Month: September 2004

This is from A Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C.S. Lewis by Gilbert Meilaender, and concerns the idea that Lewis emphasizes union with God rather than faith as the key to his theology:

Faith as trust is not for Lewis the foundation stone on which to build an exposition of Christian theology. Hence, the Christian life is not conceived largely as a turn from consciousness of sin to the proclamation of grace. Instead, it is conceived as a journey, a process of sanctification. The Christian is one who has found in Christ what he yearned for: the way to community with the Father. And he is one who has now entered upon an imitation of Christ. From start to finish his journey is the work of grace, but it remains true that grace is conceived not as the announcement of a right relationship with God but as the means by which one may travel the path which leads to such a relationship. …



…It should be obvious, however, taht we here touch upon an aspect of Lewis’ theology which might properly be termed “Anglo-Catholic.” It is the vision of God, not justification by grace through faith, which is the cornerstone of his theological system. (pp. 37-38, 1st edition)

An Episcopal priest once said something very similar to me – that I was already a Christian in virtue of my baptism, and that the rest of life was the journey toward sanctification (I’ve got a long way to go, by the way). Protestants often emphasize a particular “moment” of conversion where one is “saved.” And they tend to understand salvation in forensic terms, as an act whereby God decrees that we are right with him. Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox, it seems to me, are more likely to see the life of faith as a journey on the path to union with Christ in the manner Lewis (at least as interpreted here by Meilaender) seems to be getting at.

Protestantism has always had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the Law – understood both as the natural and revealed moral law. With its emphasis on justification by grace through faith alone, Protestantism has frequently been accused by critics of lapsing into antinomianism. That is, if we are saved by grace, independently of whether we keep the law, what motive do we have to be good people?

The Reformers were aware of this charge, of course (just as Paul was, cf. Romans 6), and early on they developed an approach to the Law that we may with some fairness call the “classical Protestant” position. For both Luther and Calvin, the Law has multiple uses:

The Political Use: The Law serves as a check on human sin, protecting the vulnerable and preserving society. Since we can’t assume that people will spontaneously, e.g. respect the lives and property of others, the political authorities are charged with enforcing external adherence to the law.

The Spiritual Use: This is arguably the most important use of the Law for the Reformers. When we see how far short we fall of meeting our moral obligations, we become receptive to the message of grace. The Law “convicts” us by showing us where we have failed. We then realize that we can’t save ourselves by seeking to meet the requirements of the Law. The teachings of Jesus only intensify this dilemma by turning our attention to our inner states and motivations (“lusting in the heart,” “hating one’s brother,” etc.). The Law reveals our sin and we are forced to rely on Christ alone for our salvation.

The Pedagogical Use: The so-called third use of the Law has been the most controversial, and there is debate about whether Luther ever endorsed it. But it’s clear that Calvin thought it was important, and it has been an important part of much Protestant thought ever since. In this capacity, the Law provides guidance for the Christian life. Though we are saved by Christ alone, the Law shows us the proper shape the Christian life should take as a response to God’s grace. According to Calvin, the Law helps Christians “to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord’s will to which they aspire, and to confirm them in the understanding of it.”

Many Protestants (especially Lutherans) object to the “third use” of the Law, because they think it threatens to become a backdoor to legalism and works-righteousness. And that it risks making us content with a moral minimalism rather than spurring us on to daring acts of love. Calvinists respond that the Law (understood broadly to include the Decalogue and the precepts and example of Christ) provides a needed concreteness to the Christian life. If we rely on vague norms like “love,” “justice” or “peace” without giving them a definite shape, they can become justifications for pretty much any position, and the Christian life becomes hostage to our pet political nostrums (That this has in fact happened in many a Protestant church, liberal and conservative, scarcely needs pointing out!).

Put another way, Lutherans and Calvinists agree that grace provides the motive for doing good works. As Luther said, good works are the “fruit” of faith. But they appear to disagree on how we determine the content of what count as good actions. To those who emphasize the third use of the Law, there will be norms for Christian living that are always binding. Those who say we should rely on creative responses to new situations informed by the Spirit will tend to be more consequentialist in their moral reasoning.

While I agree that there is a genuine problem of “legalism” when we emphasize the Law as a guide to Christian living, I think the greater danger lies in thinking that we can do without it. The result seems to me to be a loss of a distinctively Christian pattern of life. As theologian Reinhard Hütter says, “God’s commandment is nothing else than the concrete guidance, the concrete social practice that allows us to embody our communion with God in concrete creaturely ways.” Living in communion with God has a definite shape, one taught to us by the Law, by the example of Jesus (who came to fulfill rather than abolish the Law), and by the Apostles and Saints of the church catholic throughout the ages. It is precisely this concrete practice, as embodied in the church’s life, which shows us what life in community with God is supposed to look like. The point is not that the Law saves us, but that God saves us for a particular kind of life, and we see that life reflected in the Law.

From the New York Times:

It was no accident that John Kerry appeared Tuesday on “Live With Regis and Kelly” and recalled his days as a young prosecutor in a rape case. Or that he then flew from New York to Jacksonville, Fla., to promote his health care proposals. Or that on Thursday in Davenport, Iowa, he will preside over a forum on national security with an audience solely of women.

These appearances are part of an energetic drive by the Kerry campaign to win back voters that Democrats think are rightfully theirs: women.

In the last few weeks, Kerry campaign officials have been nervously eyeing polls that show an erosion of the senator’s support among women, one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituencies. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last week, women who are registered to vote were more likely to say they would vote for Mr. Bush than for Mr. Kerry, with 48 percent favoring Mr. Bush and 43 percent favoring Mr. Kerry.

In 2000, 54 percent of women voted for Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, while 43 percent voted for Mr. Bush.

A great piece by Gene Healy on being a libertarian in D.C.

One argument sometimes offered as a justification for meat-eating is that it’s “natural” for us humans to eat meat and therefore okay. We’re “made” for meat-eating, it’s sometimes said. Or the human body is “designed” to eat meat, as indicated by our teeth, etc.

Barring a really crude creationist picture of human development, I think it’s only fair to point out that the critics are right in one sense. It seems likely that our distant ancestors’ switch to meat-eating provided a catalyst for human evolution. Anthropologists have suggested that meat provided nutrients that were unavailable from plant material at the time, and this allowed our brains to develop in the way they did. Thus, those humans who ate meat would have had an edge in the struggle for survival, and were able to evolve into intelligent sociable creatures. Thus, we are, congenitally, fitted to eat meat.

Granting all this, though, it by no means follows that we must eat meat today in order to get the nutrition we need to thrive. Nutritionists are virtually unanimous in agreeing that a properly balanced vegetarian diet can provide all we need to be healthy. And of course there are many indications that those who eat meat sparingly or not at all tend to be healthier than their carnivorous counterparts. Since scarcity of nutritious plant-based food is no longer an issue, at least in the prosperous parts of the world, it’s difficult to argue that we need to eat meat.

Just because something might have been necessary for survival at one point in our evolutionary history, it doesn’t follow that it’s okay to do the same thing under vastly different circumstances now. In our present situation, meat-eating, in addition to being unnecessary, involves the infliction of prolonged and intense suffering on literally millions of our fellow creatures. Under these circumstances it’s pretty difficult to see the justification. Things would be different, however, if meat-eating were to become necessary for human survival because of changed circumstances.

If our end is survival and flourishing, and there are two means that equally enable us to pursue that end, isn’t the moral course to choose the end that involves less suffering for our fellow creatures?

Should churches ever excommunicate their members? What would be the grounds for such a measure? Camassia considers the issue here and here.

Consider the bully on the school playground, tormenting his victim. He is giving outward expression here to a low view of the victim, putting him at the bottom of the playground hierarchy. The playground, especially if it is relatively unsupervised, is a good place to observe what I said yesterday. People who know each other well, and know how much what they do hurts, can go ahead despite this knowledge with relish. They establish a pecking order, like chickens in a coop, and the people at the bottom get wounds from which they sometimes never recover. But the victim’s moral value as a human being with dignity is higher than this, and is in fact equal to the bully’s. The function of punishing the bully is then to give an outward expression to the lowering of the bully from his assumed status, ‘putting him’, as we say ‘in his place’, and raising the demeaned value of his victim. The suffering of the bully is not something good in itself; here the utilitarians are right. But it is good because it expresses the right relative value of himself and his victim. On the expressive theory of punishment, punishment is good because it takes the victim seriously.

I do not claim that I have given here more than a suggestion of a theory of punishment. But it enables us to see what might be good about God’s accepting reparation. For we most often wrong God by wronging each other, not by wronging God directly (though we can do that too). The punishment of the offender takes seriously the value of the victim, and this is not given expression if the offender is let off. If it is the victim who lets the offender off, this might express his own value (if the situation is not inherently coercive). But on the expressive theory of punishment, God’s punishing us expresses not so much his own value as the value of the people we have wronged. Or we could put this distinction in a different way. The punishment expresses God’s value in his image-bearers who have been abused, rather than his value in his own person. To go back to the example of the bully. If the victim says to the school that he does not want the bully punished, this might be an expression of his magnanimity and a restoration of his value; though he might also be afraid of the bully’s implied threat in the future, and just be continuing his role as victim in an inherently coercive situation. But if the school on its own account lets the bully off his punishment, it fails to acknowledge the value of the bully’s victim. — John Hare, “Moral Faith and Atonement”

Via Get Religion here’s an interesting story about the last days of Johnny Cash. Apparently he and producer Rick Rubin took communion together every day as part of their working relationship. (Rubin, who was raised Jewish has also produced acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, and Slayer.)

In Commonweal, veteran religion reporter Kenneth Woodward critiques Mario Cuomo’s idea of separation between religion and public life. Cuomo responds.

First Things has an excellent article pointing out the many inconsistencies in the worldview of the last angry atheist Richard Dawkins.

A troubling article from Time:

Between 10,000 and 30,000 of Iraq’s 800,000 Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to Christian groups in Baghdad. Although Christians make up only about 3% of Iraq’s 25 million people, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has said they account for about 20% of the refugees fleeing Iraq for Syria. They are escaping a climate of violence and a surging Islamic radicalism that have made the practice of their faith a deadly enterprise. …



The violence in Iraq threatens one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, dating back 2,000 years. The population includes Chaldean Assyrians (Eastern-rite Catholics who recognize the Pope’s authority); Assyrians, who form an independent church; Syrian Catholics; and Armenian Catholics. Under Saddam, Christians coexisted more or less amicably with the Muslim majority. Easter services were broadcast on state television, and Christians were allowed to own and operate liquor stores. …



Many Iraqi Christians say their reversal of fortune has been especially disappointing given the backing the Bush Administration receives from evangelical Christians. “Why did the U.S. come here?” asks Mardirosian, the Armenian-Catholic leader. “To protect the Christians or allow others to kill them?”



(via Amy Welborn)

George Will:



[Kerry] needs to resuscitate his campaign by making himself an interesting alternative to Bush. However, he seems incapable of mounting what the nation needs—a root-and-branch critique of the stunningly anticonservative idea animating the administration’s policy. The idea, a tenet of neoconservatism, is that all nations are more or less ready for democracy. So nation-building should be a piece of cake—never mind the winding, arduous, uphill hike the West took from Runnymede and Magna Charta in 1215 to Philadelphia in 1787. …



…neoconservatives alarm almost everyone who isn’t one—and especially dismay real conservatives. …[Robert] Kagan, a highly intelligent and very representative neoconservative, evidently believes it is in Bush’s power to determine Russia’s fate.



Lurking there is the idea behind foreign-policy overreaching—the anticonservative delusion that political will can control the world. And Kerry has nothing to say about it.