Month: November 2005

It’s interesting that in some theological circles epistemology has become such a hot topic, especially considering I’ve always found epistemology to be one of the least exciting branches of philosophy. Much of the controversy seems to revolve around attacking or defending “foundationalism.” Foundationalism is the view, often associated with Descartes, that all our knowledge rests ultimately on certain “foundational” beliefs.

The Cartesian version takes those foundational beliefs to be certain in the sense of not being open to doubt, but it’s important to note that not all versions of foundationalism are committed to that. It’s perfectly possible to think that some of our beliefs are more fundamental than others (in fact, I’d say it’s probably impossible not to think that to some degree) but that even the more basic beliefs are fallible. For instance, many of my beliefs rest, at least in part, on my sense-perception of the world, but it’s quite possible for me to coherently doubt whether my sense-perceptions accurately represent the world. It’s just that perhaps I don’t have anything more basic to go on.

So the common dichotomy you see between people who supposedly believe in “absolute certainty” and those who don’t isn’t necessarily a matter of foundationalism vs. non-foundationalism. Once that’s clear I’m not sure how much of a stake theology has in that particular debate (though I do think theology has a stake in realist vs. non-realist epistemologies).

At Reason Nick Gillespie writes appreciatively of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, and sees him as a model for religious liberty and secular government that is still applicable today.

While it’s true that the baptist Williams believed that it was wrong – for impeccably theological reasons – for government to try to coerce belief, he did think that civil government should enforce the “second tablet” of the Decalogue. But this would hardly sit well with Reason-type libertarians and other secularists!

It seems to me that the limits of applying Williams’ vision to our time arise because he, like virtually all pre-modern Christian thinkers, identified the Decalogue with the natural moral law that was accessible to all people without need of special revelation.

But nowadays it’s fashionable to think that moralities are irreducibly particular and are outgrowths of specific traditions, rather than being common to all reasonable people. The problem with this is that, in a pluralistic society such as our own, it’s not clear what, if any, common morality that leaves us. And “separation of church and state” doesn’t settle it because, if there is no universal morality then we still have to decide which morality will hold sway in the public sphere. And, according to this view, all morality is “religious” in the sense that it belongs to a particular tradition.

In his book on Spiritual Theology, Diogenes Allen considers whehter spiritual disciplines aimed at growing in love of God and neighbor are a form of “works righteousness,” a concern that Protestants often have:

Many Christians are uneasy with the idea that we are to make an effort to overcome our inadequacies because it sounds like “works righteousness,” as if our salvation depended on something we do rather than wholly on God’s grace. But we must remember that God is as fully active and present in our lives when we are making an effort as when we are not. I both instances we rely wholly on God for our existence and powers. It also helps to remember the distinction between justification and sanctification. As the great Protestant reformer John Calvin put it, justification and sanctification are twins. They are both the work of Christ, but each is a distinct work. Justification is our forgiveness or pardon by God apart from the law because of Christ’s death on the cross; sanctification is the process by which we actually begin to become holy, free of the effects of evil and full of charity or divine love. Justification is the beginning of sanctification. Both require divine grace. Divine grace does not mean that there is nothing left for us to do. Quite the contrary, it is precisely because of divine grace that we are able to begin to seek freedom from the effects of sin and evil, and to begin to love in the way Christ loves. (p. 9)

Even Luther, arch-foe of works-righteousness that he was, could write of the necessity of discipline for the Christian life. From The Freedom of a Christian:

Although, as I have said, inwardly, and according to the spirit, a man is amply enough justified by faith having all that he requires to have, except that this very faith and abundance ought to increase from day to day even till the future life, still he remains in this mortal life upon earth, in which it is necessary that he should rule his own body and have intercourse with men. Here then works begin; here he must not take his ease; he must give heed to exercise his body by fastings, watchings, labour, and other regular discipline, so that it may be subdued to the spirit, and obey and conform itself to the inner man and faith, and not rebel against them nor hinder them, as is its nature to do if it is kept under. For the inner man, being conformed to God and created after the image of God through faith, rejoices and delights itself in Christ, in whom such blessing have been conferred on it, and hence has only this task before it: to serve God with joy and for nought in free love.

I think the key distinction here is that, according to the Reformers, we are justified (forgiven, pardoned, etc.) solely on account of Christ and there’s nothing we do to merit salvation in any respect. What they objected to was any suggestion that God accepts us based on some intrinsic quality we posses, even if it is supposed to be wrought by grace (what Robert Jenson called the “anti-Pelagian codicil”).

But, as a consequence of our justification we receive the Holy Spirit who works within us to transform us into the image of the Son of God. But it’s not in virtue of that “actualized” holiness that God accepts us, but only on account of Christ. You might say that sanctification is the working out or making visible of our salvation as we are conformed to Christ’s image, but it’s not the cause of it.

A while back I was reading an article about the flat tax and all the benefits it could bring in terms of simplifying the tax code. But, as far as I could tell, you could get all the same simplicity benefits from a simplified graduated rate. My wife, who is smarter than me and has taken a class on tax law, confirmed this breakfast-table analysis.

Anyway, here’s someone making basically the same point, except with knowledge and facts and whatnot.

As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur. –“Mr. Republican” Robert A. Taft, speaking twelve days after the attack on Pearl Harbor

(from this American Prospect article, via Antiwar.com)

This article on self-styled “Christian Zionists” isn’t likely to tell you anything you don’t already know, but, as I’ve been working my way through Romans lately with the help of a couple of commentaries, this brought me up short:

“Our Christian Zionism – and we readily endorse that term – grows out of God’s promise in Genesis 12:1-3,” [Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry] executive director William Sutter said, flipping his Bible open to read the vow from God to Israel’s patriarch Abraham: ” ‘And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.’

“We take this literally,” Sutter said. “The land of promise is Israel, and the recipients of the promise are the Jewish people.”

Now, I’m no biblical scholar, but it seems that the promise to Abraham is one of the hinges of Paul’s argument, and he interprets it to refer to God’s promise to bless all people – Jews and Gentiles – through the salvation wrought by Christ. In other words, Paul seems to be explicitly contravening the “literal” sense of the promise as entitlement to a particular piece of real estate.

It’s strange, to say the least, that Christian Zionists would embrace a position that seems to entail denying a crucial part of the gospel message as proclaimed by Paul. (Needless to say, there may be other good reasons for supporting the state of Israel, but that’s a different debate.)

Apparently there’s a trend among yuppies and millionaire movie stars to dress their children in Che Guevera t-shirts:

This week, Fairchild Publications is introducing a horrifying new magazine called Cookie—a sort of Lucky for the sandbox set, featuring $900 strollers and hair gel for 3-year-old boys (“have him rub no more than a quarter-size dollop”).

But could this be the very magazine that New York City parents deserve? Have you noticed how parents are increasingly using the bellies of innocent babes as their own personal billboards?

Take David Moore, 37, a creative director at Publicis Advertising, who likes to dress his 2-year-old son, Conrad, in a T-shirt stenciled with the classic image of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. “It seems like pretty much all parents in Brooklyn have something similar,” Mr. Moore said. “If it’s not Che, it’s a Pixies T-shirt, which Conrad also has,” he added—along with one that reads “I Already Know More Than the President,” which has also been spotted on the young spawn of Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

Actress-mommies Jennifer Connelly and Kate Hudson have both bought the Che tees, which are distributed by Appaman.com, an online supplier to stores like Sam & Seb, the bustling children’s boutique in Williamsburg, and Lolli’s in Park ­Slope. “I don’t think many of our customers are Communists,” said Harald Husum, Appaman’s founder, a Carroll Gardens resident with a 2-year-old daughter. According to Mr. Husum, he’s sold nearly 6,000 Che products since his company was launched in 2002, despite a smattering of protests from Cuban-Americans. “The whole idea behind the company was to put traditional grown-up images on babies,” Mr. Husum said. “This is not at all a political statement, it’s a fashion statement. Che’s image has a rock ’n’ roll edge to it that we’re looking for.”

Mr. Moore’s wife, Francesca Castagnoli, a writer, wearily estimates that one in 10 kids in her ’hood own the Che shirt. “Some people probably think it’s an icon of what’s cool,” she said, adding (without apparent irony): “Also, you sort of want that independent spirit for your child.”

Personally, I like this one instead:

The New Republic has a profile (free registration req’d) of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) that makes him look ever-more appealing (to me, anyway, though surely not to the editors of TNR).

Not only did Feingold vote against the authorization of force for the Iraq war (question to the Dems who are now complaining that they were duped: what did Feingold know that you didn’t?), and not only was he the sole senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act, but he has been a pretty consistent anti-interventionist, even during the Clinton presidency when many Democrats discovered their inner hawk:

Conditions in Iraq are certainly nasty. But Feingold has long harbored wariness about U.S. military action. When Republicans forced a 1995 Senate vote to cut off funding for U.S. military forces in Bosnia, for instance, he was the sole Democrat to join 21 conservatives in support of the resolution. As other Democrats waxed idealistic about human rights, Feingold fretted about Vietnam parallels and worried that “our attempting to police the world threatens our own national security.” By 1997, he was fighting to cut off funding for military operations in Bosnia and to begin an early withdrawal of U.S. forces. “What they haven’t done is define a concrete exit strategy for our American troops,” he said at the time. “This administration needs to sit down and work with Congress to map out a specific schedule for bringing our troops home, or they will be there for a very, very long time.” Likewise, Feingold cast just one of three Democratic ‘no’ votes against the 1999 Kosovo bombing campaign. “It’s a compelling notion that the American government has an obligation to stop brutality and genocide. I can’t dispute that,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in March of 1999. “But how can we be acting in Bosnia and Kosovo and not Rwanda, or Sudan, or East Timor, or even Tibet?” Feingold even told me that, during the 2000 presidential campaign, “I liked some of the things George W. Bush said about nation-building.”

The problem with Feingold is that he may not enough of a dogmatic liberal to win the primary (he was the sole Democrat to vote to see the Clinton impeachment trial through; he voted to confirm John Ashcroft as AG and John Roberts as chief justice; he has been a moderate on gun control) and probably not enough of a hawk to win the general election.

But if the Democrats were picking their candidate solely on the grounds of who would most appeal to me, an anti-war civil libertarian would be a pretty good place to start (they could also make him or her pro-life, but let’s not be utopian).

Speaking of William Placher, in this article from 1992 he discusses how Christians should participate in public life, both in academia and politics. He points out that Christians are in an ambiguous position in American society – on the one hand most Americans would consider themselves at least nominally Christian, but on the other hand our personal and national lives are often sharply at variance with the values of the gospel. But, in recognizing this, if we do try to promote “Christian values,” non-believers often (and not without reason) feel threatened.

Placher considers two prominent approaches to this problem. The “genericist” option emphasizes the common “religious values” supposedly shared by people of good will regardless of their confessional affiliation as providing a foundation for a kind of “civic republicanism” that can direct people to virtue and the common good. He associates this view with the proposals of Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart. In Placher’s view, this position fails to reckon with the imporant differences between religious traditions and ultimately places a utilitarian value on religion – it’s valued for its usefulness in promoting social cohesion and virtue rather than for its own sake.

The “tribalist” option, associated with thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas, says that the primary job of the church is to “be the church” – i.e. to exist as a countercultural community that displays the virtues of the gospel whose effect on the surrounding society will primarily be an indirect one. Its communal life will serve as a witness to a different ordering of values than those embodied in the structures of the world.

While Placher is clearly more sympathetic to the “tribalists” he worries that they don’t give Christians guidance on how they should behave outside of their roles in the church. How should the Christian bank manager, or newspaper editor or politician behave? Should they bring their Christian convictions to bear on their “secular” callings? And how do they do that without forcing Christian values on their nonbelieving neighbors? Don’t non-Christian citizens have a right to protest the Christian senator who votes for pacifist policies or radical social policies on explicitly theological grounds?

Placher ultimately concludes that if Christians are to participate in shaping public life, they have to do so in what we might call a “self-emptying” way that follows the example of Jesus:

If we are to communicate Christian faith with passion in a way that does not become the morally inappropriate assertion of cultural dominance, then, in a culture like ours, we have to keep rejecting the advantages that Christianity’s residual cultural status could provide. We have to keep making ourselves into outsiders who could speak with a prophetic voice. I suspect this is one reason that theologians of liberation have been the most powerful recent public witnesses of Christian faith. They do, for social reasons, speak from the outside. It is from the margins, from the underside, that one can speak a prophetic Christian word that does not threaten one’s non-Christian fellow citizens.

[…]

For some, such an approach will mean participation in the political process, but always with a bit of irony, always as uncomfortable allies who ask awkward questions just at the moment of victory. For others, it will mean standing radically outside the ordinary political system, as fundamental critics of the way the United States does its public business, whether our critique is explicit or takes the implicit form of constituting communities founded on different values and different presuppositions. But none of us will make either ourselves or our neighbors very comfortable. That seems part of the job, somehow.

This reminds of something French sociologist and Protestant lay theologian Jacques Ellul says in his book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. He says that if Christians are going to join a movement on behalf of the oppressed, then as soon as they acheive victory they have to switch sides, since the oppressed almost invariably become oppressors as soon as they acheive power. (Think, for instance, how India, after successfully gaining independence under the leadership of Gandhi, used the power of the state to suppress internal minority independence movements.)

We’ve seen how the religious right has often been co-opted by the Republican Party into supporting policies that seem to be tangentially related, if not outright opposed, to Christian values (preemptive war, torture, Social Security privatization, etc.). And it’s not hard to see how the same thing could happen to the renascent “religious left.” Some of the rhetoric coming out of Sojourners, for instance, sounds like an appeal to a kind of generic religiously-tinged humanism (“people of faith,” “the religious community,” etc.) which could end up simply slapping a religious patina on the platform of the Democratic Party. But without a strong sense of distinctiveness will they be able to resist the blandishments of power any better than their counterparts on the right? If a liberal religious bloc materializes in 2008 and helps elect Hillary Clinton, what will they do when she orders her first bombing raid on another country?

As Placher notes, this isn’t an argument for withdrawal from the political process, but it does suggest a certain amount of detachment and skepticism, a refusal to identify too closely with any movement, and humility in trying to translate our convictions into public policy. It also means a retention of independence rooted in a community that recognizes that all earthly regimes and powers belong to this age that is passing away. Christian values are radical enough that they are unlikely to be embodied in any political party or movement. And there will always be a gap between what can be acheived politically and that community of mutual love that will arrive only when the Lord comes in glory.

Does Paul teach that homosexual intercourse is always sinful? For the reasons I have been indicating, I think that’s a question on which honest Christians can disagree. Is homosexuality one of the sins Christians should worry most about? That’s by contrast an easy question, and the answer is “no.” Scripture discusses same-sex intercourse only briefly, and in complicated contexts. However we interpret those passages, there’s something very wrong in current attitudes in many churches, where condemning homosexuality appears to be the most important of all ethical topics. Moreover (and this is how, I believe, this topic fits into a general discussion of Jesus’ ministry), Jesus clearly did not deliver his most forceful condemnations about the sins that generated the most social antagonism in his culture, as homosexuality often does in ours, but rather reserved them for the flaws in those his society viewed as most respectable. — William C. Placher