Month: January 2005

First, two from The Ivy Bush: How to (and how not to) respond theologically to the tsunami and a meditation on the pros and cons of civilization.

Next, The Morning Retort replies to this post and points us to this review of Jim Wallis’ new book. The lesson MR draws is that the Left has a hard time taking yes for an answer from Christians. (Also see this old post on Christians and the American political order.)

Camassia tackles the free will issue.

Slate’s Chris Sullentrop reports on the Gonzales hearings.

And lastly, a meaty article on the life and thought of Ivan Illich (which, come to think of it, relates the the post from the Ivy Bush on civilization). Link via A Conservative Blog for Peace.

I noted some dissatisfaction the other day with David B. Hart’s suggestion in his Opinion Journal piece that natural disasters like the recent tsunami can be explained, at least in part, by the fallenness of creation. Hart says:

Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”–spiritual and terrestrial–alien to God.

Hart intends, I take it, to distinguish himself from those who think that the world necessarily contains some evil, even if that evil is balanced by good. In fact, he makes this explicit in some remarks at Mere Comments:

What is essential—and this is all I ever meant to say—is to distinguish between two understandings of God’s power over creation. In one—a deist understanding—the world was created from eternity to be an intricate machinery of good and evil, darkness and light, exquisitely balanced between felicity and moral gravity, wherein death and suffering constitute necessary elements of God’s creative purposes, without which he could not bring his purposes to fruition, and wherein every event is part of a perfectly coherent scheme of cosmic and spiritual harmony. In the other—the Christian understanding—God creates us for union with himself, requiring no passage through evil to realize the good in us and to divinize us, but we fall away into the damnable absurdity of sin, death, and hell, from which God then rescues us; while indeed God, in the economy of salvation, makes even death obedient to his saving purposes, he does so as the one who on the last day will judge and damn the meaningless brutality and absurdity of fallen existence, and—far from disclosing the inherent rationality and moral necessity of death—will conquer it utterly on behalf of its victims. Yes, God uses suffering and death for the good; but, no, in themselves they are contrary to the nature of the world, in enmity to God’s goodness, and “meaningless” (that is, they do not possess that ontological or moral necessity that either a deist or a semi-Hegelian theologian would assign them).

Hart’s point is that the evil of the world is a contingent fact, not a necessary one. And this implies that creation, at least “originally,” was devoid of evil. So the question then becomes how evil entered into it. Since natural catastrophes and the general structure of the world that brings them about cannot plausibly be based on human sin, Hart adverts to the demonic powers that are in rebellion against God.

The strength of this view is that it denies God’s complicity in the horrors of our world. If the world’s evil is somehow a necessary feature of creation, then how can we deny that God is responsible for it? On the other hand, if evil is the result of the free actions of creatures (whether human or demonic), then God would not seem to be directly responsible and we could affirm that evil is opposed to the nature of creation.

The weakness is that most of us, I suspect, have a hard time making sense of the notion that demonic powers are responsible for natural evil, or we just don’t find it plausible. We see the world from a scientific perspective as an interlocking series of causes and events, a series that inevitably involves a certain degree of suffering. The very structure of our world, it seems to us, creates the possibilty that sentient creatures will suffer, and we have a hard time imagining how it could be otherwise.

And yet, the biblical promise is that God will redeem his creation, so the idea of a creation devoid of evil (natural or moral) must, according to the Christian tradition, be possible, even if we can’t see how. Nor do we have much idea about what relation the new heavens and earth will bear to our present reality. But the bottom line is that a creation free from evil (which presumably includes death, decay, suffering and other “natural” evils) is God’s ultimate intention.

So, does this mean we have to suppose that creation would have been free from evil if no creatures had disrupted it by the misuse of their free will? Or was it not possible for God to create a world without natural evil even if no creature had sinned?

The Christian Century reports on the increase in conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy among American Christians:

The past several decades have seen an increase in conversions to Orthodoxy in the U.S. Frederica Mathewes-Green writes that nearly half the students in Orthodoxy’s two largest American seminaries—Holy Cross and St. Vladimir’s—are converts. The number of Antiochian Orthodox churches in the U.S. has doubled—to over 250 parishes and missions—in 20 years. The Antiochian Church, unlike most Orthodox organizations in the U.S., has committed itself to seeking converts in North America and sees itself “on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian faith.” The missions organization of this branch of Orthodoxy estimates that 80 percent of its converts come from evangelical and charismatic orientations, with 20 percent coming from mainline denominations.

The author, Amy Johnson Frykholm, suggests that part of the attraction is the desire for a more authentic communal experience of Christianity in contrast to hyper-individualism, doctrinal laxity and banal worship:

…converts to Orthodoxy … diagnos[e] two distinct problems in contemporary American Christianity. One is the turn toward theological and social liberalism; the other is an entertainment-oriented, self-indulgent style of worship. These two issues sometimes draw different kinds of converts, but they are often equated with one root problem: individualism. Doctrine, practice, sacrament and worship are all suited to the needs and desires of the self.

Though Frykholm finds much to admire, especially in the spirituality of a monk she meets in Denver, she wonders if some converts, many from conservative evangelical backgrounds, haven’t exchanged one fundamentalism for another:

If the Holy Spirit is a living presence in Orthodoxy, then why were social questions of enormous complexity—abortion, feminism and homosexuality, to name a few of the most controversial—treated with such dismissive certainty by many of the converts I met? While I value historical roots and the search for answers within the church’s rich past, I wonder why, in contemporary Orthodoxy in the United States, those answers are so easy to come by. Orthodox converts told me that they find comfort in the stability of the church, that positions on issues such as homosexuality and abortion have already been decided and will not change any time soon. But are answers preferred to compassion or the living work of the Spirit? By settling readily on answers to social questions, do converts embrace Orthodoxy as another form of fundamentalism?

See also John Garvey’s “Typology of Converts.” Garvey is an Orthodox priest (and convert) who writes frequently for Commonweal.

A group of church leaders, including George Hunsinger, Tony Campolo, Ron Sider and Jim Wallis, has penned an “open letter” to Alberto Gonzales:

As a self-professed evangelical Christian, you surely know that all people are created in the image of God. You see it as a moral imperative to treat each human being with reverence and dignity. We invite you to affirm with us that we are all are made in the image of God – every human being. We invite you to acknowledge that no legal category created by mere mortals can revoke that status. You understand that torture – the deliberate effort to undermine human dignity – is a grave sin and an affront to God. You would not deny that the systemic use of torture on prisoners at Abu Ghraib was fundamentally immoral, as is the deliberate rendering of any detainee to authorities likely to commit torture.

We urge you to declare that any attempt to undermine international standards on torture, renditions, or habeas corpus is not only wrong but sinful. We are concerned that as White House counsel you have shown a troubling disregard for international laws against torture, for the legal rights of suspected “enemy combatants,” and for the adverse consequences your decisions have had at home and abroad.

On a related note, Matthew Yglesias says:

Any Democrats who voted “no” on Ashcroft and are intend[ing] to vote “yes” on Gonzales desperately need to have their heads examined. Yes, I like courting Mexican-American voters, too. But if Bush nominates Robert Mugabe to be Secretary of Agriculture are we going to decide that supporting him is a key element of our African-American outreach strategy?

Of course, Gonzales doesn’t have the authority to order torture, so this is a stretch. The proper concern, I think, is the length to which members of the Administration have gone to provide legal cover for torture and what this says about their intentions. This, combined with the Abu Ghraib fiasco and reports of mistreatment coming out of Guantanamo, creates the impression that the Bush Administration’s commitment to refraining from the use of torture is lukewarm at best.

Jacob Heilbrunn talks to Daniel Bell about our “endless culture wars.” Bell’s most famous work, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, argued that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction by engendering a libertine consumerism that undermines the bourgeois values necessary to its own success. Bell was also one of the famed “New York Intellectuals” and co-founded The Public Interest with Irving Kristol.

Don’t call him a “neocon” though:

Bell gets tagged as a dreaded neocon by the left, in part because he started the Public Interest with Kristol, a magazine that debunked liberal shibboleths about the welfare state, among other things. But as Bell said to me with some exasperation, he remains “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.”

In fact, Bell blames the conservative agenda of the GOP for much of our cultural degradation:

Few things infuriate him more than the GOP’s moral contradictions, as its concerns over cultural decay bump against the needs of big business. For instance, Bush sponsors a sexual abstinence program for teens while gliding over the fact that his biggest media booster, the Fox network, airs such titillating shows as “The O.C.”

It’s also the case that conservatives who preach moral values readily turn a blind eye to ethical violations committed by corporations. Despite plenty of evidence that the accounting industry was running amok, Bush acceded to reform only when the calls for it became overwhelming. Now he should be denouncing the outrageous compensation package slated for Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s outgoing chief executive, under fire in an accounting scandal — but once again, the silence is deafening.

The Democrats don’t get a free pass either:

…They claim to do a better job in holding corporations and Wall Street accountable, but their rights-based platform has made them loathe to back societal limits on much of anything. Even now, as the Democratic Leadership Council pushes a moral values agenda, the backlash against it is mounting.

Heilbrunn concludes:

With social conservatives, libertarians and neocons pushing conflicting agendas, the unity of the GOP is more fragile than it may appear. One of these days a canny Democrat will link the voters’ demand for moral values to their anger over corporate excesses to call for a new age of reform. For that to occur, however, the Democrats will have to admit that culture matters.

(link via Godspy)

One of the unforseen consequences of President Bush’s re-election has been the new attention suddenly given to liberal or progressive Christians. Because Bush’s victory has widely (if perhaps erroneously) been attributed to religious “moral values” voters, some secular liberals have recognized the need to reach out to religious people, and left-of-center Christians have made new efforts to distinguish themselves from their conservative brethren.

However, progressive Christians are by no means a homogenous group. For starters, we have to distinguish between politically liberal Christians and theologically liberal Christians. I take a “theological liberal” to be someone who has a more or less revisionist understanding of traditional Christian doctrines like the resurrection, the virgin birth, etc. Theological liberals tend to be religious pluralists, seeing all religions as human responses to the divine and thus (potentially at least) equally true and salvific.

I think it’s fair to say that theological liberals tend to be political liberals, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Some Christians are politically liberal (or at least not conservative) because they’re theologically orthodox. N. T. Wright, for example, widely regarded as a defender of orthodoxy, has said that debt relief for poor nations and a just form of globalization are the most pressing political issues of our day. Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action combine a traditional evangelical piety and theology with opposition to war and militarism, progressive stances on economics and conservative positions on sexuality and abortion.

In fact, the close association between conservative or orthodox theology and conservative politics seems in many ways to be a uniquely American phenomenon. John Paul II, a hero to many American conservatives, has been sharply critical of American capitalism and foreign policy. The current archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has been caricatured as a knee-jerk leftist for his opposition to the war in Iraq, but he has also soundly critiqued such thelogical revisionists as John Shelby Spong and has also been associated with the pro-life movement in the UK.

These examples show, I should think, that Christian orthodoxy does not automatically go hand-in-hand with conservative politics as understood in the USA. Not only is there no necessary connection between the two, there are good grounds for questioning whether they are even consistent in many respects.

But the examples I cited show also that there is no simplistic equation between Christianity and liberal politics either. No one would, I think, accuse John Paul or N. T. Wright of being liberals in any conventional sense. This means that the answer is not a “Christian Left” that is merely the mirror image of the Christian Right, but something else entirely. I imagine it is tempting for Christians who oppose aspects of the conservative agenda to hitch their wagon to the essentially secular political agenda of the left. But this would be the same mistake that their conservative counterparts tend to make.

This is why I don’t like the idea of “Christian Progressivism” any more than the idea of “Christian Conservatism.” Both risk making a certain political ideology dominant and trimming their theological sails accordingly. This is not to say that Christians should never get involved with secular political coalitions, but rather they should maintain their independence from them. Maybe this means restricting alliances to an issue-by-issue basis; Christians might find themselves aligned with conservatives on issues like pornography or abortion and with liberals on war or anti-poverty measures.

Of course, saying this presupposes that there is an identifiably “Christian” stance that is independent of both conservatism and liberalism, not something that everyone will concede. For what it’s worth, I incline to the view that a “consistent life” or “seamless garment” ethic does come close to such a position, but there are certainly few churches that teach that, much less a political constituency that takes it as its organizing principle.

Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo both have recent (characteristically overheated) columns about the growing “fascism” of the American right. William Marina of Liberty & Power critiques Rockwell here. Reason’s Jesse Walker has some thoughts here.

The thrust of the Rockwell/Raimondo position is that American conservatism has shifted from being anti-government during the Clinton years to pro-government now that Bush is president and especially in the wake of 9/11.

Marina questions (correctly, I think) the depth of the libertarianism of the American right during the Clinton years. He points out that Newt Gingrich, leader of the “revolution” of 1994 was anything but a libertarian (a point that Rockwell and Raimondo would concede, I suspect).

The Rockwell-Raimondo position rests on the assumption that the conservative grassroots were staunchly libertarian during the 90’s and are only now moving in a more authoritarian direction. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that grassroots conservatives were never consistently libertarian. Most people simply don’t have an elaborately thought-out political ideology that they use as a yardstick by which to judge all parties and candidates. Politics is much more tribal than that.

Moreover, libertarianism was always just one element within the broader conservative movement. It existed (at times uneasily) alongside traditionalists, social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, law and order types, Reagan Democrats and other decidedly un-libertarian tendencies.

For better or for worse, consistent liberatarians are few and far between (just like consistent adherents of any political ideology). Most people pick a side and stick with it despite ideological deviations. It’s more a matter of cultural/tribal affiliation than anything, which is part of the truth of the red-blue dichotomy. And most people would rather see “their guy” in power than dismantle that power as radical libertarians advocate.

Surely American culture can’t be as insipid and superficial as critics claim when a theologian of the quality of David B. Hart can publish a piece on theodicy in a major newspaper:

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”–spiritual and terrestrial–alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him–“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”–and his appearance within “this cosmos” is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God’s glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.

(via Mere Comments)

Also see commentary by Bill Vallicella here.

I have questions about this position, though. For instance, how can we adhere to a belief that creation is fallen if we reject the notion of a literal “fall” at some actual point in time? Or, to put it another way, when did Hart’s “primordial catastrophe” take place? How seriously should we take the idea that there are demonic powers responsible for at least some of what we call “natural” evil? Should we think that there really was a rebellion in heaven (perhaps simultaneously with the creation of our universe) and that this rebellion has infected our world?