A Thinking Reed

Month: September 2006

  • We’re all liberals now(?)

    This helpful post at Connexions argues that “liberal theology” should be seen more as a method or approach to theology than a set of substantive conclusions. In other words, there’s nothing about liberal theology per se that prevents one from, say, believing in the resurrection or the virgin birth or what have you. What’s distinctive about a “liberal” approach to theology is that it sifts religious claims in light of reason and experience and is open to the possibility that faith and practice will be revised as a result.

    In that sense, I think pretty much all of us are liberals to some extent in that we have to navigate the relationships between our theological interpretations of the world with those offered by the sciences, the arts, other religions, and other competing perspectives. We live in multiple overlapping cognitive worlds and there’s no a priori way for most of us of resolving conflicts between rival interpretations. “Private judgment” is a fact of life.

    Even if we submit to an institutional authority of some sort, we still decide to do so (though we may give an account of our decision that downplays the element of private judgment). No religious outlook or institution has the kind of givenness that may have been enjoyed by the church in previous ages.

    I imagine for most Christians in the (post)modern west there is a great deal of cognitive dissonance or simply a bracketing of our religious lives when it comes to our lives as workers, citizens, parents, consumers, and so on. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that in many areas of our lives most of us have neither the need nor the inclination to invoke theological categories to make sense of what’s going on a lot of the time.

    In his book An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt, Christian ethicist William Gustafson argues that there is a spectrum of responses to secular accounts of reality that seem to challenge Christian belief. On one extreme is literalistic fundamentalism, which simply overrides any putative knowledge that seems to contradict the Bible by an appeal to the authority of revelation. On the other end is the person who allows the claims of secular disciplines to completely determine their theological commitments (Bishop Spong?). Most of us, Gustafson argues, exist somewhere in between, making some accomodations and not others. The important thing, he says, is for Christians to be self-conscious and honest about this because it’s unavoidable.

    Despite the fact that we may yearn for an all-encompassing theological narrative that “absorbs” our experience of the world, I’m not sure it would ultimately be desirable even if it was psychologically possible (and I suspect for many of us it isn’t). As R.R. Reno argued before he jumped ship to Rome, we have fragments of a Christian worldview, but we don’t know how to fit all the elements of our experience into it. Theology no longer provides, if it ever did, a comprehensive ordering of all human knowledge.

    But even beyond that, an attempt to do so might result in the creation of a closed system that was immune to new experiences and information that could alter our perception of the world. Christians have revised their beliefs and teachings in the light of new knowledge before (be it evolutionary biology or the historical criticism of the Bible or the manifest goodness of adherents of other religons) and there’s every reason to believe that will happen again. We don’t have the map of how it all fits together. But maybe that’s okay as long as we have enough light to take the next step down the road.

    What do you think? Should theology aspire to a comprehensive account of the world and human knowledge? Or do we continue to muddle through trying to understand things piecemeal? Or is there some other way of looking at the issue?

  • Pope notes

    A round up of Muslim bloggers’ responses to Pope Benedict’s speech (via Fr. Jim Tucker).

    The pope’s address is well worth reading quite apart from the ensuing brouhaha. Of particular interest to me is his association of a voluntarist view of the divine nature and various programs of “de-Hellenization” with certain forms of Protestantism. Luther and Calvin have certainly been grouped under a voluntarist label, though there are clearly strains in Protestantism that have a more positive view of the role of reason and Christianity’s Greek inheritance (Hooker, perhaps?).

    Also worth noting is Benedict’s call, not for repudiating the Enlightenment, but for recovering a more robust view of reason that goes beyond a verificationist epistemology that leads to a scientistic reductionism in our metaphysics.

  • NRCAT message on S. 3861

    I received this message from the National Religious Coalition Against Torture identifying certain Republican senators who might be persuaded to support Sen. McCain in opposing the White House’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, among other things, would authorize “secret CIA interrogation facilities around the world that have permission to use an ‘alternative set of interrogation procedures.’”

    One of the Senators they identify as persuadable on this issue is Arlen Specter which is, I presume, why I received it. But now that I’m ensconsed in a true blue state, I have no Republican senator to bug. However, if one of these guys is your senator, and you feel strongly about this, you might consider registering your opinion with him.

    Here’s the message in full:

    Republican Senators Warner, Graham, and McCain have been stalwart in opposing the adminitration’s “Military Commissions Act of 2006,” S. 3861. As the floor action in the Senate looms in the week to come, these three Senators need the support of other Republican senators who will stand with them against the tremendous pressure being exerted by the administration to pass the president’s statute – authorizing secret CIA interrogation facilities around the world that have permission to use an “alternative set of interrogation procedures” (what most people would call torture, and all people would call brutal, degrading, and terrifying).

    Four senators that could offer that Republican support on the Senate floor are Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio); Sen. Chuck Hagel (Nebraska); Sen. Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania); and Sen. John Sununu (New Hampshire). This email from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture is being sent to you because you live in one of these four states, and could have a lasting impact on this legislation with your phone call. Get connected to your Senator’s Washington, DC office through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-225-3121.

    Please encourage your senator to do the right thing. Tell your senator that you oppose the president’s “Military Commissions Act of 2006,” S. 3861. This legislation is on a fast-track and must be defeated, or at least slowed down. It will be debated on the Senate floor next week.

    History will look back on the congressional actions on this proposed legislation either as the time when the U.S. abandoned statutory commitment to its long-held moral values for a shameful lesser standard, or as the time when Congress reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to its basic moral values. Here are some talking points you can use in your calls to your Senator or the Senator’s staff:

    As a constituent and a person of religious faith, I urge the senator to reject the White House’s proposal, the “Military Commissions Act of 2006,” which would dangerously redefine the U.S. standard of conduct toward detainees.

    This legislation would not only open the door to prisoner abuse by the CIA, it would violate the core principles of the Geneva Conventions.

    U.S. adherence to its present standard for treatment of detainees:- makes our soldiers and citizens abroad safer from retaliatory and punitive treatment;- disempowers those who would make martyrs of the tortured and the abused; and- makes our nation safer and more secure.

    Thank you for joining NRCAT, www.nrcat.org, in our efforts to abolish U.S.-sponsored torture now – without exceptions.

    Click here to read detailed background information and analysis of the Administration’s Proposed “Military Commissions Act of 2006”.

  • The church of the future?

    Here’s an interesting piece about the community that has grown out of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. While it has some of the heavy breathing about conservative Christians you’d expect to find at Salon (“Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted”), the author seems to get that this kind of tight-knit community is filling a void in many people’s lives, especially those who’ve come from broken homes, or have had problems with drugs, or generally don’t fit in with our idea of respectable church folk.

    Now, personally, there’s a lot about Mars Hill, at least as described in this piece, that I find objectionable and even a bit creepy. The combination of hipster culture and dispensational theology for starters. Not to mention the strident anti-feminism and the emphasis on obedience (at least as quoted in this piece, Mark Driscoll, the head pastor, seems much more a law than gospel kind of guy).

    But at the same time, it’s pretty darn difficult to imagine a mainline church mounting a life-changing project like this. It’s easy for mainliners to use the things they think are wrong about conservative evangelicals as an excuse for not learning from them. Not that I’m eager to run off and join an intentional community, but something like Mars Hill seems to be in an entirely different league from shallow self-help prosperity gospel tripe or your standard megachurch. Lots of young people in particular seem interested in a faith that is demanding and requires commitment and transformation. If the more traditional churches don’t think about what that might mean for them, other churches will pick up the slack.

  • "String conjecture"?

    Thomas at Without Authority, himself an honest-to-goodness scientist, points us to this article from Gregg Easterbrook about a new book arguing that string theory isn’t really science, but something more like metaphysical speculation.

    I’d be the last one to claim anything more than a layman’s knowledge of current physics (at best), but it has always raised my suspicions when scientists start talking about unobservable other dimensions (or whole other universes) to account for the existence and/or specific structure of our cosmos. It starts to look like any theory, no matter how farfetched, is okay if it keeps God out.

  • Theocons or liberals?

    I’m reminded by this post from prolific Orthodox blogger Daniel Larison that there are those who not only don’t regard the First Things crowd as theocrats, but who actually regard them as fatally compromised and sold out to secular Enlightenment liberalism. In addition to traditionalists like Mr. Larison there are folks like Stanley Hauerwas who resent what they characterize as the liberal-democratic “policing” of distinctive Christian language and practice which they contend is the result of the paradigm pushed by people like Richard John Neuhaus.

    That paradigm, as I understand it, is an attempt to “revitalize” the ideas of a liberal political order by basing them on a vision of human nature that is both more secure and truer than the various utilitarian and rights-based approaches inherited from secular liberal theorists. The latter secular liberalism, lacking a distinctive vision of human good and flourishing and based on individual autonomy, has resulted in what Neuhaus and others consider to be an ultra-individualistic and ultimately nihilistic political stance that permits things like abortion-on-demand, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia.

    As Neuhaus says:

    In the 1960s I was very much a man of the left. Not the left of countercultural drug-tripping and generalized hedonism, but the left exemplified by, for instance, the civil rights movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the latter half of the 1960s this began to change with the advent of the debate over what was then called “liberalized” abortion law. By 1967 I was writing about the “two liberalisms”—one, like that earlier civil rights movement, inclusive of the vulnerable and driven by a transcendent order of justice, the other exclusive and recognizing no law higher than individual willfulness. My argument was that, by embracing the cause of abortion, liberals were abandoning the first liberalism that has sustained all that is hopeful in the American experiment.

    That is my argument still today. It is, I believe, crucially important that that argument prevail in the years ahead. There is no going back to reconstitute the American order on a foundation other than the liberal tradition. A great chasm has opened between the liberal tradition and what today is called liberalism. That is why some of us are called conservatives. Conservatism that is authentically and constructively American conservatism is conservatism in the cause of reappropriating and revitalizing the liberal tradition.

    Some traditionalists and (for lack of a better word) communitarians may agree that America was founded as a liberal order, and that many contemporary “conservatives” are actually a species of liberal. But what they won’t agree to is that this is a good thing or something that Christians should reconcile themselves to. Hauerwas would say that Christians’ primary political commitments should be found in the church – the community constituted by distinctive political practices. And he would add that when Christians seek a “seat at the table” or a “place in the public square” they almost inevitably end up compromising their message and re-interpreting or translating it to make is understandable to a secular order, effectively neutering it in the process.

    For my money, I don’t find either Neuhaus’ Thomistic liberalism or Hauerwas’ ecclessiocentric communitarianism fully persuasive (though I think there’s value in both). In my view, the transcendent order of justice Neuhaus appeals to is perceived only incompletely and “through a glass darkly” by any of us in this fallen world, and to attempt to make that perception the basis of a polity is to invite tyranny and coercion. It doesn’t take seriously enough the fact that people can hold, and be justified in holding, quite divergent views about the existence, nature, and character of the transcendent order. This kind of “epistemic humility” ought to make us wary of basing too much in the way of political coercion on our perceptions of it.

    Interestingly, I think Hauerwas and some other aligned movements (e.g. Radical Orthodoxy) may make a similar mistake. They claim a high degree of certitude for Christian conviction and action, though they base Christian practice primarily in the church. But by so sharply emphasizing Christian distinctiveness and its irreconcilability with any “secular” (or non-Christian?) outlook, they don’t seem to take seriously the potential for common ground with those who don’t share one’s own convictions as well as for encounters with those others to challenge and even change one’s convictions.

    Following Christopher Insole, I think a broadly liberal political outlook is the natural complement to the kind of epistemic humility I’ve been describing. Since none of us can claim to discern the contours of the transcendent with perfect clarity, we need to be humble about subjecting others to our certainties. This results, in Insole’s words, in a “politics […] ordered towards peaceful co-existence (the absence of conflict), and the preservation of the liberties of the individual within a pluralistic and tolerant framework, rather than by a search for truth (religious or otherwise), perfection and unity.”

  • Chill out, liberals

    We’ve seen conservative critiques of the recent raft of books warning of an imminent theocracy, but it’s nice to see liberals trying to interject some sanity into the debate. Peter Steinfels and Paul Baumann (both political liberals affiliated with Commonweal magazine, I believe) throw cold water on some of the more alarmist books to come out recently. Baumann’s review of Damon Linker’s Theocons is particularly interesting since Linker used to work for First Things and now apparently views his former employers as hell-bent on undermining American democracy.

    P.S. I think Steinfels in particular gets things just about right here:

    Does any of this really matter? If the danger is so great, is hyperbole or inaccuracy to be counted perhaps not as a vice but a virtue?

    It matters, first of all, because it deflects attention from what remain the major sources of the Bush administration’s disastrous and ominous policies, perfectly secular rationales for trimming government, cutting taxes, opening the door to torture, circumventing congressional and judicial oversight in establishing secret surveillance programs, and relying on military strength while belittling international institutions.

    These approaches had percolated for years in conservative think tanks, among K Street lobbyists, and on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. Can anyone really believe that the administration’s energy policy would have been different absent the speculations of end-times theology? K Street and the lingering doctrine of supply-side economics, not Christian Reconstructionists and biblical inerrantism, drive the administration’s fiscal follies. The officials sending the United States to war in Iraq — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby — did not come from the religious right, let alone the larger evangelical constituency. One can always trot out the regrettable figure of John Ashcroft to prove the religious right’s ascendancy in the Bush administration, which makes as much sense as pointing to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to prove the ascendancy of blacks.

    Abortion, same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, teenage sexual abstinence, the public display of religious symbols, the teaching of evolution — these are the issues on which conservative Christian beliefs are the driving force and that enable the organized religious right to get traction among evangelical and conservative Catholic voters, who end up, more passively than not, buying into the rest of the Bush agenda. However much these issues exercise liberals and the left, they are also issues that the Bush administration has generally addressed in cautious, halting, inconsistent, or purely token fashion.

  • How (un)safe are we?

    I didn’t want to write anything about the 9/11 anniversary yesterday because a lot of what I read was simply an exercise in flogging the author’s politics.

    So, instead, I’m going to flog my politics today!

    Okay, not really, but I did think this article at the Cato Institute by political scientist John Mueller was worth reading. He tries to figure out what it might mean to ask if we’re safer than we were five years ago and how much of a threat terrorism really poses compared to other dangers.

    I don’t know that I’d endorse everything he says, but these kinds of things need to be said and heard, I think. After 9/11, nearly everybody, left, right and center was really quick to jump on the generation-long-war-grand-ideological-struggle-of-our-lifetime bandwagon, and we’re still living with the consequences of that. What we need more of now, it seems to me, is cold, dispassionate analysis about the scope and magnitude of the terrorist threat, hopefully leading to a response that’s driven by reason rather than emotion.

  • The season of our bloggers’ discontent

    Maybe it’s an end of summer thing, but some of my favorite bloggers are calling it quits, or seriously considering doing so: Jack at Cantanima, Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity, and Caleb at Mode for Caleb. We can only admire them for their commitment to the more important things in life, while nevertheless hoping they will rise from the ashes, Marvin Lindsay-style, to blog again!

    In the spirit of the circle of life I will note that I’ve just added two blogs to the links at the right that I’ve been checking out regularly for a while now: The Claw of the Conciliator, a wide-ranging blog covering religion, science fiction, and religious science fiction in addition to the usual blog fare, written by (I think) a Canadian Anglican and The Idle Ramblings of the LutherPunk, the musings of (I gather) a heavily tatooed Lutheran pastor with high-church leanings and a thing for Elvis.

  • Ah, West Philly…

    Neat article about University City – the collection of neighborhoods west of the University of Pennsylvania where we lived for about three years before coming to Boston a couple of months ago (Via A Conservative Blog for Peace). Old Victorian houses, broad streets with lots of trees, and a wonderful mix of students, young professionals, immigrants, slacker/hipster types, and working-class folks. Right down the street from our apartment was a Laotian restaurant, an Ethiopean place, an anarchist co-op, and a Chinese convenience store. Everything was walkable or bike-able and there’s a really nice park – Clark Park – that freqently hosted a farmer’s market, flea markets, and other community events. (The Calvary Center mentioned in the article – which houses a Methodist congregation, a Mennonite fellowship, and a community theatre among other things – is about a block away from where we used to live.)

    Of course, the dark side is that many long-time (mostly poorer and black) residents resented what they saw as an attempt to drive them out via university-sponsored gentrification (or “Penntrification” as I saw it referred to on more than one flyer posted on telephone poles). Defenders point out that the neighborhood had experienced a high rate of violent crime and other serious problems before the university took an active interest in it.