William Placher on the Incarnation and reverence for life

William Placher is a Presbyterian theologian in the “postliberal” (Hans Frei, George Lindbeck) tradition, but one who actually writes in a very clear and accessible style. A theologian writing for laymen rather than other academics! Imagine! (I’m looking at you, John Milbank.)

Anyway, I’ve gotten a lot out of Placher’s writing. His book The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong helped convince me that many modern criticisms of Christianity simply miss the target, and that reappropriating the tradition of theologians like Aquinas, Luther, and Calivn was a viable alternative to various modern reductionist theologies (e.g. process theology, Bultmannian existentialism).

Lately I’ve been re-reading parts of his great primer on Christology called Jesus the Savior: The Meaning of Jesus Christ for Christian Faith. He discusses the traditional topics of Christology but also shows how they have concrete implications for ethical and political issues.

Here’s a good example:

Our society, like many others, tends to tell lots of people that they are not very important. We celebrate “the rich and famous,” but few of us are famous, and a shrinking number of people holds a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. The power that emerges when a group of people follows Jesse Jackson in chanting, “I am somebody,” makes it vivid how people can begin to doubt that they are anybody, and how much pain that doubt can cause them.

I remember some years ago visiting Washington, D.C., noticing how many people defined themselves by their connections. “I went to prep school with the vice president’s son.” “That cabinet secretary used to be my boss, and she still remembers me.” Hearing such comments in Washington, I noticed them particularly, but don’t we all say similar things? “I studied in graduate school with the famous professor.” “My office is right next to the boss’s.” “I used to play basketball with the famous star.” And yet these claims are trivial compared with the one available to us all: “I share the same humanity assumed by the Word of God.” If we really understand that, then all our doubts about our own worth, all our compulsive needs to prove the significance of our particular connections, ought to dissolve, and at the same time so should our sense of who the “important people” are. Compared with this qualification that everybody has, all our usual criteria of importance seem singularly unimportant.

In our society, it seems hard to grasp the importance of every human life. Pope John Paul II has denounced the “culture of death” which pervades the contemporary world. He condemns abortion, the death penalty, and war as among its manifestations. Yet a recent survey of the United States Congress (which includes many Catholics) could find only one member who opposed both abortion and capital punishment. Political values rather than religious ones usually shape our views: liberals favor abortion on demand, conservatives applaud executions, and very few consistently begin their thinking with the inestimable value of each human life. (pp. 50-51)

I think Placher’s writing is an excellent counterexample to the idea that theology is all about irrelevant obscure doctrines and takes away from living a life of discipleship.