Month: January 2006

Brendan O’Neill argues that Bin Laden’s rhetoric has become parasitical on Western arguments about the U.S. and its role in the Middle East; he’s gone from being obsessed with Saudi Arabia, to self-declared champion of Palestine, and, now in his most recent supposed message, he parrots many of the lines of the anti-war Left. What gives? Is the idea of “Islamism” (or “Islamo-fascism” as some prefer to call it) as a coherent fighting faith something of a myth? Worth a read.

Jacob Weisberg writes:

[T]he Senate hearings on NSA domestic espionage set to begin next month will confront fundamental questions about the balance of power within our system. Even if one assumes that every unknown instance of warrant-less spying by the NSA were justified on security grounds, the arguments issuing from the White House threaten the concept of checks and balances as it has been understood in America for the last 218 years. Simply put, Bush and his lawyers contend that the president’s national security powers are unlimited. And since the war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive supremacy they’re asserting won’t be a temporary condition.

And this isn’t something that will go away when Bush leaves office. Future presidents are unlikely to renounce these kinds of powers once the precedent has been established. Just as the Clinton administration laid the groundwork for many of the powers now being claimed by the Bush administration, I’m sure President Hillary Clinton (heaven help us!) will be more than happy to use the tools bequeathed to her by Bush should the situation arise.

Earlier I mentioned that the Bush administration has created some strange political bedfellows, evidenced by the American Prospect publishing articles by anti-war libertarians and running a glowing article about William Jennings Bryan, the bête noir of enlightened secularists.

Now the American Conservative has published appreciations of George “Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion” McGovern and Eugene McCarthy.

I think that many Christians would want to affirm the following:

1. Slavation comes through Christ alone.

2. Members of non-Christian religions (or people who adhere to no relgion at all) can be saved (and at least some will be).

The motives driving our affirmation of these two statements are, I think, a desire to affirm the traditional beliefs about the salvific uniqueness of Jesus Christ and a sense that it would be grossly unjust for people who, through no fault of their own, fail to come to explicit faith in Jesus to be denied any chance at salvation (either because they haven’t been exposed to the gospel message, or have been exposed to a distorted version of it, for instance).

Of course, it’s possible to simply deny one of the two statements. We could take the strong pluralist view that there are many paths to salvation, all more or less equal. Or we could take the strong exclusivist view that only those who explicitly confess faith in Christ in this life can be saved. The first view entails surrendering the heart of what Christianity has traditionally affirmed, so I’m inclined to take that off the table. And I suspect few of my readers are tempted by the second option, so I won’t address that directly in this post.

How we attempt to reconcile these statements, though, depends on how we answer a host of questions. Questions like “What does salvation consist in?” and “How does Christ save people?” If we say, for instance, that salvation consists simply in God forgiving us by fiat without requiring any response on our part, we could simply say that in virtue of Christ’s work on the cross all people have had their sins forgiven and are therefore saved, whether they know it or not (or, alternatively, that some specific set of people have had their sins forgiven, but not others, and this is entirely a matter of God’s will).

On the other hand, if we say that salvation does require some kind of response on our part, such as turning toward God, repenting of our sins, trying to live a life in accordance with God’s will, etc. (even if we are aided in all this by God’s grace), then we will want to see how someone can do those things without explicit knowledge and/or acceptance of the Christian revelation. One popular move is to see other relgions as vehicles for this kind of journey – the progress that people make along other spiritual paths is “credited” to them as service to God, even if their understanding of the truth (from a Christian perspective) is deficient. They have responded to God, even though their grasp of the god to whom they responded is inadequate. This view is depicted in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle when the virtuous Calormene warrior Emeth discovers to his surprise that his misguided service to the false god Tash was counted to him as service to Aslan.

One problem with this view is that it runs the risk of simply saying that all “people of good will” or “all basically decent people” will be saved. For one, how good does one have to be to be saved, and doesn’t this run the risk of turning into a doctrine of works-righteousness? And secondly, if anyone who is “basically good” can be saved, why the need for the Incarnation in the first place?

The problem may be that in trying to figure out how people can be saved without explicit faith in Christ, we’re setting things up in such a way as to make the Incarnation superfluous from the get-go. What’s needed, it seems to me, is a way of thinking abou this that preserves the importance of the Incarnation as a unique act of God for the redemption of humankind but also allows that those without explicitly Christian faith can be saved. We also need to consider how we consider salvation to be “transmitted” – i.e. what kind of connection does someone need to have to the salvific events in order to benefit from them?

Apparently Richard Dawkins has a TV show in the UK, the central premise of which is that religion is the root of all evil. Subtle!

Here Keith Ward (who has been discussed in this space recently) dissects Dawkins (via Amy Welborn).

Ward nicely points out the dilemma that atheists sometimes try to use to discredit religious belief: either you take every word of the Bible literally, in which case you’re a wacko fundamentalist theocrat or you don’t, in which case you’re a wishy-washy liberal sellout and not a “real” believer. Sort of like, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

(via Chris)

p.s. Does my 50% Pelagianism make me a “semi-Pelagian”?

I’m not sure it’s worth anyone’s while to discuss something as over-the-top as this:

There is no moral reason for this country not to torture. If in self defense, we can lie, cheat, deceive, firebomb cities, shoot spies, defoliate jungles, assassinate enemies, annihilate armies, steal secrets, and even use atomic weapons—all of which are perfectly appropriate responses in a just war when a democracy has been attacked— it stands to reason that it is not only optional, but a moral imperative, to employ “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” in the name of defending ourselves and perhaps saving our civilization.

But it might be worth pointing out that if, as we’ve been incessantly told, what makes terrorism uniquely evil and despicable is that it involves the direct targeting of civilians, then once we’ve accepted targeting civilians, torture and the like as just tools in the policy kit, we’re well on our way to surrendering the moral high ground, aren’t we?

(link via Catholic and Enjoying It!)

Here. My wife and I just started watching this on dvd. So far I think it’s really good (we watched the miniseries and have just started season 1). Though, not quite as good as the late, lamented Firefly.

Philosopher Anthony Kenny reviews some recent books on the ethics of killing at the beginning and end of life. Dissenting from the dominant Catholic view, Kenny defends the position that the individual human life doesn’t come into existence until around 14 days (once the possibility of “twinning” has been excluded). If that’s right, it has significant implications for the ethics of abortion and research on human embryos.

Via Pontifications.