Nathan Scott and the Cultural Economy of Faith

THE LEGACY OF REV. NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR. 103 Nathan Scott and the Cultural Economy of Faith Giles Gunn As I reflect on Nathan Scott'swork in religious studies, I am astounded, like so many, by the sheer scope and scale of it. Ranging over three centuries and a variety of traditions, simultaneously literary, philosophical, and theological, his curiosity was not only legendary but almost inexhaustible. Yetit could be argued that its chief subject was signaled early in the title of, if I am not mistaken, the third among his twenty-five titles. His attention wasabsorbed throughout his lifeby what he there called "Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier:' Modern literature so interested him because it was always making forays into the domains of what, for want of a better term, I'll call the de- or a-theologized spiritual. Bythe same token, modern religion so absorbed his attention because of its increasing dependence for its reconceptualization and articulation on formations that were imaginative and figurative. But this is a subject he made very much his own. His interest was not merely in the borders between these areas of experience so much as in, at least in his best writing, what could be seen and comprehended of the one from the domain of the other. Nathan knew, and helped me and so many others of his students understand, that disciplinary crossings can sometimes produce not only a new configuration of methodological practices but a new refiguration of the material on which they are directed. Change the paradigms by which one discipline makes sense of itself to itself by looking through the eyes of another and you can sometimes alter the way disciplines represent their own knowledge to themselves (Gunn 206). Tospend time on borders that delimit, differentiate, and yet link such different fields-sometimes charting where they overlap, sometimes investigating intersections that seem unusually productive, most often exploring the unmarked territory were they diverge as well as converge-involved a good deal more than survey work. It also entailed figuring out how those borders were created to begin with, who maintains and monitors them, what institutions and practices they serve or frustrate, how they have been challenged and redrawn over the decades, what those changes have done to our notions not just of religion and literature, but of culture and humanity, whether such borders constitute, in addition to lines of demarcation, places, regions, margins, peripheries, or zones with their own customs, protocols and laws, and, finally, what sorts of intellectual 104 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE and professional credentials-the academic equivalent of birth certificates, passports, and visas-one needs to traverse such borders without violating rules of trespass, much less risking professional humiliation, disgrace, or ostracism (Grenblatt and Gunn 5-8)-in short, as Nathan would have put it with a great guffaw, making an ass of oneself. There was,ofcourse, as Nathan viewed these matters, a specifichistorical point d'appui for these developments. As evident to a number of thinkers and critics of his generation, whether they resided confessionally within the precincts of Christian faith, as Nathan did, or quite outside them, it was obvious that literature and religion, long allies in the West in reinforcing (when not critiquing) each other's certitudes, had long since become variously problematic to one another while at the same time still remaining somehow sedimented in each other's being. From the literary side, this seeming contradiction was fairly easy to explain. The project of literary modernism, according to the historical narrative that I-and I believe Nathan-accepted was a decreative attempt to move perception back out of conventional, essentially Victorian, spiritual mindsets in the direction of what remains more elemental, even primordial, in our formalized humanity. The object was to recover, in the language of Wallace Stevens, "a reality not ourselves, something 'wholly other' by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking of broken and enriched" (Opus 237). On the other hand, religion had also been obliged to suffer a decreative process of its own as it reconfigured itself under the sign of the modern, and this process was nowhere better exemplified for Nathan than in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul...