Month: August 2005

Diogenes Allen is professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of numerous books on theology, spirituality, and the philosophy of religion. His book The Path of Perfect Love (second ed., 1992) is the first thing I’ve picked up of his, but so far I think he offers a very intriguing approach to the problem of belief in the modern world.

Allen begins with a description of the “panic in theology” – i.e. the idea that theology has lost its ability to make sense to modern people or to offer them anything relevant to their lives. God, if he is thought or spoken about at all, has been pushed to the fringes of out experience. The result is an attenuated and reductionist theology and an impoversihed religious life.

What Allen wants to show is that the presence of God properly resides at the center of our experience rather than the periphery. Rather than assault the reader with a series of deductive arguments intended to compel assent though, Allen begins with what he calls “the experience of perfect love.” Using a passage from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn as his jumping off point, Allen defines perfect love as an apprehension of things in their particularity as worthy of attention and love in their own right, quite independently of any usefulness they may have for the apprehending self. We might understand this as a version of Augustine’s dictum that “being qua being is good.”

For Murdoch the agnostic, this experience of perfect love is not necessarily a clue to any larger cosmic meaning. But it is a more objective way of viewing reality than our typical way – namely to regard the self as the center of the universe and to apportion value according to how things and people benefit us. The highest goal of the moral life, for Murdoch, involves a certain self-forgetfulness and an apprehension of the goodness of beings that exist for their own sake (she spells this out more prosaically in her essay “The Sovereignty of Good” found in the collection of the same name).

But, Allen asks, what if we did take this experience of perfect love – of love unmixed with self-seeking – as a clue to the meaning of reality itself? And what light might the traditional Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection shed on this experience? The subsequent chapters take up these questions, which I’ll attempt to discuss in upcoming posts.

Paul J. Griffiths reviews David B. Hart’s new book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (link via Mere Comments)

From a Christian point of view, Mr. Hart notes, such events are quite easy to explain, if difficult to accept. They are dramatic instances of the fact that the world is profoundly out of joint, damaged in deep ways by the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of man. This fall, brought about by the exercise of human freedom, has altered the very physical order of the cosmos so that what God had intended to be a world of harmony and peace, free from suffering and death, is now a world running red with blood.

Much of this blood is shed by human ingenuity, in holocausts and genocides and gulags. But much of it is shed by earthquakes and storms and tidal waves and plagues, catastrophes independent of human will. This was the case for the quarter-million people who died in December but of course it is the case as well every time, for instance, a stray pathogen robs a single child of life.

Indeed, such tragedies are common. For Christians, they are horrors, evils opposed in every way to God’s loving intentions. (Mr. Hart notes, by the way, that the post-tsunami skeptics, in their what-kind-of-God question, posited a Christian and loving god and not a version of the cruel or indifferent gods that are a part of some other religious traditions.) More important, God can achieve victory over such tragedies and in fact has already begun to do so in the victory over death won by Jesus on the cross. There will be a time, too, when comfort is provided to those who have suffered and died, when the world will be irrevocably returned to the harmony intended for it.

But until then the only fully Christian response to events like the tsunami, argues Mr. Hart, is mourning and lament. The effects that natural disasters have on us are privations, absences, negative images of what God’s love intends for us and for the world. There is nothing good to say about them because, precisely, there is nothing good in them. By arguing in such a way, Mr. Hart draws upon and restates, with verve and ornament, the classical Christian view that all evil is an absence, a privation of good.

Thus to the claim that the tsunami provides evidence against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God Mr. Hart responds: The disordered world in which we live isn’t as God intended and created it. God did order the world in such a way that natural disasters don’t happen. The only disaster he permitted was the one that we ourselves succeeded in bringing about, the one that disordered the world in the direction of chaos. God will finally overcome even this, Christian faith teaches. But until that victory is complete the damage wrought by chaos provides no evidence against God. Or, as Mr. Hart likes to put it: The God against whom natural disasters might provide evidence isn’t the one in whom Christians believe.

Despite its difficulties, the doctrine of original sin seems to be the perennial way of reconciling the existence of a benevolent God with the manifest disorder of the world. Also see Hart’s article from March’s First Things.

Interesting piece from Radley Balko. As a believer in natural law I’m generally sympathetic.

Adam Kotsko makes a good point:

there are plenty of good American beers. There’s Sierra Nevada, first of all, the official beer of the Chicago Theological Seminary. There’s Leinenkuegel’s — many varieties, made in nearby Wisconsin. Goose Island, 312 and Honker’s Ale, and who knows what other seasonal brews. Even PBR is kind of good, and I guess one is expected to mention “Sam Adams” — in fact, in at least one case, one of my professors specifically passed over Sierra in favor of Sam Adams (and he’s Korean!). And Killians! Don’t be fooled by the “Irish” in the name of their most famous brew! Not only are there good American beers, but there are cheap American beers — in point of fact, all those beers that you buy in the “second tier” of prices, just above Bud Lite and Miller Genuine Ass, are probably American. All the beers you rely on when you want to look generous by buying everyone a pitcher, but you don’t want to break the bank: American.

You don’t need an imported beer from Germany. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that if you drank the most popular German beer, you wouldn’t like it. (Heineken is actually from the Netherlands, which is why I can say this.) I mean: Beck’s? Who wouldn’t just as soon take a Killian’s or a Goose Island? And Corona? Yeah, sure, it’s cool that you put lime in it, but other than that, it tastes basically like all the other beers that are that color.

American beer, people! Don’t be ashamed! We have good beer here. Not the best, but who does have the best? You can go to any country in the world, and you’ve got your lagers and your stouts and that’s about it, frankly — dark-colored and light-colored beer. How many ways can you ferment grain, really, at the end of the day? And I mean, yes, of course Bud Lite is coagulated homeless guy piss, but why should that reflect on all the hard working brewers in this fine nation? Huh? Riddle me that, Batman.

Indeed! Americans need to stop being ashamed of their beer! I second Mr. Kotsko’s appreciation of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. We also have some local goodies – Yuengling‘s (“America’s oldest brewery) is a respectable (and inexpensive) brew. Yards brewery is right here in Philly. I’ve also always had a soft spot for Latrobe, PA’s Rolling Rock.

And, frankly, I hate Heineken.