Today is two for one day in reviewing all things Foster/Tennant. This review will address the chapters “How to Bear the Weight” and “Manhood through Mission”. The chapters really address much the same thing as they focus on the mission and calling of men particularly as it pertains to their work. Overall, the chapters end with the sort of bland mission/vision goal setting we find in almost any other self-help book where someone is examining their future and making changes for the better. After all the theological talk, the net result of Foster/Tennant’s advice is to write out three to five achievable goals that aren’t impossible in spiritual, physical, economic, vocational, and relational areas to start a new life. Then, the authors want their new recruits to write out a mission statement describing it all and go to town getting it done. Anyone working in the corporate world should recognize the sort of advice given here, merely ‘dominionized’ for Foster/Tennant and their overall focus on men as rulers of their destiny in line with what they see as the kingdom work of the mission of God. This is coupled with additional advice asking the reader to consider what makes them happy, what they’re good at, and how they’re gifted in order to think about where to go next in doing work for the kingdom. Reading along, I almost expected the authors to pull out a spiritual gifts test for the reader to take and send in for Foster and Tennant to score!
Of course, Foster/Tennant continue to present a reductive account in invoking the missio Dei, a term they use but yet again don’t bother to define. Men are told to order their lives according to God’s mission but what is that exactly and how does that take place? Of course, the mission of God as he reveals himself and establishes his kingdom in the Three and One of the Trinity is no small thing to quietly pass by on the way to thinking about the mission of men and their participation in the same. Joe Boot’s work The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society is especially instructive here but not found referenced within their pages nor is there any real discussion of what the mission of God actually is in Foster/Tennant. Dr. Boot defines the missio Dei as “the universal implementation of the ‘reign of God” found first in the “‘sending of God’ (of His Son, the Holy Spirit and His church) and the universal ‘reign of God’ (basileia tou Theou) and is therefore not limited to earlier, somewhat truncated, soteriological, cultural, or ecclesiastical definitions of ‘mission'”. The reason a definition must be offered is because the mission of God is a controversial term and exists as such both used and abused by a great many folks in trying to understand the work of God and our salvation in him. Over the last thirty years, a lot of postmodern nonsense slipped into the church in the name of both the missio Dei and “missional” theology so a proper definition is in fact necessary. Foster/Tennant likely agree with a definition like the one offered by Dr. Boot given their emphasis on dominion, but at the same time simply assuming that’s what they mean isn’t helpful in understanding the corresponding mission of the redeemed man in response. Dr. Boot goes on to define mission as straight out hundred proof “biblical theology and doxology as the mission…biblical theology externalized and applied to every area of life”. Foster/Tennant define mission instead as, “your best effort at wisely integrating your interests, skills, and circumstances into a personal vision for exercising dominion over what God has given you”. The difference between Dr. Boot’s understanding of mission and Foster/Tennant could not be more profound. Foster/Tennant essentially present a Christianized version of modern psychological self-help psychobabble rather than focusing on the true mission of mankind in God’s sending. That is why chapter 12 ends with goal setting and crafting mission statements instead of understanding and applying the consideration that theology determines doxology in how we live.
A constant strategy of Foster/Tennant in the book is to present a negative case and enforce a negative dialectic. So, the first three points of “Manhood Through Mission” is about avoiding the wrong assumptions about “mission”. Why do Foster/Tennant go here instead of fleshing out a fuller conception of mission as defined by Boot? The simple answer is that there just isn’t anything but the skin and bones here of what in other contexts is just a repeat of secular psychology and typical career advice the reader could find almost anywhere. So, Foster/Tennant have to talk about something and decide to frame the matter in theological terms rooted in dominion. But, Joel Osteen or Tony Robbins could have told the reader to have three to five goals and a mission statement as a way to a “Best Life Now” sort of future.
However, there are likely more complex social reasons why Foster/Tennant dive down into a negative dialectic about mission and a man’s work. There is a sort of Rust Belt blue collar flavor to Foster/Tennant’s book that is likely more about the authors and their background than they let on in their writing. Having lived in western rural PA for several years now, the commentary they write at once resonates with a prevalent mindset among many of the folks who remain here after the coal, lumber, and steel industries have left the region, stuck in dead-end low wage low skill manual labor jobs, and perpetuating what might be called a sort of lower to lower middle class lifestyle transferred from generation to generation as poverty reigns supreme. After all, the median per capita income for the county we live in is $25,000 a year. Work is drudgery for many of these folks and they live for the weekend to fish, hunt, or roll around in ATV’s. The so-called Rust Belt that runs from New York to the Midwest is filled with the lingering problems of industrial decline, poverty, mindsets that on the whole are often quite negative about innovation and moving past one’s circumstances, a poor work ethic, a lack of initiative, and a generational culture that sees nothing but low wage work and just surviving going forward.
Foster/Tennant are busy in these two chapters tempering the expectations of men in terms of having any sort of grand visions or plans toward a better future as a result of dominion. Elsewhere in the book they want to avoid being dreamers. In fact, the authors tell their readers to abandon the idea that a man’s mission must be epic and that a person’s mission will be limited by the extent to which a man conforms to God’s law, another way of saying that being successful and obeying God’s law in society don’t work well together. Expect to be banned from Twitter. ‘Don’t get too excited about all this dominion stuff,’ they’d say. Further, Foster/Tennant also want men to avoid thinking mission will include any sort of detailed map of a man’s life. In chapter 11, the authors make quite the point to say that dominion is a matter of toil and grind rather than “palaces and throne rooms”. “Manning up” is all about not being lazy, a struggle, and hard labor. Adam’s curse in working is still in effect and you’ll certainly feel it. A man’s life can’t be easy and soft and must find blessing in “pushing a heavy boulder up a mountain every day only for it to roll back down”. Foster/Tennant want the reader to believe that happiness isn’t found in a material/spiritual dualism and appeal to Christ as the one who helps a man cope with the illusion that “your life sucks less than it does” as a result of seeing it differently in Christ.
Foster/Tennant claim that “the Spirit changes everything” and they’re not being Gnostic, but they don’t escape the charge quite so easily. If Christ really does redeem work and transforms the everyday life of men, is work still a curse? In passing, we might ask whether work was the curse in the first place since that’s not what the Bible actually teaches. Foster/Tennant only suggest changing one’s “mindset of toil and futility” and look at things another way in Christ. The problem here is that work itself has been changed, not only that our mind must change. Toil and grind may reflect some “dirty jobs” in the economy but men are not in fact limited to continuing in lives and careers that are low wage and low skilled. Further, Foster/Tennant’s perspective here is about man as an individual and forgets that the mission is actually multi-generational. Therefore, a map detailing both specific plans and multi-generational dreams more than just a few goals is the sort of planning that is likely going to be more helpful than thinking you’re on mission simply because you think of your dead-end job differently. Part of the authors’ mindset is reinforced by universalizing passages of Scripture about suffering that were never meant to be taken that way. American culture is largely Christian and self-determinative. Men are not in fact bound to stay in bad jobs and hard labor like they live in a concentration camp in Siberia or slave on a farm for a Roman noble. Education is widely available here to switch careers and businesses can be started at the drop of a hat with almost nothing. Opportunity is had by all to take the risks necessary to move into a more complete mission-minded framework in advancing the kingdom. And, yes, failure is likely too but never remains unrecoverable in American life. But, Foster/Tennant make nothing of these new realities while focusing on how hard and difficult work is and saying it’s going to stay that way, except of course in how one thinks about it. What good really does it do to tell men, “Yeah, your life really does suck, but think happy thoughts!”?
A proper chapter on mission in light of the missio Dei would address the blessings and nature of risk, reward, and ownership as it pertains to vocation and life. Men need to take more risk in our society and can, not less. Outlining man’s mission is about understanding the progressive work of God and the favor he bestows in offering grace and giftedness in vocation to men and their families. Further, otherwise ordinary men who have adopted the sort of hundred proof mission Dr. Boot outlines in his book have turned the world upside down, they’ve built nations, fought tyrants, and done things never thought possible before much like the Hebrews 11 men and women before them. When men became biblical men during the Reformation in taking God at his word, they spawned multi-generational advancement that included things like the advent of modern science, Ivy League universities, accounting, banking, global trade, technological innovation, freedom of women from bad patriarchal designs and limiting lives, peace among the nations, and global prosperity through capitalism. In fact, in the last thirty years, a billion people have been brought out of extreme poverty through the outworking of Protestant economic thought. So, I very much take issue with the notion that the calling and work of men on mission is somehow always going to be something other than epic. Foster/Tennant are just dead wrong here and their reductive approach to mission is really just recasting Rust Belt-like poverty in Christian terms. What Foster/Tennant miss is that “epic” is normal for our God and abundant life or the shalom peace of God has far more this life blessing attached to it than they let on in their negative assessment of men at work in this life.
True to form, Foster/Tennant enforce a postmodern outlook even in the way they consider their negative assessment of where men are in the culture and society around them. Foster/Tennant tell men, “the deck is stacked against you, it is a shock to the system…A lot of men awaken to this reality only to stew on the raw deal they got. And, to be sure, modern men are victims of a twisted man-hating system. They are casualties of the war on gender: scarred, injured, and discouraged…We can relate.” I doubt seriously that Foster/Tennant have read Foucault and Marcuse and instead intuit their own insecurities in relating the notion that men are victims and that the deck is stacked against them. Further, the authors also seem to be unaware of Marx and how he talked about awakening the proletariat as they attempt to do the same with men they feel find themselves in this terrible position. They echo the language of Marx, Marcuse, and even Foucault in seeing a system at work bent to destroy them, a victimization as a result of gender wars, and a sort of technological rationality to it all that is inescapable. Had Foster/Tennant any real knowledge of how critical theorists, postmodernists, and even Marx himself thought and wrote about these things they likely would have expressed what they want to say differently because otherwise they risk informed readers seeing their claims as yet another postmodern systemic critique of society. But, instead Foster/Tennant go along with the standard cultural way to say these things in fine postmodern fashion.
This is a problem not only because Foster/Tennant echo postmodern language but more importantly what they claim simply isn’t true. While the notion of white privilege is a myth of no small measure that serves the postmodern gods of our society through critical theory, there is enough evidence in social science research to consider that what Foster/Tennant call out as the victimization of men is really just a remembrance of the blessings men in general continue to enjoy in our society. Christians don’t call what social scientists see as white privilege a matter of privilege, but there are in fact a great many benefits in being a man in a society that is still largely Christian that Foster/Tennant ignore in their special pleading. Further, using postmodern discursive techniques helps prep Christians to think about society in postmodern ways and inadvertently lends credence to deconstruction in Christian life and society. More importantly, however, men find themselves in the situation they’re in by virtue of their own action and not in fact because of a system designed to beat them down. Men aren’t victims. Men are blessed by God to be men and women are also blessed to be who they are even when both find themselves in trouble and sin. After all, the title of Foster/Tennant’s book is “It’s Good to Be a Man” but you wouldn’t know that by reading these two chapters! A simple change of mind or “wokeness” isn’t going to turn things around for men and their problems either. Foster/Tennant know this otherwise they wouldn’t attempt to move men from red-pilled angry status to being faithful to God in life. But, at the end of the day, their advice isn’t all that different from other self-help manuals or the postmodern move toward utopia, ‘Change the way you think about things, live differently, stick with your tribe, but keep doing what you’re doing even though you continue to suffer and nothing seems to change’, Marcuse practically said the same thing in One-Dimensional Man in pining toward utopia. About the only thing Foster/Tennant add is getting into a good church and being among good men with some kind of spiritual father in the lead. Tomorrow’s post will address the sort of fraternity Foster/Tennant advocate. As you can likely tell, there are a few problems there to consider as well.
Next Review:
The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man
No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1
No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2
No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1
No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2
How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood
Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission