Month: December 2004

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Lutheran World Relief is also at work providing relief to victims of the Asian tsunami. LWR is a pan-Lutheran (they act on behalf of ELCA and LCMS Lutherans) relief organization based in the U.S. that does a lot of good work, not only with disaster relief, but also in social justice advocacy, fair trade and debt relief.

Via Keith Burgess-Jackson comes the new blog Reductio run by Dave Graham, a libertarian vegan.

Via Camassia I followed the link to Quaker Ranter, the blog of Martin Kelley, a “post-liberal” Quaker living right here in the Philly/South Jersey area apparently (no surprise there).

Also, I’ve recently been alerted to Eric Lee’s modestly titled Eric Is Rad.

Marcus critiques a Calvinist theodicy and theory of predestination here. Generally, I’m suspicious of theodicy – it seems like a problem that’s above our pay grade, and I’d be surprised to find out that most theodicies have provided any actual comfort to those in need of it.

Still, it’s a topic that inevitably comes up. I tried to deal with it in relation to the Atonement (see here, here, here, here and here – whew!) as a way of putting it in a more concretely Christian context.

Regarding predestination, I’m right in the middle of Paul Althaus’s book on Luther’s theology and he says that Luther makes a distinction between God’s “revealed will” and his “hidden will.” God’s revealed will comes to us in the Gospel proclamation – God seeks to be merciful to sinners. But God’s hidden will is that he predestines some to salvation and some to perdition.

To reconcile this with God’s justice, Luther takes what philosophers would call a “compatibilist” view of free will. That is, I am responsible for my rejection of God’s grace because it is my will to remain obstinate in my sin. This is true even though my will is determined by causes outside of my control.

I happen to think compatibilism has serious problems, but in fairness, so do virtually all other accounts of free will. The deeper issue here, though, is the theology that underwrites the notion of predestination.

What Luther (and Augustine and Calvin among others) were interested in safeguarding was God’s sovereignty and the efficacy of his grace. For Luther in particular, God’s grace is manifested in the fact that he has mercy on whom he wills to have mercy, and that mercy is effective in bringing to salvation. If a human response is necessary for God’s grace to be effective, then Luther thinks we are right back to works righteousness. My being saved is dependent on something I do.

The trick is reconciling God’s efficacious grace with a) the claim that God wants to save us all and b) the claim that at least some people, and possibly a majority of people, are going to be damned. If God’s grace is completely efficacious (i.e. it doesn’t depend on anything we do) and God wants to save everyone, then it seems to follow that everyone will in fact be saved.

Both a and b seem to have scriptural support. Thus the resort to the “hidden will” of God. God wants to save us all in the sense that the Gospel is proclamed to all as an unconditional promise of forgiveness and new life, but in fact some people will not respond to the proclamation and will not be saved. And this failure to respond is itself predestined by God from all eternity.

The problem with the theory of the hidden will, as Althaus points out, is that it seems to contradict Luther’s firm belief that Jesus reveals the Father to us. In fact, this belief, Althaus says, was the lynchpin of Luther’s Christology. It was the answer he found to the burning existential question of how we can know what God’s attitude toward us is. Jesus reveals to us a God who loves us so much that he comes to us to offer forgiveness, take away our sins and give us new life.

But if the “real” will of God is the “hidden will” that predestines to salvation and damnation, how can we say that Christ truly reveals the Father? The merciful Father that Jesus reveals to us seems to be trumped by the inscrutable deity of predestination.

It seems safer to stick with this bedrock theological principle – that Jesus reveals a God who really wants to save all of us, and let the other chips fall where they may (either in the direction of universalism or some form of Arminianism). After all, it was Luther himself who said “I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ.”

I meant to blog on this a while back, but I see that Paul J. Griffiths’ “Orwell for Christians” from last month’s First Things is now online.

Griffiths argues that Orwell had a distinct moral epistemology that dovetails very closely with Catholic natural law theory, both formally (ordinary people are capable of perceiving moral truth) and substantively (in its judgments of certain actions as intrinsically evil). People whose ordinary decency is undistorted by some ideological commitment are perfectly capable of perceiving the evil of torture, oppression, abortion and other assaults on the dignity of the human person.

He suggests that Orwell can teach Christians to distrust political abstractions that are used to justify atrocities. Instead we should adopt a modest politics of “localist meliorism.” Griffiths argument is somewhat reminiscient of John Howard Yoder’s contention that Christians have no blueprint for a political utopia to offer, but can seek remedies for concrete injustices.

Spent a very nice Christmas with my in-laws in the great city of Indianapolis. The weather was cold (single digits on Christmas day!) but the food, company and holiday cheer kept us warm.

Thoughts and prayers go out to all the victims of the Tsunami. See here for where and how to send aid.

I see that Among the Ruins is closing up shop. What a bummer – I only recently discovered AtR, but they will be missed.

A Happy New Year to all!

In thinking about the inspiration and authority of the Bible, one thing that I think it’s good to keep in mind is the purpose for which the Bible was written. 2 Timothy says that “all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” That is, it is fundamentally a religious book, concerned with leading us to salvation.

With that understanding in mind, maybe it’s more helpful to see the inspiration of Scripture not as a “micro-level” phenomenon (e.g. getting every word, detail, and fact exactly right) but as a “macro-level” phenomenon (i.e. giving us a true and reliable understanding of God’s character, relations with humankind and acts of salvation).

One theory offered by those uncomfortable with inerrantism is that the Bible’s value lies chiefly in being a witness to God’s mighty acts – i.e. a record of the revelatory events contained in the stories of Israel, Jesus and the Church. The Spirit then can use this witness to make the Bible a means of revelation for us. Some interpreters ascribe a position like this to Karl Barth.

A problem with this theory, I think, is that it doesn’t do justice to the belief that the Scriptures themselves are a source of revelation, rather than just a witness to revelation.

Why is this a problem? Because events in and of themselves need to be interpreted to become meaningful. It requires interpretation to see the crossing of the Red Sea as an act of divine deliverance or Jesus’ death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice that reconciles us with God.

So, I would tentatively suggest that what we have in the Bible is the inspired interpretation of those events. That is, the apostles and their followers provided us with the divinely inspired meaning of, e.g. the life and death of Jesus. And consequently this interpretation is authoritative for the church.

This doesn’t mean that the historical facts are unimportant or that it doesn’t matter if the Biblical authors got the basic facts right. But many people witnessed the events of Jesus’ life without coming to believe that he was the Messiah. There is a “gap” between the basic facts and seeing those facts as God’s saving acts.

Obviously the Resurrection was crucial in the apostles’ coming to understand the significance of Jesus. And I believe that the Resurrection was a public physical event (not just a private vision had by Jesus’ followers). But it still requires an act of interpretation to understand the meaning of these events. And since God would presumably want us to understand the proper significance of these events, it seems reasonable to think that the Spirit was at work in guiding the early Christians in their understanding, an understanding that was eventually recorded in the books of the New Testament.

One advantage of this way of looking at the Bible is that it seems, in many cases, to match with what the Biblical authors took themselves to be doing. It’s long been recognized, for instance, that the Gospel writers did not set out to write “objective” biographies of Jesus. What they saw themselves as doing was setting forth the proper theological meaning of the events of Jesus’ life (Which obviously required setting forth the basic facts of that life).

This also shows, incidentally, the limitations for Christian faith of any “quest for the historical Jesus.” If the NT provides us with the inspired and authoritative interpretation of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, then this will exclude certain competing interpretations (the cynic philosopher Jesus, the revolutionary Jesus, etc.). To confess the Bible as inspired is to confess this understanding of Jesus as authoritative for our lives and the life of the church.

I wouldn’t claim that this way of looking at the issue is without problems. But it does seem, at least at first blush, to be a coherent way of speaking about the Bible’s inspiration and authority that avoids the pitfalls of both conservative inerrantism and a liberal view that denies that the Bible is divinely inspired.

From Spiked Online:

We all have the right to die, with or without its sanction in law. All the ‘patients’ of Dr Jack Kevorkian, currently in prison in America for having gone a little too far in assisting the suicide of Thomas Youk (which was videotaped and shown on CBS’s 60 Minutes), were physically capable of bringing about their own deaths.

Anyone, with a little forward planning and much determination, can kill themselves. The Assisted Dying bill will instead place an onus on doctors and carers to help individuals to commit suicide. One of the most ugly arguments to come from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society is that disabled people should have the right to die, too. We must be clear that we are being obligated to give the proverbial man on the bridge a push (or perhaps to make the bridge wheelchair accessible). …

It is true that many religious groups vehemently oppose the Joffe Bill, but they are not the only ones. They unite with medical representatives and disabled groups, who fear that doctors’ judgements about ‘quality of life’ may imply that their own lives are not worth living. …

In fact, it is those calling for legalisation of assisted suicide who tend to espouse New Age religious values. ‘Self-deliverance’ is the term favoured by Derek Humphry, former Sunday Times journalist and author of the best-selling suicide bible, Final Exit. Delivery to where, Mr. Humphry? Dr Timothy Quill, who admitted in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had helped a patient die, has written a book called A Midwife through the Dying Process. To an atheist (like myself), death is not an ‘experience’ but the end of all experiences. Do assisted suicide advocates wish simply to replace rituals formerly carried out by priests?

Finally, you need not be Christian to agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury that ‘the respect for human life in all its stages is the foundation of a civilised society’. …

More.

How should we think about the inspiration and authority of the Bible? What does it mean for the Bible to be authoritative in the church and how is this related to the question of its inspiration? For Protestants who affirm the principle of sola Scriptura, this is a particularly pressing question.

One view that seems to be clearly untenable is the ultra-conservative view that the Bible is totally inerrant in every word. This includes not just broad theological affirmations or historical events, but historical details like the number of people killed in a particular battle, the exact words spoken by Jesus on a certain occasion, etc. Not to mention various statements about the natural world that seem to contradict what science tells us (I’m talking about things like the evolution of life on earth or astronomy, not miraculous events. Nothing that science tells us can rule out, as far as I can tell, that God might act in history; science deals with how things go when left to their own devices, but it can’t tell us if or when God might not leave things to their own devices). In short, it seems clear that the Biblical writings (and in many cases the oral traditions which underly those writings) were products of their time and incorporated beliefs that we would now regard as mistaken.

But surely the inerrantist makes an illegitimate inference when she concludes that if we can’t trust the Bible to be a textbook of science or history, then we can’t trust it to be a revelation of God. Presumably St. Paul had some false beliefs about biology or astronomy, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get the Gospel right. The inerrantist doesn’t seem to take seriously enough the human element in Scripture, that it was written by fallible human beings with limited knowledge. Rather she adheres to an excessively mechanical notion of inspiration, where the Spirit literally dictates every word to the authors who are little more than passive instruments.

On the other hand, what we might call the extreme “liberal” view emphasizes the human element at the expense of the divine. It sees the Bible as a collection of writings that arose out of the religious experiences of certain groups of people over several centuries. The liberal tends to see the inspiration of the Bible as a point on the same continuum as the inspiration of any great work of human genius. As such it is a decidedly mixed bag (the liberal often likes to stress the high ethical ideals of Jesus with the “barbaric,” “vengeful,” etc. God of the Old Testament) and different parts of the Bible will have lesser or greater value.

The Achilles’ heel of the liberal position is that the Bible seems to lose all of its authority. If the religious ideas of the Bible are simply human products (however exalted) then we have to test those ideas by some external criteria (our own experience, moral/religious sense, etc.), since there is no claim that the Bible contains a self-revelation of God. Rather, it reflects human aspirations toward the divine, many of which may have been supreseded by later experience. The Bible is ultimately subordinated to our own judgment, and it’s hard to see how it can retain its traditional place as normative for the life of the church.

So it seems what we need is a via media between a deeply implausible conservative inerrantism and a liberalism that dissolves any authoritative status for the Bible. Can we find a way to maintain that the Bible is both a product of particular fallible human beings and a self-revelation of God?

More to come…

Marcus explains why he’s batting for the other team now (so to speak).

Interesting piece from A. N. Wilson in the London Spectator:

Rowan Williams is sufficiently intelligent and normal to be aware that in the West, being religious these days is, outside America, very distinctly odd, and trying to defend Christianity against the whole ethos of materialism and scientific rationalism which most intelligent people take for granted is a more than intellectual task. We might very well be living in Christianity’s last days. Many of us who go to church do so a little wistfully, knowing that, unlike Rowan Williams, we do not believe in the ways which our ancestors did. ‘Our prayers so languid and our faith so dim’ is one of the few lines of a hymn which we could sing with gusto. ‘Fightings within and fears without’ might be another.

Yes, Rowan Williams brings cleverness and originality and subtlety to public debate, and those are not qualities to be sneezed at, even if they are repellent to so many bigots in the press and the Church. But he also has a quality which can’t be faked and which is always shown in the life and death of a martyr: holiness. When the last church on earth has closed, that will be the quality which the human race will most miss about the days of faith. The only tests Rowan is failing as Archbishop are ones not worth posing: silly posturings on both sides about homosexuality or women priests. In all the essential things, he is just what the Church and the nation most need. Of course, when it has a godsend, what does the Church of England do? It calls for his resignation.