Christian Smith - Introduction: The Bible Made Impossible

Deliver Us from a Wilderness of
Our Own Making
by R.E. Slater

I am including an excerpt of Christian Smith's book on biblicism as a way of beginning a review on this very important subject. Later articles will more fully review Smith's proposals but the reader may begin reviewing this subject with me now through this posting here below.

As an introductory note, the term biblicism seems clearly associated with the idea of "popular folk religion"... meaning that, "popular folk ideas, religious statements, pious cliches, and idealized sentiments" are used by Christians when speaking of their faith to break it down into meaningful statements to their life experiences. This is done by quoting to each other cherished abbreviated proverbs, murky haikus, quaint ideologies, judgmental temperaments, over-simplified characterizations, and generally, a form of religious-speak that is usually found within a sociological grouping of Christians when they get together to talk over their life experiences and the confusing, sinful world of people around them. Examples of these statements are given at the end of this post where Christian Smith cites dozens of popular expressions that we have all heard at one-time-or-another spoken at church or with one another in daily conversation. Popular sentiments casually expressed from the pulpit, radio, TV, family and well-meaning friends, each sentiment holding a facsimile of truth to it but ringing hollow as pious platitudes and cliches in the specific instances of our daily Christian lives in need of hard answers and clearer truths.

For myself, this type of mindset is most appropriately named folk religion, and became the reason that motivated me to re-analyze my Christian faith beginning over a decade ago in the late 1990s. One that is still evangelical but more critical of it, less in-favor with its religiosity, one which I now term an emergent Christian faith found at the further end of the spectrum of evangelicalism.  And so, I have begun synthesizing my journey within the stories and subjectlines of this blog in an attempt to convey what I have learned about what my faith is and is not; what it means and what it shouldn't mean; and how I presently understand it in comparison with popular religious expressions and opinions. It became especially clearer to me when more carefully listening to what Evangelicals were saying (or not saying) around me; or witnessing how my Evangelical faith was responding to specific issues around it before re-framing those perceived realities and events accumulating around it into unsatisfying arguments and reimaged conceptions. And much like how a sudoku puzzle is solved by looking for what is not there - as versus what is plainly seen - my judgments began to amass and grow in correspondence to Evangelicalism's overly harsh criticisms, fallacious evaluations, blithe assertions, and self-sustaining parochialisms. Consequently, this then caused me to judge my own accumulated Evangelical traditions as too shallow and on-worthy of my continued support in its current self-laudatory forms.

Having then become disenchanted with living my faith through fashionized Christian rhetoric, stylized metaphors and politically-correct expressions, what I hungered for now is to hear God's Word afresh in a more-objective, less-defensive, non-evangelically religious terms and popular cliches. Especially when presented by well-meaning Christians who coerce, threaten, bully and judge my faith when straying out of the safe boundary lands of their Evangelicalism. I yearn more than ever to hear God in a clearer light, one more realistic, more edgy, more confrontational to the popular notions of today's religious folkisms. Something that would strip away my religion and get back to its very core - the very person and fellowship of the Triune-God speaking through open Scriptures, through the atonement, through life's experiences, and the world about me.

Nor has this journey been especially easy to travel, and yet, hopefully, it will become more satisfying to share with faith-seekers following similar journeys as tortuous as mine own; who are attempting to discern truth-from-error on both sides of the Evangelical/Emergent fence! Never had I expected such an intense personal disruption, one without sufficient guides or signposts, without historical precedents, bereft of mentors, teachers, or fellowship. One finding no encouragement and no advantage to it; a singular path dimly lit, if at all, filled with judgments, condemnation, and intense personal aloneness. I felt as if in the days of the prophet Jeremiah who was thrown into the bottom of a miry pit of clay by religious zealots doubtful of his faith. Who looked up out of his cold, wet prison yearning for answers and direction from God but received little hope and cheer in return. All the while being personally vilified, doubted and made miserable by the religious community around him. Eventually all this changed for Jeremiah but it took a very long time during which he experienced the daily provocation in his spirit of new truths about God and his place in the world; along with a personal rejection of all the accumulated, ingrained, religious platitudes he had acquired in his life; and a daily fresh determination to re-assess not only his own past but to re-envision his new present and the future that beckoned him. And like my own experience, I felt my own proponents had as little charm as the predecessors of my newly-reforming faith. Each side swinging at the other side with no cause, and with even less reason, at one another. When instead a fellowship should have been arising that would create a stronger, more unified, and more honest discussion and interaction between Evangelicals and Emergents. It was enough to cause one to despair and give up hope. Neither side was guiltless, and both sides were inclined towards disagreements and hostilities towards one another.

And yet it all makes sense now after the many desperate years (including as many recent desperate months!) of religious intrication. Through it all, a new freedom has been found that does not wish to leave me. A spiritual land discovered that breathes more pure, more alive, more wondrous with every breath. One that I like and intend to keep and not give back. Come walk with me, and the many other brothers and sisters I am discovering, as Christianity's outer markers are reset and we regain what was nobly lost in our modernized religious culture of the past hundred years. It is all new territory requiring many explorers and all are welcomed to journey to God's new lands of global outreach and assimilation. Once begun none will wish to turn back... praise God through His Spirit for delivering us from a wilderness of our own making!

R.E. Slater

October 22, 2011

Christian Smith - The Bible Made Impossible

by Christian Smith

This Introduction is part of a seven part series on Christian Smith's book.

Go to this link here to see the remaining 6 Reveiws (Parts 1- 6):

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/search/label/Bible%20-%20Christian%20Biblicism

The entirety of this article's contents may be found here -

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1587433036/ref=as_li_ss_tl/?ie=UTF8&tag=newwayfor-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=1587433036#reader_B0053XXDZ8

© 2011 by Christian Smith

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

E-book edition created 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-3205-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Part 1: The Impossibility of Biblicism

1: Biblicism and the Problem of Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism

2: The Extent and Source of Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism

3: Some Relevant History, Sociology, and Psychology

4: Subsidiary Problems with Biblicism

Part 2: Toward a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture

5: The Christocentric Hermeneutical Key

6: Accepting Complexity and Ambiguity

7: Rethinking Human Knowledge, Authority, and Understanding

Conclusion

Index

Notes

Introduction

by Christian Smith

This book addresses Christians, especially evangelicals, who believe that the Bible is a divine word of truth that should function as an authority for Christian faith and practice, and who want to espouse a coherent position that justifies and defends that belief. My contention here is that the American evangelical commitment to “biblicism,” which I will define and describe in detail below, is an untenable position that ought to be abandoned in favor of a better approach to Christian truth and authority.

What follows is not an attack on Christian authority or the Bible. It is rather a critical interrogation of certain aspects of one specific account. The goal of this book is not to detract from the plausibility, reliability, or authority of the Christian faith or from scripture. The goal is to persuade readers that one particular theory of Christian plausibility, reliability, and authority—what I call biblicism—is inadequate to the task.

I am aware that the term “biblicism” is often used pejoratively, as a disrespectful slight suggesting ignorance and lack of sophistication. I intend the use of the term here in a rather more neutral, descriptive sense, denoting a particular tradition of approach to scripture, as described in greater detail below. I contend that the biblicism that characterizes the thinking and practice of much of American evangelicalism is not so much “wrong” as it is impossible, even taken on its own terms. It simply does not work as proposed and cannot function in a coherent way.

In order for evangelical biblicism to appear to work, therefore, those who believe in it have to engage in various forms of textual selectivity, denial, and contortion—which actually end up violating biblicist intentions. Most of these are practiced covertly, not in any sneaky way, but simply as the learned, taken-for-granted, and therefore largely unintentional habits of a particular subcultural style of thinking and behaving. Contemporary Christians who want to be theologically orthodox, biblical, and evangelical (in the best sense of the word) can and must do better. But before anyone is motivated to do better, we must confront the real problems with the current, inadequate biblicist account.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that all American evangelicals are biblicists. Some are not. And some others mix biblicism with other forms of authority, such as personal “leadings of the Spirit.” Many simply assume a kind of background biblicism without giving it much systematic thought. Many academic and more thoughtful evangelicals also tend to be more selective and careful in the way they articulate their biblicism. Furthermore, while I am focused here on evangelicals in particular, nearly all American Protestant fundamentalists are also biblicists, as are many if not most charismatic and pentecostal Christians.[1] I am suggesting, therefore, that biblicism of the kind I describe below represents the epistemological center of gravity of much of American evangelicalism (and conservative Protestantism more generally) and so warrants the kinds of questions raised in this book.

By “biblicism” I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. Different communities within American evangelicalism emphasize various combinations of these points differently. But all together they form a constellation of assumptions and beliefs that define a particular theory and practice. My argument as follows does not question the doctrine of the divine inspiration of the Bible.[2] Nor am I here discounting the crucially important role that the Bible must play in the life of the church and the lives of individual Christians. I am not suggesting that the Bible is just a set of historical writings set in particular cultures, or the record of human subjective experiences of the divine that has little to say to contemporary people without being translated into terms that modern people can accept. Instead, what I say here is simply that the biblicism that in much of American evangelicalism is presupposed to be the cornerstone to Christian truth and faithfulness is misguided and impossible. It does not and cannot live up to its own claims.

I must also insist that my motives, goals, and arguments have nothing to do with promoting or representing theological liberalism. I am no theological liberal. While I believe that orthodox Christians need to engage intellectually and socially with theological liberals, I am and always have been a skeptic of theological liberalism as a project. I view the program of liberalism as an unworthy corrosion of historically orthodox, evangelical (again, in the best sense of that word) Christianity. I view theological liberalism—despite its good intentions—as naive intellectually, problematic in its typical ecclesial expression, and susceptible to unfortunate and sometimes reprehensible social and political expressions. It was no accident, for example, as Karl Barth explained at the time, that the prominent leaders of theological liberalism in the German church together publicly endorsed the causes of both Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I in 1914 and Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. When the church lacks a sovereign word of God that is not defined in terms of human subjectivity, experience, and culture, such ill-fated political moves become hard to resist. The theological liberal program lacks internal resources to help expose idolatry and so recurrently falls prey to the latest cultural movements and political fashions. I would go so far as to agree with J. Gresham Machen that theological liberalism is not one particular branch of Christianity; it is rather actually a very different religion from Christianity.[3]

However, opposing theological liberalism does not necessitate biblicism as the only viable alternative, as some seem to believe. This notion is an unfortunate legacy of the American modernist-fundamentalist battles of the early twentieth century. Slapping the “liberal!” label on others is still a knee-jerk reaction of many evangelicals against any argument that on first glance does not seem identical to or more conservative than their own position. This tendency has much more to do with the sociological process of maintaining safe identity boundaries and avoiding truly challenging intellectual engagements than it does with sustaining Christian faith with appropriate confidence, integrity, and trust in God.[4] In any case, to be clear, I deny any attempts to label the argument of this book “liberal.”

My argument in what follows focuses not merely on theories about what the Bible is believed to be and how it ought to function as an authority. It also focuses on how in practice the Bible is often actually read and used as an authority and on the results that this produces. I will suggest that the problematic results are not mere accidents or worst practices within an otherwise sound approach, but they are rather the inevitable outcomes of bad biblicist theory. In this I do not assume that empirical facts about what actually happens are all that are ever worth knowing. A great deal of Christianity is of course about conforming problematic empirical experience to what is ultimately true in and about reality. However, actual empirical human practices and experiences of Bible reading, interpretation, and application—especially when they are widespread and endemic—tell us a great deal about the adequacy of our theories about the Bible.

In what follows I will not engage a number of issues that have long occupied certain kinds of critics and defenders of the Bible. One of those concerns “higher criticism” of the text, such as whether the purported author of a certain text really was that author or whether the events described in a text “really” happened in that way. Those may or may not be interesting and important issues, but they do not concern me here. Neither will I engage the exercise of finding long lists of scriptural texts that appear to contradict each other, to which some sophomoric skeptics devote themselves in order to try to undermine the Bible’s coherence and authority.[5] That merely mirrors the worst kind of fundamentalist literalism, to which few thoughtful evangelicals subscribe, and betrays pitiable misunderstandings of how human language works.

My line of reasoning in this book will run as follows. First, I will argue that most biblicist claims are rendered moot by a more fundamental problem (which few biblicists ever acknowledge) that undermines all the supposed achievements of biblicism: the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. Even among presumably well-intentioned readers—including many evangelical biblicists—the Bible, after their very best efforts to understand it, says and teaches very different things about most significant topics. My suggestion is that it becomes beside the point to assert a text to be solely authoritative or inerrant, for instance, when, lo and behold, it gives rise to a host of many divergent teachings on important matters. Authority implies and requires definitive instruction, direction, or guidance. As the nineteenth-century Princeton Seminary theologian Charles Hodge stated, “If the Scriptures be a plain book, and the Spirit performs the functions of a teacher to all the children of God, it follows inevitably that they must agree in all essential matters in their interpretation of the Bible.”[6] But definitive instruction, direction, or guidance is precisely what pervasive interpretive pluralism precludes.

So, theorists about the Bible can assert theoretical claims of scriptural authority and infallibility as much as they want. But those ring hollow because of the ubiquitous variety and combinations of “biblical” teachings that sincere readers of the Bible think it teaches on nearly every subject. To be clear, the problem is not that theoretical claims to biblical sufficiency or authority are proved to be wrong or erroneous per se; rather, they are defeated in relevance by the undeniable lack of interpretive agreement and consistency among those who share the same biblicist background. That defeat in relevance then gives rise to questions about the truth of those theoretical claims. Biblicists might offer a variety of responses to this problem, to be sure, but none of them, I will suggest, are adequate to address the difficulty. So, pervasive interpretive pluralism remains a debilitating problem for the relevance of biblicist theory.

Having made that primary case, I will then turn more briefly to a subsidiary examination of the larger question of the defensibility of biblicism generally. My argument focuses on the fact that the Bible contains a variety of texts that are problematic in different ways and that biblicist (among other) readers rarely know how to handle. Some are texts that frankly almost no reader is going to live by, however committed in theory they may be to biblicism. Others are texts that need explaining away by appeals to cultural relativity (although no principled guidelines exist about when that explanation should and should not be applied). Some are passages that are simply strange. And some are texts that seem to be incompatible with other texts.

In order not to let these problematic texts endanger their formal theory of the Bible, biblicists tend to respond in three ways. The first is simply to ignore the problematic texts, essentially pretending that they do not exist. The second is to “interpret” the problematic texts as if they say things that they do not in fact say. The third is to develop elaborate contortions of highly unlikely scenarios and explanations—of the sort to which nobody would ever resort in any other part of life—which seem to rescue the texts from the problems.[7] But, from the viewpoint of the biblicist perspective itself, these strategies should be illegitimate. Reliance on them to sustain a biblicist position is self-defeating. In addition, I will show, first, that biblicism itself is not a self-evident, much less necessary, teaching of the Bible about itself, and, second, that biblicism has some problematic, pernicious pastoral consequences for many thoughtful youth raised in biblicist traditions.

I conclude with three chapters advancing a number of proposals for overcoming American evangelical biblicism. My proposals assume that biblicism can be escaped not by turning away from an evangelical approach to the Bible but rather by becoming even more truly evangelical in the reading of scripture. Contrary to the fears of some biblicists, leaving biblicism behind need not mean losing the best of evangelicalism but, instead, can mean strengthening an evangelical hermeneutic of scripture.

How I came to write a book about biblical authority and scriptural interpretation is sometimes beyond me. (I have no doubt that some readers, by the time they get well into the book, will wish I had never written it.) I did not start off with that intention in mind, but it began simply with me (someone who tends to think better when writing) merely drafting out some thoughts and questions for myself and perhaps to bounce off a few friends for their reactions. Needless to say, it grew from there. I am not a biblical scholar or a theologian professionally—although I have studied at three Boston Theological Institute schools (Gordon Conwell, where I took a course on Christology from David Wells; Harvard Divinity School, where I studied historical theology with Margaret Miles and Ian Siggins, among others; and Andover Newton, where I took an excellent course on scripture with Gabriel Fackre) and have spent much of my life reading in theology.

Professionally, I am a sociologist. For purposes of writing this book, that is both an asset and a liability. It is an asset, I believe, because it gives me a perspective that is different from many who deal with these topics for a living and so enables me to perhaps see things that some others may not. Being a sociologist—particularly one not employed at an evangelical institution with doctrinal standards statements determining the viability of my employment—also frees me to say things in print that I think are true without the accompanying worry that I will lose my job as a result. I know that there are at least some employees at evangelical institutions who share the concerns I lay out in this book but who cannot give voice to them because of the internal political problem this would create.[8] I am fortunate not to have to worry about such matters.

But being a sociologist is also in some ways a liability in writing this book, since I do not have the expertise in certain complex areas of scholarship upon which this book touches. I do not claim to bring such expertise to my argument; rather, the force of my case, such as it is, grows merely from the asking of some very simple questions and the refusal to settle for what I think are inadequate standard answers. Sometimes what needs to be asked or said—especially in contexts of well-established and taken-for-granted routines that at least some powerful people have a stake in maintaining—is not all that sophisticated but is instead quite elementary. Pervasive interpretive pluralism is the proverbial massive elephant in the room of evangelical biblicism that nobody talks about. I want to talk about it.

I should also say up front, for purposes of full disclosure, that, since completing the writing of this book, I have joined the Catholic Church. My reasons for becoming Catholic—an evangelical Catholic, I might add—were many, and only partly related to the issues raised here.[9] This fact of my autobiography, however, takes nothing away from the importance and legitimacy of this book’s argument for American evangelicalism—a movement about which I still care, in certain ways admire, and want to see realizing its best potential. Toward that end, for evangelical Protestants who intend to remain evangelical, the argument of this book stands strong and deserves to be engaged and answered. The constructive suggestions with which I conclude this book hold true for evangelical Protestants, and, to be clear, no reader needs to become Catholic in order to embrace any or all of them.

Finally, it should go without saying that just because I cite a certain author or publication, that does not mean that I accept and endorse everything he, she, or it says. Oftentimes one wants to connect with certain specific ideas or perspectives of another without implying a full-scale endorsement of the other’s entire intellectual program. Most scholars know this. But, since among American evangelicals issues surrounding the nature of the Bible are so sensitive and politically charged, it is probably necessary for me to avoid guilt-by-association by saying it explicitly: merely because I cite a certain author or publication, that itself does not mean that I accept and endorse everything he, she, or it says.

I owe a debt of thanks to Mark Regnerus, Brian Brock, Mark Noll, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Flory, Stan Gaede, Rich Mouw, Katie Spencer, Trish Snell, Peter Mundey, Scot McKnight, Charles Cosgrove, Bill Webb, Roger Olson, Jeff McSwain, Douglas Campbell, Meredith Whitnah, Kevin Vanhoozer, Peter Enns, Craig Allert, Roger Lundin, Robert K. Johnson, Bob Brenneman, Kent Sparks, and David Sikkink for critical feedback on early versions of this manuscript. As is customary to say, and is true here also, this book was strengthened considerably by these people’s helpful feedback; yet, none of them is to be held responsible—even by association—for any of its mistakes, inaccuracies, confusions, oversights, or oversimplifications, of which I am aware there may be more than a few.

Finally, I owe a large debt of gratitude to my fellow B4B partners: Jeff McSwain, Douglas Campbell, Allan Keoneke, and (for one very enjoyable year) Brian Brock (as well as sometimes Jeremy Begbie, Allan Poole, and Peter Hausman)—to whom I dedicate this book, whether they like that or not. Nobody could hope to enjoy a more fun, stimulating, and edifying group of theological companions while meeting at Whole Foods to hash out life-changing theology. May they and their work prosper, especially Jeff’s at the Reality Ministries Center in downtown Durham, North Carolina.

1

Biblicism and the Problem of
Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism

by Christian Smith

The “biblicism” that pervades much of American evangelicalism is untenable and needs to be abandoned in favor of a better approach to Christian truth and authority. By untenable I do not simply mean that it is wrong, but rather that it is literally impossible, at least when attempted consistently on its own terms. It cannot actually be sustained, practiced, and defended. Biblicism is one kind of an attempt to explain and act on the authority of the Bible, but it is a misguided one. In the end it cannot and in fact does not work.

A better alternative to biblicism is needed that takes seriously scriptural authority but in a way that does so beyond the framework of biblicism. Before any biblicist or semibiblicist is going to be motivated to seek a postbiblicist alternative to biblicism, however, they must first become convinced of biblicism’s untenability. Seeing that biblicism really is a dead end may motivate a constructive search for something better. This chapter and the next three seek to persuade readers that biblicism is a dead end, best to be abandoned.

What Is Biblicism?

Many functional biblicists in America have not heard of the term “biblicism” or do not know that it describes them. That does not matter. What does matter are the real belief system and the practices it animates. Whether called by that name or not, biblicism is prevalent and powerful in American Protestantism, particularly among conservative Protestants. As John Frame, professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando, Florida) concludes in a thoughtful paper titled, “In Defense of Something Close to Biblicism,” “although Protestant theology under the sola Scriptura principle is not biblicist, it is not always easy to distinguish it from biblicism.”[10] The word “biblicism” turns out to mean different things to different people. It is therefore important to be clear about the meaning I intend here.

All that I write below is intended to reference the following definition. By “biblicism” I mean a particular theory about and style of using the Bible that is defined by a constellation of related assumptions and beliefs about the Bible’s nature, purpose, and function. That constellation is represented by ten assumptions or beliefs:

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language.
2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11]
3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12]
4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13]
5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
6. Sola Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch.
7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors.
8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching.
9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches.

The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles:

10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

Biblicism is not a comprehensively formalized position always explicated in exactly these ten points and subscribed to identically by all adherents. Different people and groups emphasize and express a variety of these points somewhat differently. Some may even downplay or deny particular points here and there—there are, for example, highly biblicist denominations and seminaries that are unapologetically confessional. The point is not that biblicism is a unified doctrine that all of its adherents overtly and uniformly profess. The point, rather, is that this constellation of interrelated assumptions and beliefs informs and animates the outlooks and practices of major sectors of institutional and popular conservative American Protestantism, especially evangelicalism.

Evangelical biblicism has a long history in America—one revealing how much popular biblicism was driven not by fellowship with the historic church but by the particular sensibilities of life in a postrevolutionary, nineteenth-century, individualistic, republican democracy.[16] However intensely and with whatever variations it may be expressed by different groups, biblicism is the foundational belief and practice of many tens of millions of American Christians—perhaps as many as a hundred million (according to General Social Survey data, about one-third of all adult Americans say that they believe that “the Bible is the actual word of God and should be taken literally, word for word”).[17] Biblicism can readily be found in the belief statements of scores of denominations, seminaries, and parachurch ministries; seen in the words of myriad Christian authors and speakers; heard in the messages of innumerable pulpits and Bible studies; and observed in the practices of countless personal devotions.

Popular, Institutional, and Scholarly Examples of Biblicism

To put a finer point of particularity on the “ism” about which I have generalized above, I next cite some examples of specific expressions of biblicism. I draw here from an almost limitless supply of possible examples, both academic and popular, using numbers in brackets (e.g., [5]) throughout—at the risk of oversimplifying and overlabeling—to indicate when any of the ten biblicist themes noted above are expressed or implied. I begin with popular or “folk” expressions of biblicism[18] and then move on to more scholarly and institutional examples.

Biblicism is everywhere in evangelical popular culture, including, for instance, on the Internet. One Bible website dedicated to helping readers in “selecting the best Bible translations,” for example, is entitled “God’s Handbook to Life” [10].[19] Another Christian music and lyrics website devotes a page to “The Bible, God’s Word—Our Manual for Life” [10], which says that the Bible “contains the solution for every problem you are facing today [3]. The Bible is an encyclopedia on all subjects you can think of under the sun” [10].[20] Likewise, Faith and Fitness Magazine on its website calls the Bible “His Instruction Manual—Our Guidebook for a Healthy Life” [10], explaining that

the Bible is designed by God to provide us a blueprint for living life. It’s like an owner’s manual for a piece of exercise equipment [9 implied]. We can make the best use of the equipment if we read the owner’s manual so we are aware of how to use all the special capabilities and how all the “buttons and whistles” work. When it breaks down, we can look in the manual to know how to repair it [10].[21]

Similarly, the author of the “Bible Authors” webpage says that

the Bible was written through more than 40 men, but it fits together perfectly as if written by one man [7] because the author of all 66 books is the Holy Spirit [1]. The Bible was written over a time span of about 2,000 years, and it is totally accurate in matters of History, Prophecy, and every issue of life. There are no contradictions in the Bible [7]. . . . The Bible contains the mind of God [1]. . . . It is the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the pilot’s compass, the soldier’s sword [4, 5 implied], and the Christian’s charter . . . [that] condemns all who trifle with its holy contents. The Word of God is your absolute, infallible guide for life. Just like every major purchase is accompanied by an owner’s manual which tells you how to operate it, if you do not go by the book, it won’t work. The Bible is God’s owner’s manual for your life [10]. God would not save you and call you to service without clear, exact directions. You must go by the book.[22]

As another example, popular evangelical pastor and author John F. MacArthur Jr. writes that the Bible is “the only reliable and sufficient worship manual.”[23] Folk biblicism is also expressed in products such as automobile bumper stickers and T-shirts, as with the following actual instances, all currently for sale:

• God said it, I believe it, that settles it!
• BIBLE—Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth
• Vote Responsibly—Vote the Bible!
• Confused? Read the Directions! [picture of Bible]
• Have You Read My #1 Best Seller [picture of Bible]? There Is Going to Be a Test. —God
• Have Truth Decay? Brush Up on Your Bible
• Hey Bible Hater! You’d Fit Right in with Communist-Atheist Regimes, Dictatorships, and Islamic States!
• Got Scripture?
• Certified Bible Thumper! [themes 1, 4–8, and 10 implied]

Biblicism also pervades the evangelical book-publishing market, which entails both popular evangelical markets and formal evangelical institutions (Thomas Nelson, Harvest House, NavPress, InterVarsity Press, etc.). The following are examples, drawn from among a longer list of similar books, almost all of which are currently still in print, all of whose titles listed here are, for present purposes, well worth reading word for word:

• Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions
• Biblical Principles for Starting and Operating a Business
• 100 Biblical Tips to Help You Live a More Peaceful and Prosperous Life
• Cooking with the Bible: Recipes for Biblical Meals
• The Bible Cure for Cancer
• The World According to God: A Biblical View of Culture, Work, Science, Sex, and Everything Else
• The Biblical Guide to Alternative Medicine
• Bible Answers for Every Need
• Bible Prophecy 101: A Guide to End Times in Plain Language
• What Does the Bible Say about . . . The Ultimate A to Z Resource to Contemporary Topics One Would Not Expect to Find in the Bible, Fully Illustrated—Discover What the Bible Says about 500 Real-Life Topics [pictures on the cover include golfing, pets, flower arrangements, and a whistle]
• How to Make Choices You Won’t Regret—40 Minute Bible Studies
• Queen Esther’s Secrets of Womanhood: A Biblical Rite of Passage for Your Daughter
• Handbook for Christian Living: Biblical Answers to Life’s Tough Questions
• Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible Is Supernatural in Origin
• Friendship Counseling: Biblical Foundations for Helping Others
• Principles for Life: Using Biblical Principles to Bring Dynamic Psychological Healing
• Business by the Book: Complete Guide of Biblical Principles for the Workplace
• Bible Solutions to Problems of Daily Living
• The Biblical Connection to the Stars and Stripes: A Nation’s Godly Principles Embodied in Its Flag
• God’s Blueprint for Building Marital Intimacy
• Crime and Community in Biblical Perspective
• A Crown of Glory: A Biblical View of Aging
• Gardening with Biblical Plants
• Biblical Psychology
• One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism
• Leadership Communication: A Scriptural Perspective
• Diagrams for Living: The Bible Unveiled
• What the Bible Says about Parenting: Biblical Principles for Raising Godly Children
• God Honoring Finances: What the Bible Tells You about Managing Money
• Success in School: Building on Biblical Principles
• Christian Dress and Adornment—Biblical Perspectives
• Feeling Good about Your Feelings: How to Express Your Emotions in Harmony with Biblical Principles
• Getting the Skinny on Prosperity: Biblical Principles That Work for Everyone
• Off to Work We Go: Teaching Careers with Biblical Principles
• Incoming: Listening for God’s Messages—A Handbook for Life
• Biblical Strategies to Financial Freedom
• Revelations That Will Set You Free: The Biblical Roadmap for Spiritual and Psychological Growth
• Scripture Based Solutions for Handling Stress
• Bad Girls of the Bible and What We Can Learn from Them
• Success by Design: Ten Biblical Secrets to Help You Achieve Your God-Given Potential
• The Awesome Book of Bible Facts
• Learn the Bible in 24 Hours
• Body by God: The Owner’s Manual for Maximized Living
• Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood
• Beyond Positive Thinking: Success and Motivation in the Scriptures
• Biblical Economics: A Commonsense Guide to Our Daily Bread
• Holding Hands, Holding Hearts: Recovering a Biblical View of Christian Dating
• Politics and the Christian: A Scriptural Treatise
• Seven Secrets to Bible-Made Millionaires
• Prophecy 20/20: Profiling the Future through the Lens of Scripture
• Weather and the Bible: 100 Questions and Answers[24]
  [Implied in these titles are biblicist themes 1–10.

- Christian Smith

Charles Jencks - An Architect's View of Postmodernism

The postmodern architect Charles Jencks gives to us his perspective of early postmodernism as he understood it from the 1980s to the present, based upon his past building and landscape designs, projects, and many books.

Moreover, the Evolutionary map (found below) that he provides in Architectural Review (July 2000) reminds us of the fluidity of "isms" that have washed over our past century of mankind - helping us to re-visualize the ebbs-and-flows that have washed over our souls and across our culturally-bound lives. It tells us of our larger-narratives, our grander-stories, that each of us have had a small part in the making, the creating or the undoing: to those lives around us, to our environment, and to our sense of being, time and place.

For the longer we have lived the more we have found ourselves personally (or impersonally) involved with the many events charted on this map having witnessed those events within our life; some of which we may have had a small part in its construction or de-construction; many others that we didn't. Events that didn't make sense to us at the time but in hindsight fall into place within our mental and communal (corporate) landscapes as we digested, and picked-through, an assortment of ideas, fashions, constructs, and debacles that have embroiled, or enmeshed, us through our lifetimes.

And in many ways, I suspect this blog (along with my poetic writings) have been a small attempt to piece together what I have seen and witnessed through the past decades of my life. And as the map below suggests, it seems that we have been through a lot. Each event or movement affecting us in one way or another, some directly, and others simply glancing off of us. To leave us dangling like a loose-end of thread trying to piece together the larger tapestry of our lives within an intermix of movements and duties that have driven us from morning to evening, sunrise to sunset, searching for solidarity with God, society, family and self. Waking only to hear again a continual garble of symphonies and cacophonous noises unintelligible until collected much later in life to be reviewed in the broader lights of interplay between significant speakers both personally and impersonally by a literary author, a musician, an historian, theologian, or philosopher. As each speaker/presentation interacts with, or intersects, our past-and-present world/era/timelines through the spoken or written word, a sound of music, a convocation, a play or even an authored work itself.

That said, Charles Jencks reviews his life's convocations and vocation revisualizing with us what he has seen and witness within our percolating 20th Century global societies, attempting to capture and build those many separate stories into a variegated set of pluralistic, many-faceted structures and environments that tell the story of our human societies at once complex, unending, restless, searching, evolving. It is the story of us. It is the story of me. It is our grander meta-narratives, our turbulent cultural symphonies and cacophonous noises, our alters of sacrifice and worship, our corporate works of industry and largesse, attributed to the magnificence, the disquiet, even the horror of mankind seeking relevance upon the footlights of life's multitudinous stages and melodramatic operas.

R.E. Slater

October 2011 

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"The Century is Over"

Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture

with its attractor basins, by Charles Jencks

Scanned from Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77

"The Century is Over" - Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture with its attractor basins,

by Charles Jencks, Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77 - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/10/charles-jencks-look-at-modernism.html

Post-Modernism has become an integral part of the cultural landscape after developing for thirty years as a movement in the arts, after being disputed and celebrated. In this witty overview, Charles Jencks, the first to write a book defining the subject, argues that the movement is one more reaction from within modernism critical of its shortcomings. The unintended consequences of modernisation, such as the terrorist debacle and global warming, are typical issues motivating a Critical Modern response today.

In a unique analysis, using many explanatory diagrams and graphs, Jencks reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. Critical Modernism emerges at two levels. As an underground movement, it is the fact that many modernisms compete, quarrel and criticise each other as they seek to become dominant. Secondly, when so many of these movements follow each other today in quick succession, they may reach a ‘critical mass,’ a Modernism, and become a conscious tradition.

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Critical Modernism:
Where is Post-Modernism Going
[Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Modernism-Where-Post-Modernism-Going/dp/0470030119/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1318510071&sr=8-3

by Charles Jencks, Academy Press; 5 edition (June 12, 2007)

More books by Charles Jencks -

http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Jencks/e/B001IOFGR4/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Wikipedia Bio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Jencks

Official Website - http://www.charlesjencks.com/current.html

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What is Post-Modernism?

http://www.amazon.com/What-Post-Modernism-Is%C3%A0-Charles-Jencks/dp/1854904280/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318510579&sr=8-1

by Charles Jencks, Academy Press; 4 edition (June 13, 1996)

Provides a lucid exposition of Post-Modernism in art and architecture.

From the Back Cover

'What is Post-Modernism?' Is it a new world view,or an outgrowth of the Post-Industrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture? In this fourth, entirely revised edition,   shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, Charles Jencks using analysis and diagrams designed especially for this edition, reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation.

But why has post-modern culture arrived? In an ironic parable, 'the Protestant Crusade'. Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden origins: the Modernists' abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudo-religion led in the 1920s to the famous 'vacuum-cleaning' period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the 'Protestant Inquisition' which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared - Post-Modernism; a Counter-Reformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism.

However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of Post-Modernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of Late-Modernism. This takes the de-creation and nihilism of its parent to extremes. The main engine that drives global culture today - post-modernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network - is analysed in its close relation to other 'posts': Post-Fordism, Post-Socialism and the post-national world of trading blocs and unstable nations. Jencks argues that this may result in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations.

The most radical idea of this challenging book is the conclusion: the notion that the post-modern world does not mean the end of meta-narratives, but something quite different. Belief systems are flourishing as never before and, Jencks argues, "a new meta-narrative, based on the story of the universe and its generative qualities, will soon create a new world view that will affect all areas. It is a story which grows directly out of the post-modern sciences of complexity and is thus both true and mythic."

Jencks other What is...? titles include What is Abstraction?, What is Deconstruction?

An Amazon Book Review

by mlbasquiat 

I have great respect for Charles Jencks as an architect, and as a critic of art relating to such. Therefore the book should be retitled, What is Postmodern Architecture? Or what is everything about Post-Modernism except the art? The main focus seems to be on the industrial world which created the art, rather then the [postmodernistic] art itself. Seems hardly revolutionary or even relevant since everyone and their brother and sister has written on that subject since 1820. I was hoping for something which would address the art, but I was sorely disappointed. The constant focus on the world around the buildings of postmodernism dragged and was inebriatingly dull (It got to the point where the author was forced to contradict himself to make the book interesting).

The focus of Postmoderism was once architecture, however, now the focus has shifted, it seems everyone except the academics know this. [Jencks sections on art and literature are light and misinformed] and I expected more from Jencks, being the great mind of the century that he was. If you want to know anything helpful and relevant pretaining to Post Modernism today, do not read this book. But hey if you want to know about your father's post modernism, read this book!

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2000 July: Jencks' Theory of Evolution,

an Overview of 20th Century Architecture

http://www.architectural-review.com/archive/2000-july-jencks-theory-of-evolution-an-overview-of-20th-century-architecture/8623596.article

7 December 2011 | By Charles Jencks

AR 2000 July − Jencks' Theory of Evolution Diagram

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At the start of the twenty-first century, Charles Jencks gives a personal, perceptive and provocative summary of the architecture of the twentieth. Now that the century is over it is time to ask what it meant for architecture. This is a harder question than it first appears. Did Modern architecture, as its apologists claim, triumph over other contenders? What was the relationship of commercial practice to quality - did the best architects lead or only influence the profession? Did good architecture trickle-down or was it dumbed-down? Or did a hundred mini-movements tell the real story of the century; or was it like that of the past, one of spec builders, the DIY industry and self-build?

In terms of sheer numbers the century has been claimed for the shed building, the factory, warehouse and its cousin, the office. In terms of cost airports have won, in terms of prestige museums, in terms of kitsch it has been shopping and mega-malls, but building-counts like body-counts only tell the background story.

The main narrative does not belong to any building type, movement, individual or sector. Rather, it belongs to a competitive drama, a dynamic and turbulent flow of ideas, social movements, technical forces and individuals all jockeying for position. Sometimes, a movement or an individual may be momentarily in the public eye and enjoy media power, but such notoriety rarely lasts for more than five years and usually for not more than two.

It is true that certain architects of the previous century - how strange those words ring for Modernists - were creative forces that lasted for longer. Mies was a power to be reckoned with in the ’20s and ’60s. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Aalto, who with Mies made up the big four, were seminal at more times and Kahn, Stirling, Eisenman and Gehry, the little four, each had two small periods of influence. But even these protean characters, in order to stay relevant and on top, had to reinvent themselves about every 10 years.

The notion that there is a ‘10-year rule’ of reinvention for the creative genius in the twentieth century has been well argued by the Harvard cognitive scientist Howard Gardner in his book Creating Minds, 1993. Subtitled An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi, it is a detailed study of these, the big seven Modernists, and it shows how they often made breakthroughs or underwent creative shifts every 10 years.

In a recently finished book, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, I have found the same pattern in this the Proteus of design. As the Hayward Gallery put it, polemically, in the title of a 1987 retrospective Le Corbusier was ‘The Architect of the Century’. Well, could this be possible - even before the century was over and Frank Gehry given a shot at the title? I think the answer is ‘yes’, as I argue at length and as the accompanying evolutionary tree, or diagram, shows.

One will find Corbu’s presence on this chart at five different points:

• as the leader of ‘the Heroic Period’ of the 1920s;
• as a leading thinker of a new (and rather unfortunate) urbanism;
• as the leader of ClAM and mass housing after the war;
• as a harbinger of Post-Modernism with Ronchamp and the symbolic architecture of Chandigarh; and,
• just at the end of his life, with his Brussels and Zurich pavilions, the forerunner of the High-Tech movement.

No other architect was as creative in different traditions; not for nothing was he seen as ‘the Picasso of architecture’.

But the point of my argument is slightly different than Howard Gardner’s. While agreeing with his analysis, I think one of the important reasons for the demonic creativity of these seven ‘geniuses’ is that the last century was uncommonly turbulent. My diagram, and its tortuous blobs, captures this continual revolution. At any one time the twentieth century architect has had to face three or four competing movements of architecture, respond to changes in technology, social forces, style and ideology - not to mention world wars and such large impersonal forces as the Internet. It was an exhausting century. As the Chinese say: ‘may you be condemned to live in interesting times’.

However beneficent this may be for architectural creativity this has not been healthy or good for the environment. For one thing it has been Gardner’s message - the revolutionary period has been dominated by men, there are very few women among the 400 protean creators I have gathered from other writers. An urbanism both more feminine and coherent would have been far superior to the over- rationalized and badly related boxes that have formed our cities.

For another thing continual revolution, or the constant change of fashion, business cycles, technical innovation and social transformation has meant that architecture, like the other arts, lacks depth and perfection. It is hard to master an art when surfing a waterfall. Nonetheless, that is what the old century has been, a turbulent motion of whirls and eddies; sometime even the whirlpool of Fascist and Nazi architecture going nowhere but down. There are about 100 trends and technical forces shown, and 60 movements, many of them ‘isms’ - Futurism, Expressionism, Brutalism or Metabolism - that became ‘wasms’. Riding these waves as a leader is exhilarating, until the Neo-follower surfs on by.

I don’t mean to be disparaging so much as realistic. The twentieth century produced great architecture but, as Lewis Mumford often noted, with great faults. A critical Modernism, or Post-Modern perspective, must acknowledge these deep problems and face the horrors of the century as much as the triumphs.

The evolutionary tree and its surprising conclusions

Usually when historians look at the recent past they do so with the eyes and taste that rigidly exclude the variety, contradictions, mess and creative wealth of a period, and we applaud them for so doing. All history writing is selective and based on theories of what really matters, and there is no way around this limitation. But there are ways to compensate for perspectival distortion and over the last 30 years I have devised a method, the evolutionary tree, which if it is not completely inclusive is at least balanced in its selective effects.

As can be seen in the classifiers to the extreme left of the diagram, it is based on the assumption that there are coherent traditions that tend to self-organize around underlying structures. These deep structures, often opposed to each other psychologically and culturally, act like what are called, in the esoteric science of nonlinear dynamics, ‘attractor basins’: they attract architects to one line of development rather than another. Why? Not only because of taste, training, education and friendships, but because of type-casting and the way the market forces architects to have an identifiable style and skill. In a word, specialization.

Of course, architects dislike being pigeon-holed as much as do politicians and writers - they too like to claim universality, freedom and openness. But it is the rare architect, such as Le Corbusier or Gehry, who can be found in several different traditions and often they are pilloried for leaving one fold for another. Enough forces conspire to keep the architect ‘on message’, even when they seek, like Post-Modernists, to be pluralists.

What stories does this turbulent blob-diagram tell? In crude terms it reveals some surprises. Most architecture - 80 per cent? - is by non-architects, or at least the result of larger processes that are, artistically speaking, unselfconscious: building regulations, governmental acts, the vernacular, planning laws, mass housing, the mallification of the suburbs, and inventions in the technical/industrial sphere. Le Corbusier in the 1920s, Russian disurbanists in the 1930s and Richard Rogers today try to affect this inchoate area, but like globalization it is mostly beyond anyone’s control.

This high proportion of non-architectural creativity is likely to lessen in the future as more and more of the environment is forced into governmental and planning control, the result of economic and ecological forces. But the ironic truth remains that, in terms of control and mega-planning, the Disney corporation has been more effective than the former Soviet Union and, architecturally-speaking, its results are unselfconscious vernacular pastiche (all-too-consciously applied.)

Another surprise is that a polemical movement may not be the preserve of just one tradition. One would have thought the ecological imperative might have been monopolized by the Activist tradition, but it has been taken up by all of them in different ways. For instance, the Classicists, following Leon Krier, have created an ecological movement known as the New Urbanism. It is based on the tight village planning of a previous area, and it is mostly Classical and Vernacular in style; its green credentials are presented with historicist wrappers.

Then there are Post-Modern versions of green architecture, with SITE, Ralph Erskine and Lucien Kroll; High-Tech versions usually called Eco-Tech (or Organi-Tech); the Biomorphic versions of Ken Yeang. And there is the madly optimistic corporate-governmental version of the Sustainability Movement let by Amory Lovins. His notion is summarized in the oxymoron ‘Natural Capitalism’. Nature and capitalism can walk together in the twenty-first century. He argues, counter to stereotypes, that so many efficiencies and savings can be made that economic and ecological growth can occur at the same time - at four times their current rate! - if only we can think through all systems at the start.

As Oscar Wilde put it: ‘being natural is such a difficult pose to keep up’- and reconciling these heretofore opposed forces is going to take more than a pose, that is, a raft of tax incentives. In any case, the point is that green architectures, in the plural, are coming from everywhere while we might have thought the ecological issue would be taken over by just one or two movements.

The south porch of the Templo de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

A third surprise is that we can see the strange alliances within the self-conscious tradition, usually the mainstream, or what Sigfried Giedion called the ‘ruling style’ of architecture. Up through the 1940s this was mostly a version of Classicism: Edwardian Baroque, Beaux-Arts Classicism, monumental stripped Classicism, or the fundamental Classicism of Gunnar Asplund.

When the Fascists in Italy and Spain, and the leaders of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia self-consciously imposed their version as a state style it squeezed out contending approaches. The diaspora of Modern architects and the waning of other approaches are clear from the diagram: like evolutionary species whose habitat is destroyed they went virtually extinct (or emigrated from Europe and the USSR).

Following sociologists such a David Harvey and David Herf, there is another surprise: I have called these Classical or monumental folk architects ‘Reactionary Modernists’. Like Albert Speer they were just as wedded to technology, economic progress, instrumental reason and the Zeitgeist as Mies, Le Corbusier and Gropius. The fact that they persecuted Functionalists and creative Modernists and adopted reactionary styles and attitudes has obscured the deeper point that they all shared some common assumptions about power, mass culture and mass production.

They were, in effect, disputing some common territory, a point that the diagram reveals especially when Modernism triumphs after the Second World War. The true inheritors of the mainstream were the big corporate Modernists, and they have been so ever since. They only appear small in my diagram because their creativity and influence has not been excessive. In terms of volume of work they have overshadowed the four other traditions.

The evolutionary tree also shows a minor surprise: the way this dominant is constantly attracted back to stripped Classicism, or degree-zero Modernism. Although they are very different, Lincoln Center in New York, and 20 other cultural scenes in America during the ’60s, are in this blood line, as is the Modern Classicism of Robert Stern and Demetri Porphyrios. The Corporate Modernism of Berlin, and even Richard Meier, is not too far away from this ‘strange attractor’. Why? The corporate forces of production and patronage favour an impersonal, abstract, semi-Classical sobriety. Giedion’s notion of the ‘ruling taste’ is usually pulled towards this attractor basin.

But mainstream culture is not always located on this axis. Several important exceptions were when Expressionism, the Bauhaus, and the Heroic Period dominated for a few years in the ’20s, or Post-Modernism did in the early ’80s, or Art Nouveau and National Romanticism did at the start of the century. Hector Guimard in Paris, Horta in Belgium, Mackintosh in Glasgow, Eliel Saarinen and Lars Sonck in Helsinki, and my favourite architect, Antonio Gaudi, in Barcelona - all became momentary leaders of a major public architecture, if only for three of four years.

Gaudi a standard

Here is a point where my bias shows through the evolutionary tree. Nikolaus Pevsner dismissed most of these movements as ‘transitory fashions’ and for Giedion, except for the Heroic Period, they were not ‘constituent facts’. One remembers how Modernist historians, like revisionist Communists air-brushing Trotsky out of photographs, liked to clean up uncomfortable facts. Interpretation and judgment obviously distort all historical selection.

My argument for placing Antonio Gaudi the best architect of the century, even ahead of Le Corbusier, does not rest on his influence, city planning or theoretical contribution. Rather, it concerns his creative brilliance at turning city building and structure into a high art. No other architect managed to get craftsmen, artists and even patrons working together on such a large and complete scale. His works remain the standard of integrating all the arts at the highest creative and symbolic level.

The reason his work has such creative depth is that he took a long time - which other twentieth-century architects did not allow themselves - to innovate at all levels. His architecture exploits all sorts of new structural types - such as the hyperbolic paraboloid - if not for the very first time, then for the most seminal time. He makes such form-types his own by giving them a forceful and poetic expression. Moreover he bends structural rationalism to expressive ends. For instance, where the Italian engineer Nervi makes an ordered art from showing the isostatic lines of force in his concrete ceiling, Gaudi takes the same forces and makes them dynamic - like the straining muscles of an athlete - pushing against each other. Concrete becomes animated, humorous, related to our body and moods.

Beyond this, in buildings such as the Casa Batllo, he uses technological and structural innovations for symbolic, and political, ends - to present the sufferings of the Catalans under the dragon of Castile. Structural and material invention are always means to a larger intention, and it is this overall meaning that gives his work the greatest symbolic depth. It communicates up and down the scales, from the everyday and local to the cosmic. By comparison the work of Mies and Aalto is too abstract, Le Corbusier and Wright too cut off from the language of the street, Eisenman too cerebral, Gehry too formalist.

Left. The lodge and turret of the Parc Guell.Right.
The interior of the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia

To say Gaudi was the architect of the century, however, reveals my partiality towards artistic and symbolic architecture, values that other critics, such as Ken Frampton, do not necessarily share. In an Art Net lecture in London of 1974, I was shocked to hear him dismiss Gaudi as ‘kitsch’ - but Philip Johnson used to dismiss Frank Lloyd Wright as the ‘greatest architect of the nineteenth century’. The evolutionary tree is meant to make such egregious dismissals, as Pevsner, Giedion, Frampton and Johnson are happy to commit, more difficult. Or at least make them feel uncomfortable.

I realize, however, the high placement of Gaudi is a contentious claim that needs more defence than I can offer here. Those who value the perfecting of architectural technique might proffer Mies, Kahn or Norman Foster as the architect of the century. Those who value theory and education might favour Gropius at the Bauhaus or Eisenman because of his design and writing; those who prefer an understated humanism might put Aalto in this role. Many contenders for the top positions re apparent in the weighting I have given the 400 ‘best’ architects.

But my idiosyncrasy of proffering Gaudi actually raises another surprise. In spite of a few disagreements over ‘transitory facts’, most critics and historians of twentieth-century architecture would accept this lift of the 400 and most of the relative weighting. They would argue over the details but, because it is constructed as a composite portrait of what they have written, it is not very contentious.

Perhaps I have exaggerated the recent Biomorphic School (because I think it will be important) but a provocative aspect of this diagram is how conventional is it. We are surprised to find such a tumultuous century so full of stereotype and consensus. Was Modernism really invented to mass-produce opinion and culture on a global scale - what ever happened to its creativity and individuality?

When we look back at he nineteenth century, with superiority, we laugh at the Salon and the conformity of an Academy of taste that could elevate Bougereau and Lord Leighton to such heights. Will the twenty-first century be kinder to the Brit Pack of Damien Hirst and other sensations sanctioned by the Royal Academy; or the 10 000 followers of Andy Warhol? One of the more pleasant aspects of a change in century, and millennium, is that it forces such thoughts of quality and perspective into view. On 1 January 2000 all the most avant-garde artists and Modernists became old hat. The twentieth century is over; interpretation begins!


From the AR Archives

Charles Jencks discusses revivalism in relation to the Getty Museum and asks if we should still indulge in historical simulation from 1978’s February edition of The Architectural Review.