Month: October 2005

The October issue of First Things is now online in its entirety.

Some pieces I particularly enjoyed:

• Stephen Barr on evolution and design
• Joseph Bottum on P.G. Wodehouse
• David B. Hart on the theology of Robert Jenson

This is from Gustaf Aulen’s excellent book Reformation and Catholicity:

The act of salvation is entirely an act of Christ. This act creates faith. Faith is the sign of man’s new relationship to Christ, which comes into being when man is incorporated into a living fellowship with him. Luther has a classic statement: “in faith itself Christ is present” (in ipsa fide Christus adest). If “faith” therefore involves a relationship between Christ and man, it means that faith may also be considered from man’s point of view. Faith means then man’s acceptance of the gift given by Christ. This point of view eliminates completely the question as to how salvation can be partly the work of God and partly the work of man; or how it can be partly dependent on what God does, and partly on qualifying achievements on the part of man. The man whom Christ saves is an unqualified sinner. Faith cannot be understood as a qualifying, human achievement. On man’s part faith is primarily receptive. But this does not mean at all that man is passive in relation to what takes place. He participates actively to the highest degree. From this point of view faith is man’s Yes to the gift given to him on the basis of pure, undeserved grace. His acceptance of the gift means that he has been won and overcome by Christ and has been brought to obedience in faith under him. If faith were not primarily conceived of from this point of view, but were regarded as a matter of holding more or less tenaciously to certain doctrines as true–to speak in modern terminology–“Christianity” would be transformed into an ideology, one among many ideologies competing with each other. To be sure, Christian faith includes both the acceptance of something as true and a confession. But acceptance and confession depend primarily on the fact that faith is “God’s work,” God’s redemptive act through Christ. If this context is ignored, the truth will be lost, and faith will be devoid of meaning. (pp. 62-3)

Aulen goes on to discuss how, for Luther and the Reformation, Christ is actively present in faith. He comes to us in the Word and the Sacraments, actively justifying, forgiving, giving us new life, and sanctifying us.

Salvation takes place thanks to the fact that Christ as Kyrios continues in his church the work of reconciliation he fulfilled on the cross. The characteristic feature of the Reformation is not only its strong emphasis on the fact that the atonement has taken place once for all but also, and especially, that it combines what once happened with that which continually takes place in the church of Christ, where Christ realizes the victory which had been won through sacrifice. He accomplishes this continuing work through the means of grace, the Word and the sacraments. (p. 63)

Because Christ is present with us in the church, the Word, and the sacraments, justification isn’t merely “forensic” as some critics of the Reformation have charged, because to be united with Christ in faith is to “posses” all that he has – his life and his righteousness. This is the essence of Luther’s “happy exchange.”

From this point of view justification by faith alone, through Christ alone, involves possessing. “He who believes has.” He “has” Chirst with all that he is, owns, and can do. Because this is so, Reformation preaching and hymns are filled with the joy and confidence of faith. The life of faith is a life “in Christ,” “in the Spirit.” God’s gift, salvation and adoption as sons, is a gift given to man now in the present. We can speak here with a modern expression of “realized eschatology.”

But the eschatological perspective also prevents us from thinking that we have already attained the perfect righteousness that is our hope in faith. The meaning of simul iustus et peccator – being at the same time saint and sinner – is that our trust is always in Christ’s righteousness, not our own. Before God, considered in ourselves, we always remain sinners. We have no righteousness of our own that we can use to make claims upon God. And the righteousness we do have – the righteousness of Christ – is only party realized in this life.

What this formula wants to say about the Christian relationship with God is that this relationship always depends on and has its foundation in the forgiveness of sins. This is something, therefore, that does not have reference only to the beginning of the Christian life, to initium, but is true of Christian life as a whole under the conditions of human life here on earth. Man never comes to a point where he has so qualified himself that by his own attitude and his own work he could present his “own” rigteousness before God. Before God, coram deo, he is always a sinner who has nothing else to trust in than God’s mercy which meets him in the forgiveness of sins. He is not partly a sinner and partly righteous. He is altogether a sinner, who lives by and finds his righteousness in the grace of God which is new every morning. (pp. 84-5)

This doesn’t mean, however, that there’s no progress or growth in sanctification. Though our righteousness always remains partial and incomplete in this life, the Spirit does really effect change in our life.

The Holy Spirit accomplishes sanctification by “obliterating, destroying, and killing sin.” Here on earth there is “a Christian and holy people in whom Christ lives, works, and reigns per redemptionem, through grace and forgiveness of sin–and the Holy Spirit per vivificationem et sanctificationem, through daily washing away of sin and daily renewal–so that we do not remain in sin, but can and ought to live a new life in all kinds of good works, as God’s Ten Commandments demand.” By these means man grows in sanctification and becomes more and more a new being in Christ. This growth in sanctification, in faith and obedience, continues throughout life. It takes place through the use of God’s Word and the Lord’s Supper, which are the means the Spirit employs in sanctification. (pp. 88-9)

And yet, in another sense, we’re always beginning anew. This is because “the Christian life never reaches a point where it can build on anything else than God’s forgiving grace that is new every morning” (p. 89). We always live between the “already” and the “not yet,” and this reminds us not to have unrealistic expectations of perfection and to always rely only on God’s mercy.

Wow! Anne Rice has returned to the Catholic Church and has published a novel about Jesus’ “lost years” in Egypt.

Rice knows “Out of Egypt” and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, “I was ready to do violence to my career.” But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. “I mean, I was in despair.” In that afterword she calls Christ “the ultimate supernatural hero … the ultimate immortal of them all.”

I only ever made it through Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat but enjoyed them both. I’m kind of intrigued by the new novel.

The UK Observer profiles the “new puritans” – twenty-something youngsters who build their lives around making “ethical choices” such as eschewing consumption, being ultra-health conscious, avoiding alcohol and tobacco and haranguing their friends and fellow citizens about their “lifestyle choices.”

I can agree with the aims of some of these people to live in less shallow and more environmentally-friendly and healthier ways than some of their peers. But darn it if the ones they profile don’t come off as insufferable and humorless prigs.

Also, it’s hard not to see this as a peculiarly modern and secular version of “works-righteousness” – you justify your existence by making all the correct “ethical” choices, resulting in a pinched and joyless approach to life. Hopefully they’ll grow out of it and moderate their positions before they manage to use the force of law to impose their neo-cromwellian order on the rest of us.

Just a note that the much-heralded VI blogroll has been recently updated. Amazing how many good blogs there are out there.

It has long seemed plain to this Protestant that the invocation of saints’ prayers must be possible and if possible surely desirable. I certainly can ask a living fellow believer to pray for me. If death severed the fellowship of believers, I could not of course ask a departed fellow believer to pray for me. But the New Testament hardly permits us to think that death can sever the fellowship of believers — and the eucharistic prayers also of Protestant bodies explicitly deny that it does. Thus there seems to be no reason why I cannot ask also a departed believer to pray for me. And if I can do it, there will certainly be contexts where I should do it. Thus there should be no problem about asking Mary in her capacity as sancta, Saint Mary, to pray for us.

Those of the Reformers who thought otherwise needed to produce more stringent arguments than any I am aware of their adducing. Simply saying with Melanchthon that there is no scriptural mandate to address individual saints, will not do. Magisterial Protestant churches live by all kinds of practices, perhaps most notably infant baptism and the authority of the New Testament canon, for which no scriptural mandate exists, and which can be justified only by chains of argument far longer than the one just developed for invoking saints. On infant baptism Luther’s final word was simply that this had long been the practice of the church, and that he saw no decisive argument against it. One must wonder why the same cannot be said about invocation of the saints. — Robert W. Jenson, “A Space for God”

Via “Gaius” (the blogger formerly known as Marcus) comes this interesting tidbit about Americans’ support for various health care measures. Turns out we overwhelmingly support not only standard fare like Medicare, but also more drastic “socialistic” measures:

The online survey of 2,242 U.S. adults found an overwhelming majority (96%) of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” favor Medicare, the medical assistance program for the elderly and disabled, while 91% say they support Medicaid, the program to assist people with very low incomes.

The poll also showed high support for policies or practices that are considered more controversial. Eighty-seven percent of those polled say they support funding of international HIV prevention and treatment programs, while 75% favor universal health insurance, compared with 17% who oppose it. Another 70% support embryonic stem-cell research, compared with about 19% who oppose it.

Now, universal health insurance can mean a lot of different things (e.g. single-payer systems like in Canada, mixed systems like in the UK), but it would seem to indicate massive support for some pretty major changes in the way the U.S. delivers health care.

Which makes it all the more baffling that the Dems haven’t made this more central to their campaigns. Too scared after the Clinton health plan debacle?

I’ve been reading Diogenes Allen’s Quest: The Search for Meaning Through Christ and have found that he develops some ideas that resonate with what I’ve long thought. Allen is addressing the condition of the “seeker” and trying to show how attending to the story of Jesus can draw them into the life of God. What I think is invaluable about Allen’s work is that he is cognizant of post-modernism and the way it challenges the Enlightenment understanding of truth and rationailty, but he doesn’t jump into the arms of the po-mo relativists or try and make Christianity a hermetically sealed languge game. Nor does he reduce the claims of Christianity to moral or spiritual platitudes in order to secure universal assent.

Allen’s argument is that by attending to the story and teachings of Jesus, and by earnestly seeking God through prayer and other practices, we will come to a greater experience and knowledge of God’s reality. He doesn’t claim to prove the doctrines of Christianity, but he does see a positive role for reason and philosophy in removing common intellectual objections to Christianity’s claims. This serves to clear a space where we can go on to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

He describes the journeys of Tolstoy and Simone Weil and how their experience led them to a process of seeking through prayer and reasoning. There is no separation of theology and the spiritual life here, but they’re intertwined in an ongoing ascent. (For more on that see this article.)

He even goes on to compare the persistent search for God to the methods employed by science:

Persistence in prayer has a direct parallel in experimental science. Russell Stannard, who directed a research team that confirmed the existence of the fourth kind of quark, called “charm,” used his experience in small-particle physics to answer a young woman’s question about how to find God. Although he had estimated the odds of confirming the existence of charm by the experiments his team had prepared as about one out of five, they had not put less effort into their preparations than they would have done if the odds had been higher. One hundred percent effort, so to speak, had to be made, even though the odds of success were less than twenty percent. He and his colleagues invested two years of their scientific lives to plan, prepare, and conduct experiments that might well fail. If it took concentrated effort for two years to confirm the possible existence of a sub-atomic particle, Stannard thought it reasonable to advise the young woman to set aside five minutes each day for two years for prayer. Not just prayer but persistent prayer is needed in our search for God. (Quest, p. 102-3)

Now obviously the search for God differs in important ways from the search for a sub-atomic particle. Since God is always the subject, never an inert object, the initiative always belongs to God to reveal himself to us. And our relationship to God involves us in a personal existential way that testing a scientific hypothesis usually doesn’t. Nevertheless, there is precedent in the Christian tradition for saying that we should put ourselves in a position of receptivity so that we can hear God.

This whole line of thought reminds me a lot of Pascal. Pascal was a critic of the Enlightenment when being a critic of the Enlightenment wasn’t cool. Though a brilliant and accomplished mathematician and scientist, Pascal believed that Cartesian rationalism was destructive of faith because it substituted the “god of the philosophers” for the living “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” He used reason to demolish the pretensions of reason, showing how its claims were more limited than the best and brightest of the day supposed.

Reason’s impotence to decide ultimate questions of religion made Pascal’s famous “wager” necessary. But I think we misunderstand Pascal if we think of the wager as simply willing oneself to have faith. For one thing, as a Jansenist-symp Pascal had an extremely high view of God’s grace and sovereignty, so he would’ve seen faith as a supernatural gift, not something we can will ourselves to have. Nor was Pascal psychologically naive enough to think that we could just will ourselves to have a particular belief.

I think the wager is best understood as the initial willingness to put oneself in the position to receive faith. This is underscored by his admonition following the wager argument:

[A]t least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavor, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. “But this is what I am afraid of.” And why? What have you to lose?

Pascal doesn’t promise us that wagering on God will give us faith or quiet all doubts and questions, but he urges us to take the first step on the path. He tells us to put ourselves in the company of those who believe, by “acting” as if we believe, participating in religious services and so on. When we do that we increase the chances of being open to God’s grace and presence. You might say that things like Bible reading, prayer, worship, acts of charity, etc. are ways of exposing ourselves to God’s spiritual radiation. Pascal and Allen want us to try acting on the assumption that there is something to be exposed to.

Patricia E. Bauer writes about her experiences as a mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome in an age of prenatal testing.

If it’s unacceptable for William Bennett to link abortion even conversationally with a whole class of people (and, of course, it is), why then do we as a society view abortion as justified and unremarkable in the case of another class of people: children with disabilities?

She claims to have met people who think that parents have a duty to abort a child diagnosed with a disability like Down’s Syndrome. Is there a growing expectation that every child should be a “perfect” child? I honestly don’t know how prevalent such a sentiment is.

(link via 11D)

From Christianity Today:

President Bush faces a defining question of morality on which he has yet to receive any discernible guidance from the faith-based coalition that helped put him in office. The question: whether it is ever right for Americans to inflict cruel and degrading treatment on suspected terrorist detainees.

We read credible reports—some from FBI agents—that prisoners have been stripped naked, sexually humiliated, chained to the floor, and left to defecate on themselves. These and other practices like “waterboarding” (in which a detainee is made to feel as if he is being drowned) may or may not meet the technical definition of torture, but no one denies that these practices are cruel, inhuman, and degrading.

Today, the practical application of that question is whether the President should fight the efforts of a group of Republican senators, led by John McCain, who has introduced amendments to a defense bill that would outlaw such abuse. Two weeks ago, the Senate passed the McCain amendment, but whether it is put into place will be determined by the conference committee charged with resolving differences between the Senate and House defense bills.

For the President’s base of evangelicals and conservative Catholics, no practical expediency, however compelling, should determine fundamental moral issues of marriage, abortion, or bioethics. Instead, these questions should be resolved with principles of revealed moral absolutes, granted by a righteous and loving Creator.

Indeed, recent survey results from the Pew Research Center indicated that, in rating the importance of Supreme Court issues, the treatment of terrorist detainees is a close second only to abortion on the list of concerns of evangelical and Catholic voters. Where, then, are the robust voices of theological reflection and moral reasoning that we have come to expect in these debates?

I do not know how others would advise the President theologically on these matters, but as a convinced Christian who has tried for 20 years to apply principles of evangelical faith to issues of human rights, here are three principles of a biblical worldview that seem applicable:

• The state has the authority to protect its citizens by detaining criminals and using force to restrain those who seek to destroy innocent life.
• All those whom the state detains retain the image of God and are due a standard of care required by God.
• Because the power of the state over detainees is exercised by fallen human beings, that power must be limited by clear boundaries, and individuals exercising such power must be transparently accountable.

Therefore, even if it is expedient to inflict cruelty and degradation on a prisoner during interrogation (and experts seem very much divided on this question), in my view, the moral teachings of Christ, the Torah and the Prophets do not permit it for those who bear the Imago Dei.

Read more here.