Month: October 2005

Here are my reflections on Reformation Day from last year. I pretty much stand by everything I wrote then, except that I’m probably more open to the idea of a more robust episcopacy as a sign of church unity. Though I haven’t really given that much thought.

Bush nominates Alito.

This article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer purports to instruct us that Science has shown that the Virgin Birth couldn’t possibly be true becuase, well, where would Jesus have gotten his Y chromosome if he didn’t have a human father? Jeez, why didn’t I think of that?

And, now that you mention it, hasn’t Science shown that dead people don’t come back to life? Time to close the churches, folks! Nothing more to see here!

Then it degenerates into true silliness:

But for Jesus, a miraculous manufacture of genetic material would imply there’s a sequence of genetic code designed by God himself – God’s own approved DNA. That would have big implications for those who believe in the premise of The Da Vinci Code – that Jesus had children and his lineage continues to the present day.

And this is in the “Health and Science” section of the paper!

Start coming up with more creative post titles than “[Author] x on [topic] y.”

Since I’ve been on a bit of a Robert Jenson “kick” lately, and it seems germane to this morning’s topic, here’s an excerpt from his 1984 essay “Toward a Christian Theory of the Public” (I’m not sure how much of this Jenson still stands by, but it’s good food for thought anyway):

In the economy God rules us in the same way as he rules galaxies and amoebae: without our choice. We must eat, take shelter, and the like; and we are an economy insofar as we cannot manage these singly. God so arranges his creation that we cannot but deal with one another. Just so, communal moral choices become inevitable, and with them politics—and with politics prophecy.

I have room and ability for only a few somewhat scattered maxims about right economy—whereby it should be remembered that presenting and arguing such maxims is an act within the political public, not the economic public. The first is: if necessitating politics is God’s goal with the economy, maximum production in itself is not. Of course, since I must eat, I cannot but want to eat well. But not even the possibility of substituting “we” for “I” in the previous sentence can make the promotion of production the automatic right choice for every situation. In a right economy, the GNP would not be a norm.

The second maxim is like unto the first: an economy that produces such inequalities of wealth as to dispense some from and incapacitate others for communal moral deliberation is just so evil, counter to the economy’s godly function. “Safety nets” are nothing to the point; it is not poor citizens’ mere survival that is the polity’s responsibility, but their freedom for the polity. And every self-aware polity has appreciated the necessity of “sumptuary” laws. (Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theory of the Public,” in Essays in Theology of Culture, pp. 144-5)

For Jenson (in this essay at least), the essence of politics is communal moral deliberation. That is, when we gather to deliberate about what kind of community we should be. Economics is subordinate to politics in that its goal should be to equip us for this communal deliberation. Economic necessity is God’s way of forcing us to recognize our interdependence and our consequent need to come together and reason as a community. “Prophecy” refers to hearing the external moral word that calls us to something new. Thus, for Jenson, there can be no absolute “separation of church and state” because moral deliberation requires being open to hearing this word that stands “above” the community.

Jenson here sounds quite “Lasch-ian.” For Christopher Lasch, liberal politics and capitalist economics tended to corrode the civic virtue necessary for people to reason together about the public good. Such virtue requires a measure of independence in thought, which itself rests on economic independence. Liberalism, for Jenson and Lasch, seeks to eliminate this need for deliberation by creating a political “machinery” – a system or process – that will allow for the balancing of “interests” without requiring deliberation about the common good. (For a good discussion of Lasch’s views, see this interview.)

I have two reservations about Jenson’s views here. The first is that he seems a bit too sanguine about political control of the economy. For all the familiar reasons, subjecting economic life to the dictates of a political class can easily lead to corruption, inefficiency and outright oppression. However, in fairness to Jenson, he elsewhere says that a political corollary should be an increase in direct democracy, so that the people who are affected would be the ones making the decisions (and this, presumably, would require a significant measure of political decentralization to be feasible).

My second concern is that Jenson (and Lasch) is too dismissive of the value of liberal freedom – i.e. the preservation of sphere of private action where one is not subject to the community but is free to do as one chooses. Anti-liberal thinkers like to point out that liberal freedom leaves us free to choose, but doesn’t tell what we should choose. But this seems to miss the point. Just because something doesn’t give us everything we need doesn’t mean it’s of no value whatsoever. Something may be a necessary condition of living a good life, even if it’s not sufficient.

Kim at Crossroads has a very thoughtful post about poverty and how Christians should think about government’s role in responding to it.

I left this comment (minor modifications added):

I think it’s difficult to get a political philosophy from the Bible because of the circumstances in which it was written. In the NT in particular, Jesus and the disciples are in a distinctly minority position – both as members of an oppressed people and as part of a despised new religious movement. They’re not exactly in a position to be drafting policy papers for Caesar!

But there is ample precedent in the tradition for seeing the distribution of goods as a matter of justice and not simply charity as we understand the term. The church fathers, the scholastics, and the reformers all seemed to take the view that anything beyond what was necessary to meet our needs was owed to our poor neighbors [i.e. witholding from the needy neighbor was often regarded as theft]. And there is a longstanding tradition of regarding the institution of private property as a kind of concession to sin and, therefore, subject to qualification by those responsible for ensuring justice in the community. So, I think it’s pretty hard to argue for laissez-faire as the “Christian” position.

Two qualifiers, though. First, I think empirically we’ve seen that a relatively free market does a better job at producing wealth than other economic systems. But that still leaves a lot of room for government intervention when it comes to providing basic necessities to those unable to provide for themselves, health care, education, infrastructure, etc. etc.

Secondly, I think our credibility as Christians in arguing for particular policy proposals does depend in part on how we live out those principles in our own lives. We risk looking like hypocrites if we ask the government to enforce principles that we’re unable to live by ourselves! On the other hand, if Christians actually engaged in radical acts of wealth sharing, what kind of impact might that have on our unbelieving neighbors?

This is from Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson‘s essay “With No Qualifications: The Christological Maximalism of the Christian East,” found in the collection Ancient & Postmodern Christianity: Paleo-Orthodoxy in the 21st Century – Essays in Honor of Thomas C. Oden, edited by Kenneth Tanner and Christopher A. Hall:

The Father has defined his deity itself by the appeal of that man, “Father, forgive them”: to be God is to be the one who says “Yes” in that exchange. That is why there is hope of salvation. The Father has defined his deity itself by that man’s hospitality to publicans and sinners: to be God is to justify the ungodly. That is why we have hope of salvation. It is because the Father has defined deity by that man’s permission to piggyback our prayers on his, sharing his address to “Father,” that we can pray with certainty of hearing. Shifting, for a moment, to metaphysics, it is because that Father has defined being by Jesus’ promise to be with us, that a loaf and cup here and now can be his body and blood. And so forth through as much of the Gospels’ story as needed for any homiletic or confessional occasion.

What if Jesus were in fact a sort of male Shirley MacLaine? And he were risen to be the Son? Then that is the kind of God there would be. Almighty Boopsie in heaven. What if Jesus were in fact a liberal politician? And he were risen to be the Son? Then standard Protestantism would be true. What if Jesus were in fact an unconditionally accepting therapist? One can only set one’s nightmares in order.

Mary is the Mother of God. Unus ex Trinitate mortuus est pro nobis. One of the Trinity is a Palestinian Jew who came eating and drinking and forgave sin and prophesied implausible glory. Jesus saves. These and more sentences like them are the great metaphysical truth of the gospel, without which it is all religious palaver and wish fulfillment and metaphorical projection. Jesus really is Lord because he is one of the Trinity, and that is our salvation.

Speaking of Bishop Willimon, I liked this talk on “mixing religion and politics.”

William Placher reviews Anglican theologian Oliver O’Donovan’s latest book, The Ways of Judgment, in the Christian Century. O’Donovan is (in)famous for his defense of the idea of “Christendom.” The notion that Christendom was a disaster may be the one thing that unites liberal and “postliberal” theologians these days, but O’Donovan has argued that 1. it’s natural and right for Christians to seek to “make disciples of all nations” and 2. if they’re successful at doing that (and they should want to be!) it’s only natural that people’s faith will then shape and influence the ordering of the political sphere.

However, as Placher points out, O’Donovan’s notion of Christendom is a lot different from that of, say, Pat Robertson. For starters, it would be committed to a robust notion of social justice, and it would refrain from the oppression of non-Christian minorities because it’s Christian, not out of a liberal commitment to “neutrality” or secularism. O’Donovan thinks that the liberal notion of forever seeking the truth and never finding it robs us of one of our essential freedoms as human beings.

Old-fashioned liberals from Milton to Mill, O’Donovan pointed out, valued intellectual diversity because it helps us find the truth. The combat among different ideas helps lead us to the right answer. He worried, however, that nowadays people celebrate diversity for its own sake, as if actually finding truth or even finding agreement would be some kind of tragedy. But suppose we did agree on how society ought to be organized, and suppose that agreement rested on Christian principles. Should Christians find that so terrible?

[…]

O’Donovan has little patience with liberals like John Rawls who define justice as no more than the compromises that enable us to live in peace by giving us the freedom to pursue our various visions of the good without interfering too much with one another: “There could undoubtedly be worse tyrannies than that of the regnant liberal secularism, so sensitively averse to overt physical suffering. That much must always be said in its favor. But what cannot be said for it is that it fosters freedom. For in attempting to dictate what is true on the basis of what is convenient, it shuts down the human calling to the knowledge of the truth.” When Rawls and others encourage us to tolerate each other’s differing goods, they simply give up on the quest for the good. O’Donovan thinks human beings are driven to look for a true good and to try to convince everyone else when we find it, and we are deprived of an important freedom if we are told we can’t do that.

Placher, however, is skittish about the idea that Christendom could avoid the temptations to corruption and abuse of power that have marked much of its history. He’s not convinced that, in practice, it wouldn’t involve compromising Christian principles in order to be “effective.”

O’Donovan is hard to classify with the usual political categories. Like Pope John Paul II, he is committed to social justice in ways more liberal than almost any current American politician, but he also notes as an example of unjust laws “those that permit unborn children to be unnecessarily killed by their mothers with the assistance of gynecologists.” Though he never mentions the name, O’Donovan puts me in mind of F. D. Maurice, that 19th-century British advocate of both church tradition and the poor who was H. Richard Niebuhr’s favored example for his concept of “Christ the transformer of culture.”

I am relieved to encounter an eloquent account of “Christian values” that doesn’t call for hating gays and assassinating the president of Venezuela. But does O’Donovan face the sad history of “Christendom” rigorously enough? So often when Christians have dominated the political realm, we have persecuted Jews, denigrated women and started crusades. Those who have the greatest political success just now while waving a Christian banner would seem unlikely to do much better if they had more power. I do see O’Donovan’s point: as we share the gospel with the world, it’s absurd to worry that we will persuade too many people. But shouldn’t we worry about what would happen if we succeeded?

Partly this is a question of whose version of “Christian values” would prevail in the public sphere. A liberal like Christopher Insole would say that precisely because we can only partly discern the divine order of things, we need a liberal polity that refrains from making certain values – “Christian” or otherwise – publicly authoritative. Still, I don’t see how O’Donovan’s question can be avoided – don’t we want people to believe the Gospel? And if so, won’t that affect how they think about politics, how they vote, etc.?

Via Kevin Carson comes news of the Vermont Independence Convention:

The objectives of the convention are twofold. First, to raise the level of awareness of Vermonters of the feasibility of independence as a viable alternative to a nation which has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable. Second, to provide an example and a process for other states and nations which may be seriously considering separatism, secession, independence, and similar devolutionary strategies.

The keynote speaker is James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and other books. Kunstler thinks that as a result of, among other things, the rising cost of oil we’re going to be forced to live much more locally in the near future. For a brief overview of his views see here.

Independence, localist, and secessionist ideas cut interestingly across political and ideological lines. Vermont secessionist and economist Thomas Naylor co-wrote a book several years back with Methodist pastor/theologian (and now bishop) Will Willimon called Downsizing the U.S.A., which argued for radical devolution and decentralization of political and economic power. Naylor has also collaborated with left-anarchist Kirkpatrick Sale on this idea. You also see such sentiments entertained from time to time by various libertarians and conservative agrarians.