Month: January 2005

Reagan was pals with Sinatra. George H. W. Bush had the Oak Ridge Boys. Clinton had Fleetwood Mac. And now this.

Need I say more?

Catholic Eve Tushnet posts on why she finds traditional pre-written prayers helpful. Very good points I think.

A sample:

Traditions remind us of the things we wouldn’t say of our own accord. Most times, when I pray the Hail Mary or the Angelus or what have you, I find that the words of the prayer act like prisms refracting my own concerns and shedding unexpected light. … Part of the point of traditions is that they break us out of our obvious concerns, the worries and beliefs we know we carry, by offering a different and initially alien perspective.

Another part of the point of traditions is that they tell us what to do when we’re shaky and unsure. … And traditional prayers help us praise God and give thanks and ask for help without worrying about whether we’re saying the right thing, or sounding stupid, or forgetting something.

Lutherans are perhaps more comfortable with such “vain repititions” (as some of our evangelical brothers and sisters might call them) than some other Protestants. Our liturgy is imbued throughout with traditional prayers, collects, hymns of praise, petitions and confessions. Though one thing we have all but abandoned is the tradition of praying the office, a traditional way of praying that goes back to the earliest days of the Church (and finds its roots in Judaism). This is still practiced regularly in the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican traditions.

Coincidentally, one of my Christmas gifts was a book on recovering the practice of structured daily prayer, The Rhythm of God’s Grace by Arthur Paul Boers. I haven’t read it yet, but Boers, a mennonite pastor, wants to recover the practice of fixed-hour prayer (“the hours” a.k.a. the daily office).

As Boers put it in this piece for Christianity Today:

As a pastor and Christian, I have been especially concerned about the inadequacy of most Christian prayer for a culture in which many are formed by a weekly average of 28 hours of television.

Too often, people who pray do so only briefly, without discipline or organization. They pray “on the fly,” winging phrases toward God while commuting, or squeezing in an occasional devotional. Such prayers are ad hoc and self-directed: made up along the way, according to mood, and not paying attention to the Christian year.

Rather than having help, support, or direction from others with maturity or experience, many Christians decide on their own what to do. As a result, they find themselves increasingly disconnected and isolated from other believers. They are subjective; guided by their feelings of the moment, they freely abandon prayer modes (confession, praise, intercession). In the end, these Christians find themselves increasingly disconnected from God.

The various forms of the office usually consist of collects, psalms, scripture readings and canticles. Such “formal” prayer, says Boers, can direct us from a focus on our own subjective feelings and needs to a more God-centered form of prayer.

I’d be interested in hearing about the experience of anyone who has made praying the office part of their regular discipline.

The return of death squads? (via Unqualified Offerings)

I realize that it’s possible to spin all kinds of arguments where things like this seem “necessary” (along with torture, killing civilians, etc.). But surely the deeper question is what kind of people do we want to be?

Of course, there are those who would say that our current political order is incapable of asking that very question.

Continuing our discussion of John Baillie’s views on revelation (see here) let’s turn to his thoughts on the Bible as the vehicle for revelation. Recall that for Baillie, revelation is God’s self-disclosure to humanity, and that this self-disclosure is mediated through the events of salvation history as they are interpreted and understood by the prophetic and apostolic witnesses:

We have accepted the view that the completed act of divine revelation consists in the intercourse of event and interpretation. God’s revealing activity is recognised by the Christian not only in the mighty acts which He performed for our redemption but in His illumination of the prophetic and apostolic mind. He so chose Israel that He not only led them out of Egypt but also enabled Moses and the prophets to grasp the significance of that exodus. He so loved the world that He not only sent His Son but at the same time enabled the apostles to grasp the significance of that mission. (Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 110)

Turning to the Bible, Baillie says that it is the record of the witness to God’s saving acts:

After the illumination was the witness. The illumination as integral to that to which the witness was borne, but the witness itself came afterwards. There was indeed a spoken witness before there was a written one, but it is with the latter that we are at the moment concerned. The Bible is the written witness to that intercourse of mind and event which is the essence of revelation. (p. 110)

This might lead us to think that the Bible is to be thought of as a purely human witness to revelation and that there is no room for talk of the Bible’s “inspiration,” but Baillie continues:

The witness itself is a human activity and as such fallible. Nevertheless we cannot believe that God, having performed His mighty acts and having illumined the minds of prophet and apostle to understand their true import, left the prophetic and apostolic testimony to take care of itself. It were indeed a strange conception of the divine providential activity which would deny that the Biblical writers were divinely assisted in their attempt to communicate to the world the illumination which, for the world’s sake, they had themselves received. The same Holy Spirit who had enlightened them unto their own salvation must also have aided their efforts, whether spoken or written, to convey the message of salvation to those whom their words would reach. This is what is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture. (p. 111)

What Baillie is at pains to deny, though, is the doctrine of plenary inspiration, or inerrancy, which he defines as the view that “the control exercised by the Holy Spirit was so complete and entire as to overrule all human fallibility, making the writers perfect mouthpieces of the infallible divine self-communication.” (p. 111)

What is at issue here, it seems to me, is a particular case of the more general question of how we understand God’s sovereignty and his action in the world. Does God act in such a way as to override all human freedom, or does his revelation depend in some measure on a free human response? If we say the latter, then it seems there has to be room for fallibility in the biblical witness. God’s self-communication was conveyed through human beings with their inherent limitations of knowledge, understanding and ability to communicate. Nevertheless, Baillie still wants to say that the biblical writers were inspired, it’s just that inspiration does not render their humanity inoperative. As Augustine said of John the Apostle, “Because he was inspired he was able to say something; but because he who was inspired remained a man, he could not present the full reality, but only what a man could say about it.”

If we’re going to talk about the “infallibility” of the Bible at all, it would seem, on Baillie’s account, to mean something like “a trustworthy and reliable witness to God’s revelatory acts and their proper meaning.” In a sense, the authority of the Bible is de facto before it is de jure, at least as far as we’re concerned:

The Scriptures are holy because they are the vehicle through which the Gospel is communicated to us. We know nothing of Christ except what comes to us through the Bible, all later communication of Christian knowledge being dependent upon this original record. Hence there is no outside standard by which we can measure the adequacy of the Biblical communication. The judgement we pass upon its details can only be in the light of the whole. (p. 117)

To be a Christian just is to take the Bible as normative in its revelation of God’s will, purpose and character.

But this immediately raises the question of whether we must (or can) separate the inspired parts of the Bible from the uninspired, fallible bits. Baillie suggests that whatever some may have claimed, in practice no one regards all parts of the Bible as equally inspired:

We may safely accept Luther’s criterion that the revelatory quality of each part of the Bible is to be judged according to the measure in which it “preaches Christ” (Christum trebit)… There are indeed many things in the Bible that seem to have no revelatory quality at all, yet no exercise could be more unprofitable, or indeed more artificial, than to try to make a list of them. (p. 119)

He even seems to suggest that any part of the Bible is potentially revelatory, since God can, in principle, speak to us anywhere, but no Christian actually finds all parts of the Bible revelatory, much less equally revelatory.

Nevertheless, we will be required to separate the husk from the kernel when we reject, e.g. the “three-storey” cosmology of some of the biblical writings, or its apparently pre-Copernican astronomy. Even the most conservative believer does some of this.

What Ballie’s account does, I think, is provide us with a way of understanding revelation that puts the Bible in its proper light. If we understand revelation as God’s self-disclosure, then we will see the Bible as inspired and authoritative precisely as it is the vehicle of that self-disclosure, rather than as a sacred and infallible textbook of geology, biology, history, et cetera. This view of revelation tends to render moot debates about whether the Gospel chronlogies can be precisely harmonized or how Cain found his wife. Baillie concludes that “instead of saying that ‘Scripture as a whole is the Whole with which Revelation is to be identified,’ we shall prefer to say of Scripture, as itself says of John the Baptist,…He was not that light, but was to bear witness to that light.” (p. 125)

An account of these two much-neglected Christian practices.

Daily Kos is one of the biggest liberal/Democratic blogs out there (or so I’m told), which makes this all the more interesting:

I have been a militant atheist all my life. Not militant in wanting to destroy religion, but in keeping it out of the public sphere.

But I have come to a conclusion recently that has startled me, obvious as it seems to me in retrospect — it wasn’t religious language that bothered me, it was the “values” promoted couched in religious terms.

I would cringe — and continue to cringe — when politicians and religous figures cite scripture to justify hatred towards gays or any other class of people. But I don’t cringe when scripture is used to justify poverty relief, or conservation (“protecting God’s creation”), or social security (“honor thy mother and thy fathers”), or oppose the death penalty, or oppose the war. […]

Liberals, outside the black churches, have ceded the moral language to the Right, in large part because of people like me who flinched at every reference to God by a Democrat.

But using Christianity or Buddhism or any other religion as a moral foundation is really no less superior than the moral structure I use to guide my life (I’m a utilitarian). All that should matter is that we all arrive at the same conclusion.

Not that I’m ready to sign on to the Left’s political agenda, but it would be a heartening development if no one party is thought to have a monopoly on “values” or religion.

Also, a welcome blow from the Left against the argument that religious reasons are per se illegitimate in public debate.

A critique in three parts at Disputations: 1, 2, 3.

Here’s a juicy post from Brian Weatherson (via this Weatherson post at Crooked Timber (which was also cross-posted at his personal blog – got that?)).

The gist:

Let’s assume the following metaphysical claims are all true.

• There is a class of abstract possible worlds W. (I’m not going to say what abstract and concrete amount to in any of this – on this distinction see Gideon Rosen’s SEP entry.) In other words, weak modal realism is true.
  
• God cannot change any of those worlds without destroying it – what happens in a world is essential to its nature.
  
• What God can do is make any of them that He chooses concrete. Abstract possible worlds have no moral value, but concrete worlds do have value, or disvalue if they are bad, so this choice is morally loaded.
  
• God’s creation is timeless, so He can’t create one and then tinker with it. For each world He faces a take-it-or-leave-it choice.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying these are true. I’m just saying they are a plausible set of views about the nature of modality and the nature of God’s powers. Note that the only ‘restriction’ on God’s powers here are of the form “God can’t do this metaphysically impossible thing”, i.e. make something lack one of its essential properties, so in that respect this isn’t meant to be a revisionary theology. (It’s revisionary metaphysics, not revisionary theology.)

If all this is true, what should God do? Well, I think He should create all and only the worlds such that it is better that they exist than that they not exist. And that will include worlds, like this one, that are not perfect but that contain more goodness than suffering. So the existence of this world as concrete entity is compatible with God’s existence, and indeed His omnipotence and benevolence.

Readers may recognize this as a form of Leibniz’s theodicy, with one important qualification: Weatherson thinks that God is off the hook so long as the world(s) he actualizes contain(s) more good than evil, as opposed to being the best possible world as Leibniz thought.

One of the risks of writing as an amateur or dilettante is that you run the risk of saying something that seems to you like a sparklingly original insight but in fact is territory that has been well-covered by specialists. On the other hand, there is a gratification in discovering an idea you’ve grasped your way toward confirmed by an expert.

It was with such a mix of sentiments that I recently read John Baillie’s The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought. Baillie was a Scottish theologian of the mid-20th century who, along with his brother Donald, modeled a kind of generous orthodoxy that was liberal without being reductionist, and wrote with clarity and literary flair (as opposed to the Teutonic obscurity of some of the continental theologians they were in conversation with). In reading this book I see the ideas I tried to set out here anticipated with much greater clarity and theological power than I could’ve ever managed!

In The Idea of Revelation Baillie surveys the then current thinking on revelation, entering into dialogue with Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, William Temple and other theological giants of the age. These thinkers unanimously reject the idea that revelation consists primarily in giving us propositional truth and the corresponding notion of the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Rather, Baillie argues, the subject of revelation is nothing less than God himself, in a personal encounter with humanity. Revelation is not God revealing cetain information to us (e.g. about the age of the earth, the number of people killed in a particular battle, the dimensions of Noah’s Ark…), but an act of Divine self-disclosure:

In the Bible the word [revelation] is always used in its proper and exalted sense. Not only is revelation always “the revelation of a mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed,”* but the mystery thus disclosed is nothing less than God’s own will and purpose. According to the Bible, what is revealed to us is not a body of information concerning things of which we might otherwise be ignorant. If it is information at all, it is information concerning the nature and mind and purpose of God–this and nothing else. (p. 28)

This Divine self-disclosure is mediated primarily in God’s “mighty acts” which make up salvation history. These events are what reveal God’s character, his saving will and his purposes:

…all revelation is given, not in the form of directly communicated knowledge, but through events occurring in the historical experience of mankind, events which are apprehended by faith as the “mighty acts” of God, and which therefore engender in the mind of man such reflective knowledge of God as it is given him to possess. It is clear that this represents a very radical departure from the traditional ecclesiastical formulation which identified revelation with the written word of Scripture and gave to the action of God in history the revelational status only of being among the things concerning which Scripture informed us. (p. 62)

But Baillie points out that events require interpretation:

We must, however, think very carefully what we mean when we say that revelation is given in the form of events or historical happenings. For it is not as if all who experience these events and happenings find in them a revelation of God. … It will be noticed that Dr. [William] Temple speaks of God as guiding, not only the process of events, but also the minds of men in interpreting these events so as to appreciate their revelatory character. … The concept of inspiration is thus the necessary counterpart of the conception of revelation, but its meaning and scope have often been misconceived through its being applied primarily to the prophetic and apostolic witness, and withal their written witness, to the revelation, rather than to that illumination of the prophetic and apostolic mind which is an integral part of the revelation to which such witness was borne. (pp. 64-66)

Next I want to discuss in more detail Baillie’s ideas about the role of the Bible specifically as the witness to revelatory events and the record of the prophetic and apostolic interpretation of those events.

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*Romans 16:25-26

Two Lutheran blogs recently brought to my attention: I Am a Christian Too and Progressive Protestant. Both are part of a burgeoning group of Christian blogs that are self-consciously progressive or at least at pains to distinguish themselves from the Christian Right.