A Thinking Reed

Month: March 2007

  • Stark first uncloseted “nontheist” in Congress

    According to this website, Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) is the first member of Congress to openly identify as a “nontheist.” Incidentally, Stark used to be my congressman, or, more accurately I guess, I used to be his constituent. He is, not surprisingly for the San Francisco Bay Area, a very liberal Democrat. (I’m pretty sure I opted not to vote for him when I had the chance in 2002, no doubt – and unbeknownst to me – demonstrating my pernicious bias against atheists!)

    Anyway, what’s up with the term “nontheist”? Does it mean something different from “atheist”? Is it supposed to sound less menacing or something?

  • Wright on Lewis and some quibbles

    Readers might be interested in this critical appreciation of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity by none other than N.T. Wright (who’s own Simply Christian has been called a Mere Christianity for the twenty-first century).

    Wright has much praise for Lewis of course, as well as some criticism. Some of the criticism hits the target, some of it not so much. I think Wright is, uh, right to point out that Lewis didn’t really engage with Jesus’ Jewishness and his proclamation of the Kingdom. I think that, to the extent that Lewis wrote about Jesus’ teaching and ministry, he generally portrayed Jesus as enunciating something like universal truths (Lewis, to be fair, was hardly alone in this).

    However, I’m less impressed by Wright’s criticism of Lewis’s views on heaven. Lewis no doubt had a strong Platonic streak (which I don’t necessarily consider a bad thing), but I think Wright underplays the way in which, for Lewis, the heavenly realm is more like the material world brought to fruition than a kind of “spiritual” or purely intellectual escape from the physical that some people have imagined. Granted that Wright is just writing about Mere Christianity here, but I think to get a fuller picture of Lewis’s views on the afterlife one would need to attend at least to The Great Divorce, “The Weight of Glory,” and maybe even The Last Battle.

    Part of the problem, too, is that Wright treats the “biblical” view of the world to come as clearer and more univocal than I, at any rate, find it to be. There have been a multiplicity of ways that Christians have tried to describe or make sense of “heaven,” “the new heavens and new earth,” and other expressions for the ultimate consummation of all things. And this is no doubt partly becuase the “biblical” view on such matters is not obvious, not to mention that we’re dealing with realities that are so far removed from ordinary experience that we quickly run up against the limitations of our language and concepts.

    As Lewis himself was well aware, the Bible doesn’t give us a literal picture of the resurrection life, but gives us images that point to essential features of it:

    The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’stemple. (The Weight of Glory, p. 34)

    Lewis goes on to explore what these images might indicate, but he’s not dogmatic about describing in any great detail what this will look like. And for good reason – the images we’re given in Scripture – the banquet, the New Jerusalem, the wedding feast, etc. – are hardly conducive to detailed maps of the afterlife. The point being that dismissing Lewis as simply baptizing Plato doesn’t really do justice to his reflection on the matter.

    Any Christian view of the afterlife, it seems to me, has to deal with the tension between change and continuity. We look for the resurrection of the body, but it’s also the resurrection of the body. That is, the New Testament posits both continuity with the present life and radical change (“what we will be has not yet been revealed,” “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body”). Lewis may not successfully navigate this tension, but I think he was aware of it and tried to do justice to both poles.

    The other point at which I think Wright is a bit unfair to Lewis is in discussing the Atonement:

    Lewis is right to stress that Christians are not committed to one single way of understanding the meaning of the Cross, and that as long as one somehow looks at the death of Jesus and understands it in terms of God’s love and forgiveness, that is sufficient to start with.

    But his idea—that (a) God requires humans to be penitent, that (b) we can’t because of our pride, but that (c) Jesus does it in and for us—though ingenious, places in my view too high a value on repentance (vital though it of course is), implies again that soteriology is about God doing something in us rather than extra nos (though I think Lewis believed that as well, but he doesn’t expound it here), and minimizes all the other rich biblical language about the Cross, not least the Christus Victor theme.

    Wright is correct that Lewis puts this account of the Atonement forward strictly as a way of thinking about the mystery that he has personally found helpful, and he even encourages the readers to “drop it” if they don’t. Lewis was very careful for the most part not to get into the finer points of dogmatic theology. We see this in his discussion of the Eucharist too. The important bit is the thing itself, not our theories about it. As Lewis says in his discussion of the Eucharist, the command is “take, eat,” not “take, understand.”

    That being said, I don’t think, even at the level of theological reflection, Lewis can fairly be accused of neglecting the notion that on the Cross God does something extra nos. It’s often been observed, for instance, that The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe works with a notion of Atonement that seems to combine elements of the traditional “ransom” theory as well as the satisfaction theory. Whatever one thinks of those theories, they are strongly “objective” in emphasizing a work that Jesus (Aslan) accomplished for us without our cooperation. Again, Wright is only directly discussing Mere Christianity, but it seems fair to point out that Lewis seems to have had a more multifaceted understanding of the Atonement than Wright implies.

  • Chuck Hagel and the need for a “serious” antiwar candidate

    The latest news still has Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel delaying his decision on the possibility of a presidential bid.

    While it’s true that Hagel isn’t strictly anti-war or non-interventionist (and, indeed, has been a big supporter of the Bush administration on most issues), his relatively critical voice would be welcome in the primary debates, especially when the top three GOP contenders dissent little, if at all, on the Administration’s foreign policy (John McCain partly excepted, who is, if anything, further to the right than Bush). And unlike, say, Ron Paul, the quixotic libertarian congressman from Texas, a Hagel candidacy couldn’t be easily dismissed.

    Moreover, the Democratic field hasn’t exactly distinguished itself with antiwar zeal, with Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all making threatening sounds about Iran and equivocating on Iraq (NM governor Bill Richardson and, of course, Dennis Kucinich are exceptions to this trend, and, perhaps not coincidentally, polling in the single digits).

    The fact is, it still seems to be conventional wisdom that bellicosity equals “seriousness” about foreign affairs, which is the sin qua non of having a snowball’s chance of getting elected. Any suggestion, say, that the idea of a global, generations-spanning “war on terrorism” and its attendant consequences for things like civil liberties and the treatment of prisoners might be an overreaction to a serious, but not existential threat has thus far been a one-way ticket to political irrelevance.

    That’s why having an indisputably “serious” candidate like Chuck Hagel in the field, someone who takes a more moderate line, could serve to move the debate in a more reasonable direction.

  • Big Sister

    I’m not a Barack Obama booster, but this is pretty amusing (via Andrew Sullivan and not affiliated with the Obama campaign so far as I know).

  • Jenson on Mary as the “container of the uncontainable”

    In the essay I referred to briefly yesterday (“A Space for God,” found in Mary: Mother of God, Braaten & Jenson, eds.) Robert Jenson asks why it’s important or significant to ask for Mary’s prayers specifically as Theotokos or Mater Dei rather than simply as “Saint Mary.”

    His intriguing response is that Mary in some sense encompasses the entire company of heaven. He gets to this conclusion by retracing the history of Israel as God making a space for himself among human beings. “[I]f God is to have to do with his created world and not just coexist with it, and especially if he is also to allow creatures to have to do with him, he needs space in his creation from which to be present to other spaces therein and at which to allow creatures to locate him” (p. 51). The Ark of the Covenant, the Temple, the Scrolls of Torah, the Prophets, and the people themselves are a “space” that God creates to take up residence among us. “It is the space taken up, defined, by the people of Israel, which is, with sheer heaven, God’s space in this world” (p. 53).

    What this has to do with Mary is that the entire history of Israel comes to a point in her assent to bearing the Son of God:

    It is of course the heart of the Christian faith that God’s presence in Israel is gathered up and concentrated in Immanuel, God with us, in this one Israelite’s presence in Israel: he is in person the Temple’s shekinah, and the Word spoken by the prophets, and the Torah. And if that is so, then the space delineated by Israel to accommodate the presence of God is finally reduced and expanded to Mary’s womb, the container of Immanuel. We must note the singularity of Mary’s dogmatic title: she is not one in a series of God’s mothers, she is simply the Mother.

    To what did Mary, after all, assent, when she said to Gabriel, “Fiat mihi,” “Let it happen to me”? Of course it was her womb that with these words she offered, to be God’s space in the world. The whole history of Israel had been God’s labor to take Israel as his space in the world. And it indeed was a labor, for Israel by her own account was a resistant people: again and again the Lord’s angel announced his advent, begged indeed for space, and again and again Israel’s answer was “Let it be, but not yet.” Gabriel’s mission to Mary was, so to speak, one last try, and this time the response did not temporize. (pp. 55-6)

    The conclusion Jenson draws is that “[a]s the created space for God, Mary is Israel concentrated” (p. 56). She is also “the container not only of the uncontainable Son, but of all his sisters and brothers, of what Augustine called the totus Christus, the whole Christ, Christ with his body” (p. 56). Therefore, when we ask her to pray for us as Mother of God, we are “invok[ing] all God’s history with Israel at once” and asking the “whole company of heaven” to pray for us. Mary is both the summation of Israel and the Mother of the Church. Asking for Mary’s prayers, then, is a way of asking for the prayers of the entire church triumphant.

    I’m not sure what exactly to make of Jenson’s argument; just thought I’d throw this out there in light of yesterday’s post…

  • So great a cloud of witnesses

    Chris, the Lutheran Zephyr, is wrestling with the question of asking the saints to pray for us.

    For me this falls under the category of “all may, none must.” I can see why some are uncomfortable with it, and I wouldn’t presume to judge someone else’s piety.

    The argument that it’s permissible is, I think, pretty straightforward: We ask fellow Christians to pray for us, and we have no reason to think that death severs our communion with the Christians who’ve gone before us. As Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has put it, “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.” So, there’s no insuperable theological reason for not asking the saints to pray for us.

    I can see how, in practice, devotion to the saints can and has led to abuses. But the abuse of a thing is not a compelling argument against its proper use. Many good things in Christendom have been subject to abuse: confession, the Mass itself, and so on. We might even suspect that things which are very good and valuable are particularly prone to abuse since they’re so important in people’s lives.

    Which is why, I think, the best way to get over worries about invoking the saints (if one wants to get over it) is to actually do it. Although Mariology is a different, though obviously not unrelated, issue, one thing that I think has helped me gain a better understanding of it is by actually incorporating some Marian devotions into my prayer life. I’ve found the Angelus to be a good place to start. It’s beautiful, brief, and easily incorporated into one’s daily routine (the tradition is to recite it morning, noon, and evening). It’s also very Scriptural and Christocentric, being a commemoration of the Incarnation and of our salvation and hope in Jesus.

  • Superiority complex

    Time blogger Joe Klein has produced a couple of posts purporting to identify the characteristics of “right-wing extremists” and “left-wing extremists.” LWEs hate America, capitalism, mom and apple pie, while RWEs think America and capitalism are never in the wrong, that universal health care equals socialism, etc. Determining to what extent these stereotypes match up with actual people who hold power and influence I leave as an exercise for the reader.

    However, another one of Klein’s marks of a RWE is that he or she “believes that there are inferior religions.” By this standard, virtually everyone in the world is a RWE. For instance, is there anyone, even atheists, agnostics, or whoever, who doesn’t believe there is more truth in Buddhism or Christianity than, say, Scientology? Maybe there are some who profess to believe that all religions are bunk through and through and that there is no meaningful differences between them, but this must be a rare breed.

    It’s also puzzling to claim that it’s a sign of “extremism” to hold that one’s beliefs are true and that the denials of those beliefs are false. While I’m certainly sympathetic to the view that the world’s great religions have more in common than is immediately apparent, it would seem rash to conclude a priori that there are no meaningful differences in the claims they make about reality. If a particular Buddhist denies that ultimate reality can be meaningfully described as a personal being, doesn’t she ipso facto disagree with her Christian friend who affirms this very thing? And isn’t she committed to the view that, in that respect at least, he religion is “superior” to her friend’s?

    Note that this is a different issue from whether one should respect the beliefs of others. I happen to take the view that a variety of positions about the nature of reality and human beings’ relation to it can be rationally held. That doesn’t mean they can all be true; where there are genuine incompatibilities, at most one can be right. But our epistemic situation appears to be such that we can’t publicly demonstrate the manifest superiority of a single view in a way that will convince all reasonable people. We can and should acknowledge the fact that reasonable people of good will and deep moral sensibility can come to conclusions different from ours. But none of that changes the fact that to believe x is to deny not-x, and that if I believe x, then I hold that to believe x is superior to believing not-x (since, other things being equal, it’s better to believe truth than falsehood).

    It’s interesting, and perhaps significant, that people apply standards to religious belief that they apply in virtually no other area. Take politics. Like religion it involves longstanding disagreements that are resistant to any lasting solution. And hopefully most of us would acknowledge that there are people who don’t share our political beliefs who are nevertheless just as thoughtful, morally sensitive, well-informed, etc. as we are (moreso in many cases!). And yet, recognizing that in no way commits us to being relativists about politics, does it? Does recognizing that there are smart and decent people who disagree with me about abortion, or the minimum wage, or single-payer health care or whatever mean that I would be wrong – and even extremist! – to hold that my views are “superior” to theirs? If I didn’t regard them as superior in what sense would they even by my views?

    True tolerance, it seems to me, doesn’t mean denying that we disagree about things. It means recognizing disagreement and finding ways to respect each other and live together anyway.

  • Lent for nerds or The desire to possess as alienation from God

    Part of my Lenten fast is that I’m not going to buy any books. This may sound silly, but I’ve found that I often crave books in the way that other people might crave a new pair of shoes or something for their house. Although I (eventually!) read most of the books I buy, I think there’s some deeper and more disreputable feeling that buying stuff serves to alleviate. A sort of anxiousness that the new possession momentarily drives away. Or maybe an Is this a relic of our evolutionary past where securing an important article might have meant the difference between life and death? Or is it an artifact of our capitalist economy and the need to generate new “needs”?

    I’ve also pledged to get rid of some of the books I already have. This has a practical dimension since we’re going to be moving in a few months, but hopefully the letting go of things is a way to combat the desire to possess. I have this pet theory that the anxiousness associated with our desire for security is a important symptom of original sin. Our intended state is to trust our heavenly Father for all that we need, but in our alienation from and inability to trust God we cling to things in a distorted way, and often resort to evil means to secure our being and worth. “Security,” whether it be financial or national, is something of a shibboleth in our culture. By contrast, Jesus’ admonition not to worry about what we will wear or where our food will come from seems the height of hippie irresponsibility.

    The ability to live in this way, though, would have to arise out of a reorientation of our relationship with God. Luther pointed out that, apart from revelation, we’re just as likely to imagine that God has it in for us as that he’s our loving father. So at least one reason for the Incarnation is to demonstrate God’s love for us and to create trust (a.k.a. faith) in us whereby we can live in a restored relationship with God. And the fruit of that restored relationship should be less anxiety about securing our place in this world. This, in turn, should allow us to sit more lightly to what we have, share more freely, and live more joyfully. Given the stubborn persistence of the old Adam, I think we can expect this to be a constant struggle, and one of the benefits of a season like Lent is that we can practice at it.

  • Preventive war is “inherently pernicious”

    Andrew Bacevich urges Congress to renounce the Bush Doctrine:

    The fifth anniversary of President Bush’s West Point speech [where he promulgated the “Bush Doctrine] approaches. Prior to that date, Democratic leaders should offer a binding resolution that makes the following three points: First, the United States categorically renounces preventive war. Second, the United States will henceforth consider armed force to be an instrument of last resort. Third, except in response to a direct attack on the United States, any future use of force will require prior Congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution.

    Of course, as Dana Carvey, in his GHW Bush persona, used to say, na ga happen. It’s a nice fantasy though, to think that our military policy might be brought into some semblence of conformity with our constitutional principles, not to mention the principles of Just War.

    At the very least, it would be interesting to see the question put to any and all of the prospective presidential candidates of both parties whether or not they embrace the principles of the Bush Doctrine and whether they consider preventive war to be a legitimate tool of policy.

    If there’s one element of traditional Just War theorizing that’s taken a beating over the last five years, it’s the requirement that war be a last resort. Granted that last resort can be a fuzzy concept; after all, there’s always something else you could conceivably try, however improbable. But the very real danger, one that Bacevich has expounded on at length in his book The New American Militarism, is that war has become a routine tool of policy.

  • Psalm-blogging

    David Plotz, a self-described “proud Jew, but never a terribly observant one” has been “blogging the Bible” at Slate. He’s just gotten to the Psalms and has some interesting observations. I like his description of David as a pickup artist.