Also key is evangelicalism’s positive, as opposed to its negative, posture. “Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything.”

For this reason, evangelicals are different from liberalism and fundamentalism. These are in fact the extremes that define evangelicalism. The fault of liberalism was its capitulation to “alternative gospels” that are characterized by “an exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God.” Fundamentalism’s error is to embody a “modern reaction to the modern world” and romanticize the past. This leads fundamentalists to part company with “the Evangelical principle” of loving “our neighbors as ourselves” and even our enemies.

These oppositions would seem to connote a negativity that conflicts with evangelicalism’s commitment to being positive. But aside from the implicit inconsistency, the “accent the positive” theme of EM betrays evangelicalism’s glaring intellectual defect. By eschewing institutional means for being an evangelical and for reinforcing its identity, evangelicals have abandoned any reasonable creaturely means for giving coherence to their movement, constituency, market – what is the right word when no criteria for membership exist? It actually gets worse. Evangelicals revel in not being a church, in not having a creed, in not being tied down by those structures that lead to formalism or narrowness – those barriers that restrict the free movement of the Spirit and the good intentions of regenerated saints.

How is it possible to have any sort of human identity without being embodied institutionally. For politics we have parties, for business we have companies, for sex we have marriage. All of these human activities require some kind of exclusion based on a positive identity. Democrats are not Republicans. Ford’s cars are not Toyota’s. The Harts do not sleep with the Bartons. The same is even true for Christianity where God has given us the church and its ordinances to disciple the nations. The ministry of the word has always involved distinguishing and excluding. The keys of the kingdom were given to open the gates of heaven to believers and to shut them to unbelief. At the denominational level, Presbyterians are different from Pentecostals. But evangelicals, according to EM, do not want to be tied down either the way God’s creatures are by virtue of our embodiment or the way his church is by virtue of his revealed truth about the way he cares and shepherds his people through the church.

The result is a form of Christianity that does not want to have enemies but knows that it has them because its positive assertion of evangelical identity means that evangelicalism is not fundamentalism or liberalism. The reason it cannot have enemies is the same as why it cannot have members. Evangelicalism eschews institutional embodiment. It transcends any organizational or formal arrangement that is narrow or excludes. As such EM is yet one more betrayal of a spiritual identity that knows no formal mechanisms of membership.

Contemporary evangelicalism, consequently, suffers from an inherent inconsistency which pits its spirit against its body. Born-again Protestantism cannot resolve its inherent tension between the anti-formal nature of the conversion experience – the gateway into evangelicalism – and the need for formal qualities that will make evangelicalism cohere as a distinct Christian identity. As Mark Noll has observed, “Evangelicalism never amounted to a full-blown religious tradition, but was rather a style of personal living everywhere combined with conventional attitudes and actions.” Because of its flexibility and experiential character, evangelicalism can be found almost everywhere. That also means it is one of the least disciplined and impossible to define expressions of Christianity. In fact, because of its inability to achieve the heft of a religious tradition but only to add up to a spiritual style, evangelicalism has left many of its adherents with the dilemma of not knowing how to practice, maintain, and pass on a faith that eschews the means of practicing, maintaining and passing on any form of Christianity.

Even so, evangelicals have over the centuries devised a number of other ways to indicate their membership in the evangelical movement, from listening to contemporary Christian music, buying niche-marketed study-Bibles and the vinyl covers that adorn them. This could be a betrayal of the original genius of evangelicalism. But the formalism of evangelicalism could also reveal the naivete of its original proponents. That is, folks like Whitefield, Wesley and Edwards failed to recognize that as ensouled bodies (or embodied souls if you prefer) human beings cannot avoid forms. Christianity needs more than religious affections.

At some very basic level, physical existence requires that Christianity take external form, except in those very rare, and impossible to know, circumstances where the Spirit acts directly upon the human soul independently of external stimuli and physical existence after conversion. This kind of mystical experience may happen but it is not normal. The ordinary way that God saves is through the means of his word, read and preached, and visibly signified and sealed in the sacraments, with the enlivening work of the Spirit. In other words, God instituted forms to mediate grace through the external senses of the human body. Evangelicals implicitly recognize this whenever they publish books, set up preaching tours, arrange Christian Rock festivals, or print a new line of t-shirts. These evangelical forms mediate evangelical devotion. And they show that the original impulse of evangelicalism, to escape forms, is impossible.

The $64,000 question, then, is which are the right forms. Whatever the answer to the question, evangelicalism will always have a hard time maintaining an identity and keeping its children if it teaches adherents that their formal Christian activities are matters indifferent. If it doesn’t matter if you go to a Lutheran, Presbyterian or Baptist church to be an evangelical, then a time may (and possibly has) come when it doesn’t even matter if you go to church . In which case, evangelicalism would have achieved the ghost-like status of all spirit and no body.

How Evangelicals Can Prove their Environmentalist Convictions

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

This past Sunday my wife and I visited a Baptist church in a seaside town that fifty years ago would have been the worship option for our both sets of parents when vacationing. The half-hour of singing during the first half of the service, punctuated by insights from the pianist-minister-of-music, was not surprising. This liturgical practice of unceasing song is now standard almost everywhere that Protestants do not use a prayer book even though Pentecostals were the first to introduce the period of praise songs as the way to enter into God’s presence (the invocation used to take care of that).

What was surprising, though, was that this form of service – a half-hour of song, followed by a half-hour sermon – could transpire without an order of service in the bulletin. The songs appeared on the screen above the baptistry, the singers and musicians in the front found the right music, and when the singing was finished the pastor assumed his place behind the pulpit. It seemed to transpire in an orderly way. But what happened to a prayer of praise, one of confession, one of thanksgiving? Or what about different readings from parts of Scripture? What about the dialogue between God and his people? This seemed to be one monologue (song) followed by another (sermon). The only part of the service that remained unchanged from our youth was the Lord’s Supper that concluded the service. It was a memorial of Christ’s death.

As I struggled to think about the words on the screen during the first half of the service – I could not sing because the tunes are difficult, unfamiliar and only the musicians up front had music (so much for the priesthood of all believers) – I began to wonder how this congregation would do if the power went out. Well, they would not be able to sing because the projector would not work, the microphones would also be off, and some of the instruments would no longer function. Plus, the pastor would have to do without that nifty microphone headset that made it look like he was wearing braces. Still, the sun was bright enough to let us use the hymnals, especially if the sexton would have opened the shades that darkened the room sufficiently for the projector to do its work.

This led me to think that if evangelicals really are becoming green and owning their environmental responsibilities, then perhaps such statements as “An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation” should include as one of its policy proposals the banning of all Praise & Worship worship. This would mean saving all the electricity that is used to support the praise bands, the singers, and the projectors and computers. The proposal should also call for worship music that uses only hymnals and pianos.

Of course, trees need to be felled to produce hymn books and to make parts of pianos. In which case, evangelicals might consider that the form of worship with the smallest carbon footprint is exclusive psalm-singing unaccompanied by musical instruments. Yes, the psalter still requires the demolition of trees. But unlike most hymnals that weigh in with close to 700 hymns, the psalter only has 150 songs, and so requires less paper. And without the need of a piano, organ, electric guitar, or synthesizer, psalm-singing further reduces the consumption of fossil fuels.

So if evangelicals are truly serious about the environment, one way to look for it is with a return to the worship of Geneva. Who knew Calvin was such a sensitive and trendy guy?

For Doug Wilson Apparently Being Reformed Means Evangelicalism That Is Effective

Published on by D. G. Hart195 Comments


Doug Wilson joins the Bayly Bros in heaping scorn on our good friend Scott Clark and the case for recovering the Reformed confessions. To Doug’s credit, he avoids the vituperative edge that characterizes the Baylys’ outbursts.

What unites Wilson and the Brothers Bayly in their criticism of Clark, apart from disdain for Meredith Kline, mind you, one of the true geniuses of twentieth-century Reformed Christianity, is nostalgia for Geneva. Of course, this is not the Geneva that sent Castellio packing or Servetus to the flames – well, it is, but most contemporary pining for Geneva manages to overlook the downside of Constantianism even when practiced by Reformer pastors.

Wilson is writing in response to a piece that Clark did for Table Talk on what evangelicals should expect from a Reformed church. Clark tries to cushion the blow that might come from the doctrinal, polity, and liturgical trappings that disorient the average born-again Christian. When Clark explains that “confessional churches are isolated from both the old liberal mainline and the revivalist traditions” and so offer an alternative to liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Wilson goes off.

First, Wilson laments Clark’s isolationism. Not only are Reformed confessionalists separated from evangelicals and liberals, but also “from the cultural potency of Reformed theology and piety.” This is lamentable because for Wilson, the Reformed theology that he has read and studied “built a great civilization.” In contrast, Clark’s brand of Reformed theology, that of “the truncated brethren,” “would have trouble building a taco stand.”

Wilson also takes exception to Clark’s claim that confessional churches today approximate the churches of the sixteenth century more than other Protestant congregations. For Wilson, this is patently untrue because the sixteenth-century Reformed churches were actually Reformed cities – that is, they were more than merely religious institutions. They were civil polities where supposedly Calvinism shaped all of Geneva’s or Strasbourg’s or Edinburgh’s life (tell that to the magistrates who stuck their neck out against the Holy Roman Empire and hired the Reformed pastors). This suggests that Wilson regards Reformed Protestantism as a way of taking names and kicking butt.

Furthermore, when Clark claims that evangelicals coming to Reformed churches will need time to acclimate to the new spiritual environment, Wilson retorts that Clark has the picture “exactly backwards” because Clark’s otherworldly version of the Reformed faith turns out to be warmed over evangelicalism (read: pietism). According to Wilson:

As an evangelical, and the son of an evangelical, allow me to give my testimony. I was part of the exodus from pop evangelicalism (not historic evangelicalism). I was sick of the cultural irrelevance and impotence of “believe in Jesus, go to Heaven when you die.” I was sick of a pietism that couldn’t find its way out of the prayer closet. I wanted to stop confessing that Jesus was Lord of an invisible seventeenth dimension somewhere. Why not here? Why not now? It was a long story, but the trail to historic evangelicalism, God-honoring worship, and a culturally potent and world transforming faith led me straight to the Reformed faith — the same faith that John Calvin and his successors confessed. Calvin preached to milkmaids and Calvin wrote letters to princes. Calvin drafted catechisms, and he drafted ordinances for the city council. Calvin thought that the idea of a civil society without enforcement of the first table of the law was “preposterous.” Calvin was a loyal son of Christendom, as am I.

It is remarkable that Wilson would seemingly dismiss the idea of people going to heaven, unless he thinks that this world is more than a foretaste but an actual embodiment of the world to come. I mean, people who milk cows to the glory of God still die, at which point the realities of the after life become fairly pressing compared to a Reformed way to pasteurize milk.

Also odd is Wilson’s sleight of hand regarding “pop” and “historic” evangelicalism. My own testimony (both from experience and study) instructs me that appeals to historic evangelicalism generally depend less on historical realities and more to the point the appellant is trying to make. Does Wilson really mean to suggest that Clark has more in common with Joel Osteen than Carl Henry? Let me testify again and say that I’ve spent time with Clark and know that his locks cannot compete with Osteen’s.

But the really arresting aspect of Wilson’s critique of Clark is the idea that cultural relevance and effective change of this world is what characterizes Reformed Christianity. I get it that post-Niebuhr and post-Kuyper Wilson’s brand of transformationalism is par for the course. But what is shocking is the conceit that Reformed are more effective than evangelicals in changing things.

The history of Protestantism in the United States shows that the groups that were most influential in creating the Protestant establishment and its many institutions, along with a civil religion that made the greatest nation on God’s green earth unfriendly to Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and other forms of infidelity, were those evangelicals like Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher, or the ecumenical and liberal Protestants like Josiah Strong and Reinhold Niebuhr. Funny how Calvinism did not characterize those influential voices.

The reason for evangelicalism’s can-do body (as well as spirit) has to do with the inherently activistic and this-worldly faith of born-again Protestantism. Here I am reminded of Mark Noll’s response to a paper by Nick Wolsterstorff about the need for evangelicals to become more engaged in cultural and social matters. Noll said that telling evangelicals to be more active was like pointing an addict to dope.

So Doug Wilson may be the real evangelical. He may be more culturally relevant and effective than Clark and other two-kingdom proponents, though I hear that even in Moscow, Idaho the work of cultural clean up is not perhaps a model for taking on the rest of the nation, globe, or cosmos. Granted, if Wilson can rid the United States of automobiles, Walmart, and illegal drugs, I won’t complain. But I would ask that he put church reform higher on his list. All the infidelity among churches that claim to be Christian (even some Reformed communions) certainly appears to be a matter of greater alarm than getting non-believers to conform outwardly to the manners and customs of Credenda Agenda ‘s readers.

Which means that if Wilson think’s Reformed confessionalism’s dualism is bad ju ju, his works righteousness is bad do do (is the works righteousness of do doism ever good?).

What I'm Saying

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

guinness-draft1Over at Evangel, one of First Things ‘ blogs, readers and contributors have been busy attempting to define that 600-pound object in the room that goes by the name evangelical but defies descriptions as either an elephant or gorilla. Paul McCain, the author of the post, is responding to an interview at Evangel with Os Guinness (yes, that Guinness – brilliant!). In the interview, Guinness makes the following distinction between evangelicalism and orthodoxy:

Interviewer: Evangelicalism is more of the foundation and Orthodoxy is built on top of that.

Guinness: Exactly, and that is why whenever there is corruption, deadness, formality, heresy, whatever in the church, there will always be the impulse to go back to Jesus which is the Evangelical impulse. That’s why I would insist that, understood historically, theologically, spiritually; it is deeper than the other impulses. So Evangelicals are embarrassed by the culture of Evangelicalism or the politics of Evangelicalism, but that’s just a call to reformation.

This indeed a curious riff on the form-content distinction that generally lets evangelicals do whatever in worship and evangelism for the sake of the content of saving souls or being led by the Spirit (as Luther would say, feathers and all). Guinness implies that evangelicalism is formless; it is almost a gnostic or docetic understanding of Christianity in which the relationship or loyalty or feeling about Jesus transcends any kind of embodiment, whether in thought, word, or practice. It also has the advantage of bestowing upon the lexicographer – in this case, Guinness – the privileged position of determining whatever belongs or doesn’t to evangelicalism.

But then comes an interesting exchange between McCain at his post with someone who chimes in that German pietism is the continental equivalent of the revivalism that Whitefield and Wesley spawned. Good Lutheran confessionalist that he is, McCain wants to clarify the relationship between German evangelicalism and historic Lutheranism:

“The Pietist streak runs deep within Lutheranism” needs some very serious qualification. In fact, Lutheran Pietism is responsible for nearly single-handedly destroying authentic confessing Lutheranism, since it eschewed dogmatics, doctrine, the means of grace, the office of the ministry, and so forth. It would be a very serious misinterpretation of Martin Luther to think that he was a Pietist.

To which the commenter responded:

my real point was to say that there is still an emphasis on experiential piety within Lutheranism. The Lutheran charismatics that I know draw on this stream and will even talk about the synergism of a Melanchthon. Most Lutherans will simply talk about the sacraments as encounters with God because of real presence.

All of this sort of reinforces the point that it’s easier to talk about Lutheran, Reformed, Pentecostal, than it is to talk about Evangelical, which is why I said it’s a spirituality.
(Lutheran charismatics – that’s a scary proposition!)

And McCain gives it back:

there is no “Lutheranism,” as it is properly understood and defined, apart from the confessions of the Lutheran Church, as contained in the Book of Concord. “Lutheran charismatics” is an oxymoron. It’s just a bunch of bored Lutherans dabbling with 20th century American Pentecostalism. The Lutheran Church firmly rejected Melanchthon’s errors on several key points.

Oh, for ten ounces of that confessional moxie among conservative Presbyterians.

And then along for the ride comes Francis Beckwith who proposes yet another reason for his belonging to the Evangelical Theological Society even after he went back into the Roman Catholic Church.

If the term “Evangelical” is broad enough to include high-church Anglicans, low-church anti-creedal Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, the Evangelical Free Church, Arminians, Calvinists, Disciples of Christ, Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, open theists, atemporal theists, social Trinitarians, substantial Trinitarians, nominalists, realists, eternal security supporters and opponents, temporal theists, dispensationalists, theonomists, church-state separationists, church-state accomodationists, cessationists, non-cessationists, kenotic theorists, covenant theologians, paedo-Baptists, and Dooweyerdians, there should be room for an Evangelical Catholic.

Why doesn’t occur to Beckwith that if evangelicalism is that broad, and if a besetting sin of Protestant liberalism was breadth (as in Lefferts Loetscher’s Broadening Church), then why is evangelical width a good thing? Why isn’t it actually a sign of incoherence and vacuity? Granted, born-again Protestantism could be Guinness’ warm feeling in my heart. But how do I tell the difference between the evangelical feeling and the one I receive after drinking several pints of Guinness?

Thanksgiving with the Coens?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

lone biker of apocThe e-message this week from the nice folks at Christianity Today included a list of the five best movies on thankfulness. According to Annie Young Frisbee (imagine if she had married into the Boomerang clan) the Coen brothers come in at number five with – drum roll – Raising Arizona. She writes:

An ex-con and an ex-cop kidnap one of the Arizona quintuplets in hopes of creating the family they couldn’t have on their own. On the run from the law and a bunch of outlaws, their journey leads them to be grateful for the joys they have always had.

Raising is a great movie but hardly the warm fuzzy that Ms. Frisbee makes it out to be since the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse is an omen of the killer in No Country for Old Men, and the last line, said by H. I. while overlooking a Thanksgiving Day spread, about a fairer future for him and his beloved, mocks Utah. This means that it concludes with a swipe at the support Mormons gave to family values during those years when Reagan – that “sumbich”– was in the Whitehouse. (Frisbee’s take on Raising may confirm Ken Myers’ clever line that “evangelicalism is making the world safe for Mormonism.”)

For that reason, a better Thanksgiving Day pick may be Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. Yes, it has its dark moments and Woody’s funny but starting to get old complaints about love and death. But it begins and ends with a sumptuous Thanksgiving Day meal, and it is probably Allen’s most uplifting movie – ever.

The choice for the Harts in 2009, though, is Accidental Tourist, a movie based on the novel by Anne Tyler that is set in Baltimore – a plus for all fans of Machen and Mencken – and features an idiosyncratic family and their methods of cooking turkey. Yum, yum.

Deconstructing Evangelicalism

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

BE074639Philip Yancey writes at Christianity Today one of his last columns for a while. He is not entirely encouraged by what evangelicalism has become, though he also finds room for encouragement. As is typical of so much writing about evangelicalism, Yancey notes the ying and yang that at once makes evangelicalism successful and destructive.

On the yang, Yancey writes, “In the past year I have visited the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, and Europe as the guest of churches and ministries. In each place, evangelicals exude life and energy. While staid churches change slowly, evangelicals tend to be light on their feet, adapting quickly to cultural trends.”

But for yang Yancey also observes that evangelicals are slaves to innovation (some might call it idolatry but we refuse to use such freighted language — good for us!). “The Jesus movement,” he writes, “the house-church movement, seeker-friendly churches, emergent churches—evangelicals have spawned all of these. In their wake, worship bands have replaced organs and choirs, PowerPoint slides and movie clips now enliven sermons, and espresso bars keep congregants awake. If a technique doesn’t work, find one that does.”

Yancey cautions “that mimicking cultural trends has a downside. At a recent youth workers conference I attended, worship meant a DJ playing techno music at jet-engine volume while a sweaty audience crowded the stage, jumping up and down while shouting spiritual one-liners. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I couldn’t help questioning the depth of worship.”

Well, I’m sorry but you can’t have it both ways. Innovation means a certain kind of vigor, one that attracts “new” followers. Innovation also means you disrespect tradition and also that you have no tradition – other than a perpetual quest for innovation. Evangelicalism as conservative Protestantism — are you kidding?

But none of this prevents Yancey from staying the course with evangelicalism, and advising against not abandoning the name, but “living up to it.” In fact, he observes one encouraging trend, namely, the evangelical embrace of the Social Gospel. “The fundamentalist-social gospel divide that marked the church a century ago has long since disappeared. Now evangelical organizations lead the way in such efforts as relief and development, microcredit, HIV/AIDS ministries, and outreach to sex workers.”

What Yancey fails to realize is that the Social Gospel was originally an evangelical enterprise that married word and deed in such a way that evangelicals gave deeds of mercy equal weight with word and sacrament. Over time this evangelical wedding of evangelism and reform led to an inability to see that the eternal things of word and sacrament were truly more important than temporary forms of relief and development. In other words, evangelicalism became the path to liberal Protestantism. Evangelicalism as conservative Protestantism — are you still kidding?

Along with the email that included a link to Yancey’s article came other links to other CT articles on evangelicals. One of those by Kevin Offner in 1995 – almost 15 years ago!! – included yet another depressing assessment of evangelicalism:

Just how does one define “evangelical” today? Until recently it was clearly understood, implicitly if not explicitly, that evangelicals were fully committed to two truths: the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the new birth. And the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who saves us from our sins, was the common object of adoration. One evangelical might disagree with another on secondary matters but they both shared a common, nonnegotiable center.

Today this center has become fuzzy and elusive as American pluralism hits evangelicalism with a vengeance. Lines are being drawn not over whether one does or does not wholeheartedly affirm the gospel but over secondary matters, which in turn are often set up as litmus tests for unity.

All of this invites the question: why is anyone still considering “evangelical” a meaningful Christian identity? I sort of understand why CT does, it being the flagship magazine of “the movement.” But if Yancey and Offer see these problems, what good is keeping the evangelical moniker in use? Even more poignant is why conservative Presbyterians would continue to want to call themselves evangelical.

Have the Coen Brothers Lost Their Edge?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

tom reaganAn affirmative answer would be one way of reading the recent piece on Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of such great movies as Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker Proxy, and No Country for Old Men at Christianity Today. The neo-evangelical habit is to take the rough edges off Christianity in order to make the faith relevant and agreeable to middle America. That also seems to be what happens when the editors at CT turn a kind eye toward former bad boys of Minnesota. I mean, of the many characters available to him, Josh Hurst, the author of the piece, turns to Marge, the family friendly cop from Fargo. Hurst writes:

That’s a good way to describe the brothers’ opus: a chronic search for truth. Some might argue that the Coens’ world is amoral, but a discerning look reveals morality aplenty. Good and evil stand apart from one another as clearly as black and white—or red and white, in the case of their classic crime story, Fargo. Set against the endless snow of the frigid Midwest, it’s a movie about greed, about a perfect crime gone horribly awry—in short, about the wake of destruction left by one man’s evil ambitions, seen starkly as a crimson trail of blood against the pure white terrain.

But then comes the evangelical smiley face:

Fargo’s heart and soul is local sheriff Marge Gunderson, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Frances McDormand. She’s chipper, [did someone say “chipper”?] pleasant, and very pregnant. She’s deeply affectionate and supportive of her husband, Norm. Their tranquil life contrasts the frenzied greed of the bad guys as much as a drop of blood on the snow. . . . Like Marge herself, the Coens have a longstanding curiosity about matters of morality. But hard as they might try, they can’t seem to shrug off the realities of evil as calmly as their most famous heroine.

Another reading of the Coen’s comes more from Tom Reagan, the punching-bag hero of Miller’s Crossing, than Marge Gunderson, the cop who likely pulled the Coens over a couple times during their youthful indiscretions. Tom repeatedly says, after being told to look into his heart, that you can’t know what motivates anyone, not even yourself. That’s actually fairly compatible with what Protestants know about the ambiguity of moral impulses even among the saints. But it is not the same as, “the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?”

Granted, the Coens did lose some of their mojo when they indulged Hollywood with Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers. Both movies appeared to be parodies of Coen brothers movies, what Hollywood would try to do if it were going to make a movie like Joel and Ethan.

But when you take a movie that features a human leg sticking out of a wood chipper and turn it into a study of purpose and rectitude, you may feel, like the teenager who is embarrassed to find that his parents also like The Who, that the church lady is trying overly hard to live on the edge.