How Do You See the Kingdom of God? Part 1 of 2

 

Notes from a dear friend

Russ, here is my summary of N.T. Wright's teaching on the Kingdom of God. Am I summarizing him correctly?

THE KINGDOM OF GOD - WHAT DID JESUS MEAN BY THIS?

"It assumes that Israel's God was the world's true ruler. Israel's God would rule Israel in a whole new way returning in Power and Glory, to rescue His people, rebuke the wicked, and set up a new rule of justice and peace. Torah would be fulfilled at last, The Temple would be rebuilt and the Land cleansed. Israel's God would rule in the way He always intended through properly appointed persons and means. By implication the rest of the world will also be ruled through Israel whether for blessing or judgment. Promised Kingdom of God as promised throughout Psalms, Isaiah 40-55, and the Book of Daniel. The people in Jesus' day had long cherished hope for a new exodus out of the exile that began with the Babylon Captivity in 597 BC, a new Temple, a reconstitution of the 12 tribes, a renewal of the Covenant, a national forgiveness of sins, the release from captivity, an epoch of peace and justice and an end of foreign rule. Through Jesus, God was now unveiling his age-old plan." - Anon 

How Do You See the Kingdom of God?

PART 1 OF 2

by R.E. Slater

INTRODUCTION

Having been raised (i) in a fundamentalist dispensational church, then (ii) attending a public university to hear dispensationalism preached all over again at both a on-campus Christian campus ministry and an off-campus fundamentalist bible church, and (iii) once again when transferring from university to study the bible at a fundamentalist private bible college - let's just say I am exquisitely familiar with the charts, diagrams, prophecies, themes, and hopes of Christians and their "Biblical" Systems attempting to organize the themes and eschatology of the bible (known as the "Day of the Lord" in the OT).

For the sake of argument let's simply say there are two prominent schemas of the bible which denominations have proposed and actively promote. One is the dispensational system and the other is the covenant schema of the bible. Certainly there are many more... both as variations of these systems as well as completely different from these systems... depending on your beliefs, religion, and historical roots.

In my graduate year of Seminary (M.Div, New Testament Studies) my capstone project under Dr. Carl Hoch, Jr., was to summarize the bible thematically. I believe we came up with eleven separate themes of the bible as a class where eschatology was woven in-and-out-and-around all eleven themes. Essentially we did not stipulate an eschatological system except through the major themes of the bible which also spoke to God, Christ, and divine purposes, goals, or aims as we could fathom.

DIVIDING THE WORD OF GOD

Before beginning what I would like to mention here are a number of ways to miss what the bible is saying by getting too wrapped up into systemizing it's component parts. Probably the easiest way to graph or chart the bible might be by stating there are two testamental era... (i) one before the cross of Christ and (ii) one after the cross of Christ. However, even in this observation there are some sects which espouse three testaments or even four testaments depending on how they look at the bible's canon. The Jewish bible (e.g., the OT) has three parts:

The Hebrew Bible is organized into three main sections: the Torah, or “Teaching,” also called the Pentateuch or the “Five Books of Moses”; the Neviʾim, or Prophets; and the Ketuvim, or Writings. [As a collection] they are often referred to as the Tanakh, a word combining the first Hebrew letter from the names of each of the three main Jewish divisions.

Know this let me suggest some other ways to divide the bible...

• Two Testaments: One Bible;
• by observing Covenantal Continuities v. Discontinuities (based upon the covenanted community at the time in transition per historical era, such as early tribal Israel, pre-kingdom Israel, kingdom Israel, exiled Israel, the InterTestamental Age, Jesus in Roman Israel, Jesus in Resurrection, or the Church after Jesus' death and future coming);
• Christologically as seen within each of the Covenants in either Testamental period; known as The Christ of the Covenants;
• perhaps via various schemas of Millenialism (none, pre-, mid-, post-trib, amill);
• or by God's promises to His covenanted people themselves, better known as Remnant Theology;
• by the tension between the Here-and-Not-Yet, described as the Presence of the Future;
• or reading the NT through the eyes of the OT; or, the OT through the eyes of the NT; sic, Jewish v Christian; summarized in the New Perspectives of Paul.
• perhaps by the biblical themes of Messianic Hope;
• or themes of Gospel v Law as Contrast or Continuum? between the covenants;
• there also have been studies of the bible from the perspective of God's Covenanted People: God's promises to Israel (kingdom communities) as versus God's promises to the Church (ecclesiological communities): Israel and the Church;
• or perhaps of Christ-as-the-MidPoint-of-History (sic, Christ in Time: theophanies, prophecies; thematic pictures of Christ in the OT, etc);
• then there is God's Design of Creation, Salvation, and Well-Being mostly focused on viewing the covenants for differences in legal pact, formation, geography, and promises; 
• and lastly, any other basic theological issues in Debate unaddressed by all of the above and in formations and debates around their validity of insight - or overall helpfulness - in knowing God and His creation through Christ, event, experience, and outcome (thus the contributions of many over this past century in applying Process Theology to Hellenised/Modernised Christianity).

Whew! So as you can see, there is no one way to divide the bible but LOTS of ways as one  would expect in a diversity world with many needs, philosophies, and cultural traditions. So to simply say one is a dispensationalist or one is a covenant person really doesn't say a lot except that each individual is trying in their own way to picture who God is, what He wants, and how He intends to interact with humanity (and very creation itself... which we always tend to lose sight of being overly focused on ourselves).

WORDS OF ADVICE

At this point let me throw out a few charts with the precaution that like the study of numerology I would strongly resist getting too far down the rabbit's hole in this subject. It never seems to end... as coincidental imagination runs rampant through the comparative themes of the bible. But some of us love to organize and chart things - meaning that this type of study can be a wizard's delight locking one into his or her own tower of trolling the news and social media looking forwards-and-backwards trying to predict this-or-that to come. To those future prognosticators out there, dial it back... take your passion and apply it in ministry to the underserved by providing bedding, clothing, housing, job training, and local community helps. Don't get lost in this area of predicting and prognosticating. Thanks.

To help sink in this kind of fruitless exploration let me note two things. First, history can be visualized as a helical spiral moving upwards in hope in Christ (rather than downwards in defeatism). Events and circumstances always tend to repeat but never in the same way. The Christian church recently has been going through its own apostasy these past few years (I count since the 1990s)... not unlike past historical ages of Christian apostasy away from Christ and towards worldly structures. Observation: Don't be surprised when history repeats itself... but never in the same way twice. It seems to move in escalated helical cycles.

Secondly, Christ says when He comes it will be as a thief in the night. He's not advertising His coming, He's just coming. Think of it as a surprise birthday party, or special event in your life you weren't expecting. So too with Christ. All the charting in the world is not going to help in determining the times and the seasons of Christ's coming. He's just coming. We call this form of future an "Imminent Coming of Christ" as versus a "Date-certain form of Coming" which we have had plenty of these failed predictions since the year 2000. Name the event and you'll have the prognosticators out there with their charts saying "He is Coming!"

Perhaps I'll add a third... my wife always like to say "Lord Come!" PTL, Hallelujah! To which I sometimes loving respond, "Dear, it's better to say 'Lord BECOME.'" Why do I say this? Because the Cross is a past historical event and whether Christ comes again or not is not in our Christian jurisdiction to control. But it is in our Christian responsibility to birth the love of God and the salvation of Christ to one another in all that we say and do. For me it's not a "Wait and See" event but a "Here-and-Now" let's-get-busy-event. There is work to do and God cannot do it if we are not out in the world bringing it about. I have no intention of waiting, charting, or predicting. But I have every intention of bring Christ to the world right now. Hence, "Not Lord Come! but Lord BECOME! in our midst!"

DISPENSATIONAL CHARTS AND AGES

Dispensational Link

http://voiceoftruthblog.com/a-survey-of-the-history-of-covenant-theology-part-ii

THE SEVEN DISPENSATIONAL AGES

1. The Dispensation of Innocence. (From Creation to Adam’s fall)

2. The Dispensation of Conscience and Sacrifice. (fall of man until the flood)

3. The Dispensation of Human Government. (flood until the tower of Babel)

4. The Dispensation of Promises. (Babel until Moses)

5. The Dispensation of Law. (From Moses until Pentecost)

6. The Dispensation of Grace Abounding. (Pentecost until the rapture)

7. The Dispensation of The Kingdom. (the thousand year millennium)

https://flashbak.com/mammoth-color-charts-for-the-second-coming-1912-417876/

https://flashbak.com/mammoth-color-charts-for-the-second-coming-1912-417876/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

SEVEN DISPENSATIONS

[Wikipedia]

The number of dispensations vary typically from three to eight. The typical seven dispensational schemes are as follows:

1 - Innocence — Adam under probation prior to the Fall of Man. Ends with expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. Some refer to this period as the Adamic period or the dispensation of the Adamic covenant or Adamic law.

2 - Conscience — From the Fall to the Great Flood. Ends with the worldwide deluge.

3 - Human Government — After the Great Flood, humanity is responsible to enact the death penalty. Ends with the dispersion at the Tower of Babel. Some use the term Noahide law in reference to this period of dispensation.

4 - Promise — From Abraham to Moses. Ends with the refusal to enter Canaan and the 40 years of unbelief in the wilderness. Some use the terms Abrahamic law or Abrahamic covenant in reference to this period of dispensation.

5 - Law — From Moses to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Ends with the scattering of Israel in AD70. Some use the term Mosaic law in reference to this period of dispensation.

6 - Grace — From the cross to the rapture of the church seen by some groups as being present in 1 Thessalonians and the Book of Revelation. The rapture is followed by wrath of God constituting the Great Tribulation. Some use the term Age of Grace or the Church Age for this dispensation.

7 - Millennial Kingdom — A 1000 year reign of Christ on earth (Revelation 20:1–6), centered in Jerusalem, ending with God's judgment on the final rebellion.

COVENANTALISM

My next path of life began occurring during (i) those same years in private university, then (ii) under a beloved bible teacher in Sunday School (Dr. Hoch, again) whom (iii) I followed into New Testament Studies in Seminary after graduating from the fundamentalist bible college I had attended. The Lord was preparing me to see the bible not from a dispensational viewpoint but from a Reformed Covenant viewpoint. Though the seminary was attached to the dispensational college I had just graduated from, for some reason, there were seminary professors more in line with covenantal thinking at the seminary level. Curious, right?

Which ended up being very helpful as to me, as dispensationalism felt very artificial and subjectively placed onto the Scriptures. A forced exegeticism if you will. But the covenants of the bible from a Reformed understanding of them (ahem, but not from a Reformed Protestantism perspective - they tend to be more fundamental. But a covenantal perspective more in line with the RCA and CRC churches of America) made more sense biblically to me. And as a Baptist moving away from fundamentalism and towards a progressive form of evangelicalism (though all my environments could be classified more accurately as conservative evangelicalism... not progressive evangelicalism) it felt more appropriate to speak of God and the future in the broader terms of His covenants as they reached out to humanity.

Click to Enlarge

As I know them, there are seven covenants which recognize biblically without straying into systematic versions of the covenants such as covenants of law/works v grace, or covenants of redemption, or into covenants of church ritual practices such as baptism and communion, etc.

And the reason these are important is because they are all related to the Semitic idea of relationships classified more formally as ancient Near Eastern Covenant Treaties of which I have several very long seminary papers expressing the meaning and vitality of each covenant treaty of the Old and New Testaments.

I suppose the one I like the best is the one showing how the Abrahamic Covenant is related to the ancient Suzerainty-Vassal Treaty form of the bible made between God and man where God says He will sacrifice Himself for the good-and-protection of those expressing allegiance to Him (Genesis 15.17). Of course the natural parallels to this B'rit speak to Christ and the church with the Cross as the cleavage between life and death where the Prince of Life, the Creator-God of the cosmos, is sacrificed on humanity's behalf and for our salvation. What are the seven covenants? Here they are:

THE SEVEN COVENANTS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(biblical)

Ancient Near Eastern treaties

The Hebrew term בְּרִית bĕriyth for "covenant" is from a root with the sense of "cutting", because pacts or covenants were made by passing between cut pieces of flesh of the victim of an animal sacrifice.

There are two major types of covenants in the Hebrew Bible, including the obligatory type and the promissory type. The obligatory covenant is more common with the Hittite peoples, and deals with the relationship between two parties of equal standing. In contrast, the promissory type of covenant is seen in the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants. Promissory covenants focus on the relationship between the suzerain and the vassal and are similar to the "royal grant" type of legal document, which include historical introduction, border delineations, stipulations, witnesses, blessings, and curses.

In royal grants, the master could reward a servant for being loyal. God rewarded Abraham, Noah, and David in his covenants with them. As part of his covenant with Abraham, God has the obligation to keep Abraham's descendants as God's chosen people and be their God. 

God acts as the suzerain power and is the party of the covenant accompanied by the required action that comes with the oath whether it be fire or animals in the sacrificial oaths. In doing this, God is the party taking upon the curse if he does not uphold his obligation. 

Through history there were also many instances where the vassal was the one who performed the different acts and took the curse upon them.

1 - Adamic/Edenic
2 - Noahic
3 - Abrahamic
4 - Sinaitic/Mosaic
5 - Priestly
6 - Kingly/Davidic, and
7 - New Covenant

Devarim = Deuteronomy

HITTITE SUZERAINTY-VASSAL TREATY

FORM OF COVENANT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty

1 - Preamble: Identifies the parties involved in the treaty, the author, the title of the sovereign party, and usually his genealogy. It usually emphasises the greatness of the king or dominant party.

2 - Prologue: Lists the deeds already performed by the Suzerain on behalf of the vassal. This section would outline the previous relationship the two groups had up until that point with historical detail and facts that are very beneficial to scholars today, such as scholar George Mendenhall who focuses on this type of covenant as it pertained to the Israelite traditions. The suzerain would document previous events in which they did a favor that benefitted the vassal. The purpose of this would show that the more powerful group was merciful and giving, therefore, the vassal should obey the stipulations that are presented in the treaty. It discusses the relationship between them as a personal relationship instead of a solely political one. Most importantly in this section, the vassal is agreeing to future obedience for the benefits that he received in the past without deserving them.

3 - Stipulations: Terms to be upheld by the vassal for the life of the treaty; defines how the vassal is obligated and gives more of the legalities associated with the covenant.

4 - Provision for annual public reading: A copy of the treaty was to be read aloud annually in the vassal state for the purpose of renewal and to inform the public of the expectations involved and increase respect for the sovereign party, usually the king.

5 - Divine witness to the treaty: These usually include the deities of both the Suzerain and the vassal, but put special emphasis on the deities of the vassal.

6 - Blessings & Curses: Blessings if the stipulations of the treaty were upheld and curses if the stipulations were not upheld. These blessings and curses were generally seen to come from the gods instead of punishment by the dominant party for example.

7 - Sacrificial Meal: Both parties would share a meal to show their participation in the treaty.

CONCLUSION

I'll leave below helpful links to today's article. The next set of topical links will relate to Eschatology and Kingdom Perspectives from a variety of view points. These I will develop in a second related article to today's posting. Enjoy!

R.E. Slater

June 20, 2021

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Kingdom Series, Parts 1-3

How Do You See the Kingdom of God? Part 1 of 2

Sunday, June 20, 2021

How Do You See the Kingdom of God? Part 2 of 2

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

N.T. Wright - The Kingdom of God: How God Became King

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Article References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispensationalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(biblical)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_theology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty

Related Topics Here at Relevancy22

Remembering George E. Mendenhall, Semitic Scholar, and the Importance of Ebla to Genesis

Eschatology - End Times (22 articles)

Eschatology - Our Responsibility (15 articles)

Kingdom Eschatology (37 articles)

Kingdom Now (12 articles)

Theologian N.T. Wright (19 articles)

Paul - NT Wright Series (23 articles)

Index - Kingdom Eschatology

Index - New Perspectives of Paul

Index - Readings in N.T. Wright

Related Topics at Relevancy22

Listed by Topic

Eschatology - End Times (22 articles)

Eschatology - Our Responsibility (15 articles)

Kingdom Eschatology (37 articles)

Kingdom Now (12 articles)

Theologian N.T. Wright (19 articles)

Listed by Index

Index - Kingdom Eschatology

Index - New Perspectives of Paul

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Process Sovereignty vs Church Sovereignty

Amazon Link

Applying an ever more radical hermeneutics (including Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, Derridian deconstruction, and feminism), John D. Caputo breaks down the name of God in this irrepressible book. Instead of looking at God as merely a name, Caputo views it as an event, or what the name conjures or promises in the future. For Caputo, the event exposes God as weak, unstable, and barely functional. While this view of God flies in the face of most religions and philosophies, it also puts up a serious challenge to fundamental tenets of theology and ontology. Along the way, Caputo's readings of the New Testament, especially of Paul's view of the Kingdom of God, help to support the "weak force" theory. This penetrating work cuts to the core of issues and questions―What is the nature of God? What is the nature of being? What is the relationship between God and being? What is the meaning of forgiveness, faith, piety, or transcendence?―that define the terrain of contemporary philosophy of religion.

Begin reading immediately - Kindle Link

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A God of Process Sovereignty

Our view of God's Sovereignty must change from one of power to one of weakness. God is the opposite of being nihilistic or militaristic... God is exactly what Jesus showed us He is. No spears, clubs, nor high-minded threats of ending governments and innocent lives in the name of Christ. Nay. God is gentle, meek, merciful and loving.

Conversely, we would expect man's God to be a vigorous, red-meat eating bloody military general, wouldn't we? But of the God we see in Jesus this is not so.... Our longing for unrighteous power and ill-gained safehaven in the shadows of the rich and powerful can find no substitute for God's loving strength and holy guidance in this life nor the next.

Process theology says God is embedded in all things, meaning, God's power is unlimited. It is as large as the universe. But that this power is meant for wellbeing, creational care, nourishment, and healing of body, mind, soul and spirit. A militaristic God styled after King David of the OT gets you nowhere. Just the satisfaction that your worldly God is something the true God really isn't. A proper definition of God's Sovereignty must be a loving God full of mercy and forgiveness. One who lived life caring and healing others. And in death, did the same.

What about the God of the apocalyptic revelation coming to destroy the world? Again, not true. We might destroy ourselves as we are continually predicting but God will not, and cannot, because of who God is as loving and good. But aren't all eschatological stories based on stories of holy vengeance and justice? You know, the Wyatt-Earp-kinds-of-justice staged at the OK-Corrals-of-the-world where the bad guys get what's coming to them? Sure, those shoot-em-up-endings portray their muscular, powerful stories of protecting the innocent from the cruel, the ideal from the wayward. Yet God doesn't work this way. God isn't loving one moment and vengeful the next. Sure, God is grieved and harmed by our actions towards one another but God is Spirit and we are God's fleshly hands and feet to conduct a loving, caring, restorative justice. Not a justice of harm and cruelty. We are therefore to conduct ourselves in ministrations of care... not continue the donkey wheel of injustice, harm, and hate.

Let's just say then that the book of Revelation is man's metaphorical image of God and not the picture of the true Jesus-God. Naturally it is a yearning of the Christian Church that hell be swallowed up by the cross of Jesus along with all antichrists and wicked prophets of the world. But if God's Sovereignty is epitomized in Jesus then we should suspect one of us is wrong. Either our idolatry of God is wrong as pictured by the church's idolatry of God's sovereignty always described in terms of bloody return. Or, the eschatological hope we carry for vengeful justice is wrong. Perhaps Revelation was written as a warning to the church to reign-in our lusts and megalomaniac dreams of domineering world power under religious rule. To content ourselves rather in love's healing ministries and restorative justice. Without this character in our spirits our metaphorical gods will rise up and eat us alive in hatred and cruelty where no one can stand and there can be no atonement left save for death.

R.E. Slater

May 29, 2021

 

The Power of God's Love

by R.E. Slater

Held in the loving power of Jesus

        is the God of the universe...

  His divine power supersedes all others,

              His divine love undergirds

                                the foundations of the world...

                         upon which we who walk this earth

               seek a home not of our own...

                             but of loving nourishment,

          wellbeing, soul healing,

  and nurturing care...

                                                    

                                          R.E. Slater
                                               May 29, 2021

Bible Verses about Power Through God

Most Relevant Verses - https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Power-Through-God 

Acts 3:12

But when Peter saw this, he replied to the people, “Men of Israel, why are you amazed at this, or why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk?

2 Corinthians 4:7

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves;

2 Corinthians 12:9

And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.

Ephesians 1:19-20

and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,

Ephesians 3:20

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us,

 

Colossians 1:29

For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.

2 Corinthians 6:7

in the word of truth, in the power of God; by the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and the left,

Daniel 2:23

“To You, O God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise,

For You have given me wisdom and power;

Even now You have made known to me what we requested of You,

For You have made known to us the king’s matter.”

Daniel 2:37

You, O king, are the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, the strength and the glory;

1 John 4:4

You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.

2 Corinthians 13:3

since you are seeking for proof of the Christ who speaks in me, and who is not weak toward you, but mighty in you.

Luke 9:1

And He called the twelve together, and gave them power and authority over all the demons and to heal diseases.

John 14:12

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.

Acts 4:33

And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and abundant grace was upon them all.

1 Corinthians 15:43

it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power;

2 Corinthians 10:4

for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.

Colossians 1:11

strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously

2 Thessalonians 1:11

To this end also we pray for you always, that our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power,

2 Timothy 1:8

Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me His prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God...

Advent Season - Afflicted by Hope

"When God “afflicts us with hope” we become people who look at the world with “a steady, honest, unflinching gaze." We see the world just as it is and yet, because we trust in God’s goodness, we still believe good triumphs over evil. This is the hope that lies at the heart of Advent [which celebrates Jesus' birth into a world of sin]. A hope that doggedly persists despite pain and suffering and deep, deep grief. A hope based on a promise that Jesus will not leave us alone but, instead, comes to us over and over again [in this life as the next]." - Teri Wooten Daily

A Beacon of Light: A City on a Hill Full of Light & Peace

The Risk of Birth

by Madeleine L'Engle

This is no time for a child to be born,

With the earth betrayed by war & hate

And a comet slashing the sky to warn

That time runs out & the sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,

In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;

Honor & truth were trampled to scorn--

Yet here did the Savior make His home.

When is the time for love to be born?

The inn is full on the planet earth,

And by a comet the sky is torn--

Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

The Birth of Jesus

Luke 2:1-15 (NASB)

2 Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all [a]the inhabited earth. 2 [b]This was the first census taken while [c]Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. 4 Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, 5 in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. 6 While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a [d]manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

8 In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; 11 for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is [e]Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a [f]manger.” 13 And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace among men [g]with whom He is pleased.”

15 When the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, “Let us go straight to Bethlehem then, and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 So they came in a hurry and found their way to Mary and Joseph, and the baby as He lay in the [h]manger. 17 When they had seen this, they made known the statement which had been told them about this Child. 18 And all who heard it wondered at the things which were told them by the shepherds. 19 But Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart. 20 The shepherds went back, glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen, just as had been told them.

*The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Days To Come
Isaiah 2:1-5 (NRSV)*

The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

and shall be raised above the hills;

all the nations shall stream to it.

Many peoples shall come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways

and that we may walk in his paths.’

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.

O house of Jacob,

come, let us walk

in the light of the Lord!

*The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Hour Unknown

Matthew 24:36-44 (NRSV)*

Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

*The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Downward Slope to Hope & Humanity

A Shared Place: Wendell Berry’s Lifelong Dissent

I've been reading through Wendell Berry's early collection of writings on land, work, life, and memory of all things broken, humorous, mended, or sad. Throughout his compositions lie the interwoven threads of redemption picking up the pieces of people's lives, humble as they are. Below is an introduction to Berry who I am only now realizing his voice as that of many other voices dissenting to their present economy of living disparate from nature, each other, and the world at large. For those of us who struggle with our own broken societies and the residual economies they produce let us take heart that we are not alone.

R.E. Slater

September 17, 2019

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

CULTURAL CRITICISM AND ANALYSIS

BOOKS & THE ARTS

SEPTEMBER 23, 2019, ISSUE

A Shared Place:

Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent

https://www.thenation.com/article/wendell-berry-essays-library-of-america-review/

by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

September 9, 2019

At a time when political conflict runs deep and erects high walls, the Kentucky essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry maintains an arresting mix of admirers. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. The following year, the socialist-feminist writer and editor Sarah Leonard published a friendly interview with him in Dissent. Yet he also gets respectful attention in the pages of The American Conservative and First Things, a right-leaning, traditionalist Christian journal.

More recently, The New Yorker ran an introduction to Berry’s thought distilled from a series of conversations, stretching over several years, with the critic Amanda Petrusich. In these conversations, Berry patiently explains why he doesn’t call himself a socialist or a conservative and recounts the mostly unchanged creed underlying his nearly six decades of writing and activism. Over the years, he has called himself an agrarian, a pacifist, and a Christian—albeit of an eccentric kind. He has written against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings—and argued that the modern American way of life is a skein of violence. He is an anti-capitalist moralist and a writer of praise for what he admires: the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and affection that keep the world whole and might still redeem it. He is also an acerbic critic of what he dislikes, particularly modern individualism, and his emphasis on family and marriage and his ambivalence toward abortion mark him as an outsider to the left.

Berry’s writing is hard to imagine separated from his life as a farmer in a determinedly traditional style, who works the land where his family has lived for many generations using draft horses and hand labor instead of tractors and mechanical harvesters. But the life, like the ideas, crisscrosses worlds without belonging neatly to any of them. Born in 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky, Berry was but the son of a prominent local lawyer and farmer. He spent much of his childhood in the company of people from an older generation who worked the soil: his grandfather, a landowner, and the laborers who worked the family land. His early adulthood was relatively cosmopolitan. After graduating from the University of Kentucky with literary ambitions, he went to Stanford to study under the novelist Wallace Stegner at a time when Ken Kesey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry were also students there. Berry went to Italy and France on a Guggenheim fellowship, then lived in New York, teaching at NYU’s Bronx campus. As he entered his 30s, he returned to Kentucky, setting up a farm in 1965 at Lane’s Landing on the Kentucky River. Although he was a member of the University of Kentucky’s faculty for nearly 20 years over two stints, ending in 1993, his identity has been indelibly that of a writer-farmer dug into his place, someone who has become nationally famous for being local, and developed the image of a timeless sage while joining, sometimes fiercely, in fights against the Vietnam War and the coal industry’s domination of his region.

Now the essays and polemics in which Berry has made his arguments clearest over the last five decades are gathered in two volumes from the Library of America, totaling 1,700 tightly set pages. Seeing his arc in one place highlights both his complexity and his consistency: The voice and preoccupations really do not change, even as the world around him does. But he is also the product of a specific historical moment, the triple disenchantment of liberal white Americans in the 1960s over the country’s racism, militarism, and ecological devastation. In the 50 years since, Berry has sifted and resifted his memory and attachment to the land, looking for resources to support an alternative America—”to affirm,” as he wrote in 1981, “my own life as a thing decent in possibility.” He has concluded that this self-affirmation is not possible in isolation or even on the scale of one’s lifetime, and he has therefore made his writing a vehicle for a reckoning with history and an ethics of social and ecological interdependence.

Berry defined his themes in the years when environmentalism grew into a mass mobilization of dissent, the civil rights movement confronted white Americans afresh with the country’s racial hierarchy and violence, and the Vietnam War joined uncritical patriotism to technocratic destruction—and stirred an anti-war movement against both. He was part of a generation in which many people confronted, as young adults, the ways that comfort and seeming safety in one place could be linked, by a thousand threads and currents, to harm elsewhere—the warm glow of electric lights to strip mining, the deed of a family farm to colonial expropriation and enslavement, the familiar sight of the Stars and Stripes to white supremacy and empire.

Such destructive interconnections became the master theme in his criticism, which portrays American life as a network of violence and exploitation, sometimes openly celebrated but more often concealed. For Berry, as for Thoreau, the work of the critic is to locate where the poisons are dumped and then turn back on oneself and ask: What is my place in all this? Is it possible to live life differently? And if so, how can I begin?

Berry’s most enduring work of nonfiction is The Unsettling of America, published in 1977. There he puts farming at the center of his critique of American life. If you want to ask how people live, he proposes, you should ask how they get their food. This is at once the most ordinary ecological exchange and the most important. It shapes everything from the land to our bodies. It is the place where the land becomes our bodies, and the other way around. And by this measure, Berry continues, American agriculture has proved a disaster. A good farm should renew its soil with diverse cropping and manure, providing fertility for the future. Instead, American farming has become a hybrid of factory production and mining. It strips the soil of its organic fertility and replaces it with synthetic fertilizers, either literally mined (phosphorus) or produced with considerable amounts of fossil fuels (nitrogen). Its waste becomes a pollutant—the manure from industrial-scale animal operations and the fertilizer runoff from corn and soybean monocrops, which poison waterways and aquifers. When farms are turned into dirt-based factories, they lose their power to absorb and store carbon and begin to contribute, like other factories, to climate change.

What does this disaster say about the people who create it? For Berry, American agriculture showed the country’s devotion to a mistaken standard of economic efficiency, which in practice tended to mean corporate profit. Both the market and the federal government confronted farmers with a stark choice: “Get big or get out,” in the words of Earl Butz, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture and a villain in The Unsettling of America. Success meant squeezing more and more out of the bottom line, no matter how it affected farming communities or the land. It also meant embracing a new scale and pace, with mechanical harvesters, industrial barns, and synthetic chemicals greatly reducing the need for human labor. In 1870, nearly half of American workers were farmers; in 1920, 27 percent were; today, it’s less than 1 percent. Not so long ago, working the land was the major form of life in many communities. Today, it is mostly a branch of industrial management for landowners and a grueling form of labor for seasonal and migrant workers. Far from economic progress, Berry concludes, the unsettling of America produced a cultural and ecological catastrophe. Whole forms of life, whole swaths of ecological diversity, are disappearing.

He goes even further in The Unsettling of America. The destructive transformation of land, culture, and commerce is nothing new; it is merely the latest chapter in the American story—the exploitation and elimination of settled forms of life to make room for new kinds of profit-making. Looking back to the first soldiers and colonists who drove out Native Americans, Berry writes, “These conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional communities…. They have always said that what they destroyed was outdated, provincial, and contemptible.” The conquest never ended, only changed its targets. It has always maintained a doubly exploitative attitude, toward land as a thing to be seized and mined for profit and toward human labor as a thing to be used up and discarded.

Reviewing The Unsettling of America in The New York Times, the poet Donald Hall called Berry “a prophet of our healing, a utopian poet-legislator like William Blake.” But the poetic utopia was fading fast, and the healing had come too late. Soon Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would establish themselves as the poet-legislators of the age. Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society” and Reagan’s praise of “an America in which people can still get rich” were the antithesis of Berry’s thought. In those decades, back-to-the-landers who followed his example in the early 1970s were giving up and returning to city jobs or slipping into a weird rural libertarianism or becoming entrepreneurs who converted agrarian counterculture into the kinds of lifestyle goods and status symbols that end up on display at Whole Foods. The environmental movement was beaten back in Appalachia in the 1970s when the coal industry defeated a campaign to end strip mining, which Berry had thrown himself into wholeheartedly. The defeat set the stage for the destruction of much of the region by mountaintop-removal mining in the decades that followed while inequality grew, young people continued to flee rural counties, and the American economy financialized and globalized on archcapitalist terms.

Since The Unsettling of America appeared, Berry has been straightforwardly and unyieldingly anti-capitalist. He shares a mood with Romantic English socialists like William Morris, who did not assume that all growth is good and who aspired to build an egalitarian future that in some ways looked back to a precapitalist past. These affinities bring many of Berry’s ideas within shouting distance of nostalgia—which, in the American South, has always been a mistake at best and more often a crime.

But the core of his work—both writing and activism—has always been after something else: a reckoning with the wrongs of history and identity. He does not want to celebrate an earlier age; instead, like Morris and his peers, Berry wants to come to terms with it in the service of a clear-eyed present and a changed future. “I am forced, against all my hopes and inclinations,” he writes in “A Native Hill,” a 1969 essay, “to regard the history of my people here as the progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households.” Centered on a walk across a slope where Berry’s ancestors and others like them drove out the original inhabitants, the essay confronts how his people worked the land, sometimes with enslaved labor, and left behind a denuded hillside that has shed topsoil into the Kentucky and Ohio rivers. “And so here, in the place I love more than any other,” he observes, “and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place.”

From the beginning, Berry has written the land’s history alongside the history of those who have worked it or been worked on it. When he returned to Kentucky in the mid-1960s, he was already reflecting on how much of the region’s—and his family’s—history was entangled with racial domination. In 1970, he concluded that “the crisis of racial awareness” that had broken into his consciousness was “fated to be the continuing crisis of my life” and that “the reflexes of racism…are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.” Berry argues that the mind could not be changed by will alone but only in relation to the world whose wrongs had distorted it. A writer must respond by engaging with “the destructive forces in his history,” by admitting and addressing the fact that “my people’s errors have become the features of my country.”

Even as Berry made himself a student of the flaws of local life, he sought to refashion its patterns of community and culture into something that might repair them. For him, narrowing the horizons of one’s life is the only responsible way of living, since it is how we might actually heal old wounds, clean up our own mess, and give an honest account of ourselves. Throughout his essays, he makes this case for ecological reasons but also for moral ones. Farming on a local scale, he argues, can respond to the nuances of soil and landscape and can rebuild the fertility cycle of dirt to plant to manure to dirt. Ethics also has its limits of scale. “We are trustworthy only so far as we can see,” he insists. The patterns of care that give ethics life also require a specific space. To hold ourselves accountable, we need a palpable sense of what is sustaining us and what good or harm we are doing in return. Community depends on the sympathy and moral imagination that “thrives on contact, on tangible connection.”

Berry’s judgment that localism is an ecological and moral value links his life and activism with his thought, but over the years his localism has also fostered an anti-political streak in his thinking that recasts global and collective problems as matters of community judgment and personal ethics. He laces his writings with asides dismissing “national schemes of medical aid” and “empty laws” for environmental protection. But local activity can do only so much to stop mountaintop-removal mining or industrial-scale farming. A student of material interdependence cannot ignore that the systems driving these forms of ecological devastation are just as real as the topsoil that Berry lays down on his farm at Lane’s Landing and just as powerful as the floodwaters from the Kentucky River. Politics and collective action—often through local and federal laws—are necessary, however alienating he finds them.

Some of Berry’s wariness of politics comes from his temperament. He is chiefly a moralist and a storyteller. Although he cares intensely about the effects of the economic and political orders that he criticizes, they are not the home ground of his mind in the way a local farm and community are. His wariness regarding politics also reflects something that is easily missed on account of his agrarian persona and perennially untimely style: his debt to the New Left radicalism of the late 1960s. His writing from that time reflects the New Left idea that participatory democracy is the only real democracy. “The time is past when it was enough merely to elect our officials,” he argued in 1972 concerning the fight against strip mining. “We will have to elect them and then go and watch them and keep our hands on them, the way the coal companies do.”

Horror at the Vietnam War shaped his localism as well. In 1969, he wrote of walking on a hillside watching Air Force jets screech into the valley “perfecting deadliness” and concluded, “They do not represent anything I understand as my own or that I identify with…. I am afraid that nothing I value can withstand them. I am unable to believe that what I most hope for can be served by them.”

Berry’s emphasis on place and individual responsibility can become part of the problem in the wrong hands. Back-to-the-land ethics in the 1990s and since have often sagged into a conscious consumerism that forgets participatory politics, inflates individual choices, and offers local knowledge as a status symbol and a commodity rather than a set of traditions worth preserving to prevent even further devastation. By now, calls for individual responsibility—from one’s choice of light bulbs to the search for happiness and meaningful work—are pretty clearly distractions from the lack of political programs to provide living-wage jobs and ecological restoration. A contrarian is least essential when his dogged dissent becomes an era’s lazy common sense; Berry risks becoming, willy-nilly, the philosopher of the Whole Foods meat counter.

At the same time, Berry has never shied from participating in collective action and organized resistance. He has been arrested for protesting the construction of nuclear power plants and risked arrest protesting surface mining. In 2009, he withdrew his papers from the University of Kentucky after it accepted coal money and has devoted recent years to working with his daughter, Mary Berry, to build a center to train young farmers in local practices that might resist the corporatization of agriculture. Growing up on the edge of Appalachian activist circles, I heard of him as someone who showed up—a good citizen. But it may be that the burden of his thought is a pessimism of the global intellect, married to joy (if not exactly optimism) in local work. In Wendell Berry’s view, we are caught in a powerfully warped world, and nothing of our making is likely to save us. The beauty is the struggle or, in his case, the rhythmic and seasonal labor. Indeed, the joy of work is near the center of his thinking. Our wealth is in our activity, he argues, but it is fatuous to “do what you love.” The point instead should be to make an economy, at whatever scale is possible, whose work deserves the affection of whoever joins in it.

In this respect, his local focus is not narrow but expansive. In the work of a farm and the ties of a region, he finds the materials for a theory of political economy. Like Pope Francis in the ecological tract Laudato Si’, and also like many contemporary socialists, Berry has long argued that the moral and material meaning of an economy must be two parts of the same thing. Our political economy shapes our intimate attachments, and vice versa. The personal is political, and our hearts follow our treasure. This twinned understanding of environment and economy, of personal and public life, is part of why he can appeal both to those who believe that the American ordering of political and economic power needs fundamental reconstruction and to those who believe that the values of individualism, mobility, and self-creation have led to a cultural blind alley.

Berry’s affirmative vision of interdependence finds expression in an ideal of marriage that runs through his thinking. For him, marriage is a chosen limit, a self-bounding, that helps to support and dignify all the other limits he recommends: restraint from violence, from conquest, from unchecked acquisition or the vanity of progress. It is also an expression of an intentional community, of a deliberate bonding of souls, and he describes it as being “as good an example as we can find of the responsible use of energy” and, more fulsomely, “the sexual feast and celebration that joins [the couple] to all living things and to the fertility of the earth.” In The Unsettling of America, the ideal farmscape that Berry imagines is filled with marriages on this model.

This moralizing of the most traditional relationship, along with the emphasis on localism, is part of the reason that Berry’s writing appeals to conservatives as well as progressives. But he does not defend the traditional marriage of the 20th-century nuclear household. His ideal of a union of shared work in a shared place is at once more anachronistic and more radical than that. Repudiating the right’s understanding of marriage, he argued in 2015 that the Constitution and political decency require opening marriage to same-sex couples without qualification. Speaking from his Christian tradition, he warns his coreligionists against “condemnation by category” (which he calls “the lowest form of hatred”) and “the autoerotic pleasure of despising other members” of creation.

His ideal of marriage also extends far beyond two people. It is suggestive of his larger commitment to making things whole, to imagining a good society as a great chain of being that links people and households and the earth into a single pattern. Through this image of wholeness, Berry asks moral and ecological questions in ways that conjoin what is often held apart: What harm am I involved in? What change in life could possibly redress it?

Berry’s visions of wholeness, however, can leave too little room for the thought that not all human and nonhuman goods can come into harmony, that conflict among them can be productive and a reason to prize individuality and strangeness—say, to honor a queer marriage not just because it is a marriage but also because it is queer. His passion for wholeness draws him toward the anachronistic margins of the present—the Amish, for instance, whose self-bounded form of community he admires—and dampens his interest in the radically new versions of ecological and social life that might be emerging on other margins. His wholeness is not the only wholeness, though he sometimes writes as if it were. He is, on the one hand, reconstructing his own Christian, border-state, mainly white history as one basis for “a life decent in possibility” and, on the other hand, trying to describe the general conditions for any others to live a responsible life. When his project is candidly idiosyncratic, then others may find in it some prompting for their own reconstruction, with their own equally particular inherited materials. But when Berry generalizes too hastily from what is particularly his own, his thought, ironically, can become provincial.

When I became a writer, it was probably inevitable that I would take some kind of instruction from Wendell Berry. He was the first writer I ever met, by more than a decade. I was introduced to him at a draft horse auction in Ohio sometime before I learned to read. When I did begin to read him, I found someone who had made a life’s work out of materials I had, at that time, known my whole life. He too came from steep, eroded slopes, farmed wastefully; he too worked in hay fields and barns that left the body scratched, sore, soaked in sweat, delighted; he too admired the knowledge of old people who could make a meal of wild mushrooms, some roadside greens, and a swiftly dispatched chicken. I still carry with me many of the values that Berry praises as essential, but much of what he has evoked as a life decent in possibility is far away. At present, I live in New York City and have not dedicated my life to the fertility of the land I first knew or to any one lifelong community. I love a city of strangers, whose random sociability and surprising acts of helpfulness model a very different picture of interdependence from Berry’s.

This sense of distance from him is particularly acute when it comes to abortion. Several times over the past year, I almost abandoned this essay because of Berry’s view of it. He believes that abortion takes a life; I believe the right to it is essential to women’s autonomy and egalitarian relationships. I see it as central to the vision of humane fairness that is reproductive justice and view reproductive justice as closely linked with ecological justice. Both are about a decent way for humans to go on within the larger living world. This is my version of wholeness, but it is not Berry’s, and over the years I have struggled to reconcile his views on abortion with the parts of his work that I find indispensable. Unlike his localism or his skepticism of politics, which I do not share but seem honorable expressions of important traditions, his views on abortion pull me up short. With the stakes for women’s lives so high right now, they do so even more.

Berry’s writings on reproductive justice contain an important caveat: He does not believe abortion should be the decision of the state, and he has argued that for this reason, “there should be no law either for or against abortion.” This cannot be a complete answer, and imagining it could be is a token of his distance from modern politics. Take Medicaid and the heavily regulated private insurance industry. Must they cover abortion? May they not? The question is not avoidable, and it is political as well as personal. In answering these questions, there is no such thing as the silence of the law.

Still, Berry’s stance means that all bans on performing abortion should be rejected. This is a position that falls well to the left of anything the Supreme Court has said on the matter. Nonetheless, many readers would not remotely recognize their experience in his description of the procedure as a “tragic choice” and might mistrust his judgment on other matters because of his insistence on his opinion here.

Throughout his work, Berry likes to iron out paradoxes in favor of building a unified vision, but he is himself a bundle of paradoxes, some more generative than others. A defender of community and tradition, he has been an idiosyncratic outsider his whole life, a sharp critic of both the mainstream of power and wealth and the self-styled traditionalists of the religious and cultural right. A stylist with an air of timelessness, he is in essential ways a product of the late 1960s and early ’70s, with their blend of political radicalism and ecological holism. An advocate of the commonplace against aesthetic and academic conceits, he has led his life as a richly memorialized and deeply literary adventure. Like Thoreau, Berry invites dismissive misreading as a sentimentalist, an egotist, or a scold. Like Thoreau, he is interested in the integrity of language, the quality of experience—what are the ways that one can know a place, encounter a terrain?—and above all, the question of how much scrutiny an American life can take.

All of Berry’s essays serve as documents of the bewildering destruction in which our everyday lives involve us and as a testament to those qualities in people and traditions that resist the destruction. As the economic order becomes more harrying and abstract, a politics of place is emerging in response, much of it a genuine effort to understand the ecological and historical legacies of regions in the ways that Berry has recommended. This politics is present from Durham, North Carolina, where you can study the legacy of tobacco and slavery on the Piedmont soils and stand where locals took down a Confederate statue in a guerrilla action in 2017, to New York City, where activists have built up community land trusts for affordable housing and scientists have reconstructed the deep environmental history of the country’s most densely developed region. But few of the activists and scholars involved in this politics would think of themselves as turning away from the international or the global. They are more likely to see climate change, migration, and technology as stitching together the local and global in ways that must be part of the rebuilding and enriching of community.

The global hypercapitalism that Berry denounces has involved life—human and otherwise—in a world-historical gamble concerning the effects of indefinite growth, innovation, and competition. Most of us are not the gamblers; we are the stakes. He reminds us that this gamble repeats an old pattern of mistakes and crimes: hubris and conquest, the idea that the world is here for human convenience, and the willingness of the powerful to take as much as they can. For most of his life, Berry has written as a kind of elegist, detailing the tragic path that we have taken and recalling other paths now mostly fading. In various ways, young agrarians, socialists, and other radicals now sound his themes, denouncing extractive capitalism and calling for new and renewed ways of honoring work—our own and what the writer Alyssa Battistoni calls the “work of nature.” They also insist on the need to engage political power to shape a future, not just with local work but on national and global scales. They dare to demand what he has tended to relinquish. If these strands of resistance and reconstruction persist, even prevail, Wendell Berry’s lifelong dissent—stubborn, sometimes maddening, not quite like anything else of its era—will deserve a place in our memory.

*Jedediah Britton-PurdyJedediah Britton-Purdy teaches at Columbia Law School. His new book, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, will appear this fall.