A Thinking Reed

Month: May 2007

  • Let the peaceniks have their say!

    Good article at Reason on the Ron Paul-Rudy Giuliani showdown:

    No one knows precisely what morbid formula inspired the Sept. 11 attacks. Most likely, it was some mix of U.S. foreign policy exacerbating radical Islamists’ already deep-seeded contempt for Western values.

    But to suggest that we shouldn’t even consider that our actions overseas might have unintended consequences is, frankly, just ignorant. And to attempt to silence anyone who says otherwise by attempting to define them as the lunatic fringe of political debate is not only ignorant, it’s an embrace of ignorance—a refusal to even hear ideas that might challenge your own perspective.

  • Just War theory and the “charism of discernment”

    This post from Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh revisits some of the arguments of pro-Iraq war Catholics, in particular papal biographer George Weigel (link via Eric).

    Weigel’s notion of a “charism of political responsibility/discernment” is muddled at best. Here’s the relevant passage from his “Moral Clarity in a Time of War”:

    If the just war tradition is indeed a tradition of statecraft, then the proper role of religious leaders and public intellectuals is to do everything possible to clarify the moral issues at stake in a time of war, while recognizing that what we might call the “charism of responsibility” lies elsewhere-with duly constituted public authorities, who are more fully informed about the relevant facts and who must bear the weight of responsible decision-making and governance. It is simply clericalism to suggest that religious leaders and public intellectuals “own” the just war tradition in a singular way.

    As I have argued above, many of today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals have suffered severe amnesia about core components of the tradition, and can hardly be said to own it in any serious intellectual sense of ownership. But even if today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals were fully in possession of the tradition, the burden of decision-making would still lie elsewhere. Religious leaders and public intellectuals are called to nurture and develop the moral-philosophical riches of the just war tradition. The tradition itself, however, exists to serve statesmen.

    There is a charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service. That charism is not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies. Moral clarity in a time of war demands moral seriousness from public officials. It also demands a measure of political modesty from religious leaders and public intellectuals, in the give-and-take of democratic deliberation.

    Now, you could legitimately argue, I think, that public officials have the unique responsibility for making decisions to go to war, but that’s no reason to suppose that they are given a unique gift of discernment or judgment. It’s true that they will often have access to privileged information (though, fat lot of good it did ‘em in the case of Iraq) but that’s a separate issue.

    What Weigel seems to imply is that public officials are granted almost supernatural aid in deciding whether or not a given war is just. I can’t imagine what in the tradition would support this claim unless we’re reverting to the idea of the king as God’s anointed.

    Cavanaugh puts it well:

    Regardless of the facts of this particular case, moral judgments about war, like all moral judgments, are not primarily a matter of good information. Good information is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for sound moral judgments. Sound moral judgments depend on being formed in certain virtues. Why a Christian should assume that the president of a secular nation-state would be so formed – much less enjoy a certain “charism” of moral judgment – is a mystery to me. “Charism” is a theological term denoting a gift of the Holy Spirit. To apply such a term to whomever the electoral process of a secular nation-state happens to cough up does not strike me as theologically sound or practically wise.

    It’s also worth pointing out that the Constitution envisioned war being declared by Congress, not the President (Article I, Section 8). While again it’s true that public officials have a unique responsibility for making these decisions, they aren’t guaranteed a special wisdom. It seems to me that only an inflated, quasi-monarchical concept of the presidency would even be tempted to impute this kind of “charism” to the occupant of the Oval Office. If the decision to go to war was kept with Congress (or, heck, with a plebiscite), there would probably be much less temptation toward this kind of obscurantism.

  • Lewis on the “true myth” of Redemption

    No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves.

    In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson and Tolkien about the importance of myth and how Christianity is the “true myth.”

    In October he writes to his good friend Arthur Greeves:

    What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was about the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary […]. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”) — expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

    Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

    Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amound to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approached the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened… (pp. 288-9)

    Lewis picks up on this distinction between the thing itself and the doctrines about it later in Mere Christianity where, in his chapter on Redemption, he emphasizes that the theories about the Atonement are not the objects of belief, but the event itself:

    Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. […] A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

    We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. (pp. 54-56)

    What I find intriguing here is Lewis’s insistence that the “true myth” itself can “work on us” without our having an explicit theory about how it works. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. Many (perhaps most?) Christians throughout history have no doubt enjoyed Christ’s benefits without having much in the way of an explicit theory of Atonement. Maybe it’s a legacy of intellectualistic Protestantism to put so much emphasis on holding the correct doctrine. More sacramental forms of Christianity have always believed that the benefits of Christ’s work come to us in tangible (edible!) forms, not just through understanding.

    Of course, there’s a danger in reducing Christianity to a kind of “magic;” there must, we think, be some cognitive element. An interesting question is raised here about people who are severely mentally handicapped and may have little or no grasp of doctrine. Surely we don’t think that precludes them from being beneficiaries of Christ’s work? But, leaving aside these hard cases, it does seem that an understanding of the “how” might not be completely “separable” from the “what.” There might be understandings of the Atonement, for instance, that are so wrong-headed that they preclude a decent grasp on what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do for us. And it’s not clear to me at least that believing that “Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself” doesn’t entail some further beliefs about how this works. “Narrative” and “story” have become important notions in some recent theology, but is first-order narrative sufficient without some second-order doctrinal reflection?

  • We’re all lost

    I agree entirely with the spirit of this article. The point of Lost, I’ve always thought, isn’t to “solve” the mysteries, whatever that might look like. I see it as essentially a metaphor for the human condition – we’re thrown into this world that may or may not have a larger meaning. Things are ambiguous; there’s just enough evidence to support a variety of interpretations, but not enough for one to be overwhelmingly obvious. All the characters (and, by extension, the viewers) are trying to find meaning in a world that may or may not have any. Locke, more than any of the other characters, embraces the idea that there is an overarching purpose at work, and is therefore characterized in several episodes as a “man of faith.” Jack could be taken to represent the Enlightenment belief in human rationality, Sawyer is ruthless social Darwinism, etc. These all represent different ways of responding to the world. I think it was Gabriel Marcel who distinguished betwee a problem, which is something to be solved, and a mystery, which is something to be entered into. Lost offers a mystery in this sense: the characters enter into their strange surroundings and cobble together more-or-less coherent responses to them. It’s all very existentialist.

  • Our fellow travelers

    Calvinist Richard Mouw reflects on our communion with the saints.

  • Hysterical liberal watch

    Chris Hedges has an astonishingly evidence-free article at Alternet purporting to demonstrate that “The battle against abortion is a battle to build a society where pleasure and freedom, where the capacity of the individual and especially women to make choices, and indeed even love itself[!!], are banished.” The “argument” rests almost entirely on armchair psychologizing of vast swaths of people in the pro-life movement whose commitment to that cause can, according to Hedges, only be understood as a bid to contain the “brokenness, desperation and emotional turmoil” these people feel because all the good manufacturing jobs have left the country. In Hedges’ universe it’s impossible for anyone to have sincere moral objections to abortion. They can only be masks for some deeper cause – economic disfranchisement in this case.

    The supposed knock-down argument that “demonstrates” that it’s “really” fear and hatred of sex and pleasure, not a desire to protect life, that motivates the pro-life cause is that some pro-lifers also oppose birth control. Now, in the real world there are two reasons this might be the case. One is that many pro-lifers are also committed Catholics. The other is that some pro-lifers have become convinced that certain forms of birth control, including the Pill, are abortifacient because they can act to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum. My understanding of this is extremely imperfect, but the impression I have is that it remains uncertain whether various kinds of birth control Pill ever do in fact act to prevent implantation in cases where fertilization occurs, but I don’t think it’s crazy for someone of scrupulous conscience to worry about them for that reason. None of this comes anywhere close to showing that pro-lifers are opposed to sex or pleasure or happiness. In fact, you might think that given the pro-natalist stance of many pro-lifers that they are in fact quite in favor of sex.

    All this aside, what’s so annoying about Hedges’ article is that he’s not willing to see pro-lifers as people who might have moral convictions just as sincere and, dare I say, well-informed as his own. They aren’t fellow citizens with whom to enter into respectful dialogue, but crazed hordes who want to banish love itself!This is the mirror image of the manichean worldview held by some on the Right who see liberals as godless baby killers.

  • Lewis on morality and the State

    Here’s an interesting one, to Mrs. Edward A. Allen, February 1, 1958:

    I quite agree with the Archbishop that no sin, simply as such, should be made a crime. Who the deuce are our rulers to enforce their opinions about sin on us? — a lot of professional politicians, often venal time-servers, whose opinion on a moral problem in one’s life we shd attach very little value to. Of course many acts which are sins against God are also injuries to our fellow citizens, and must on that account, but only on that account, be made crimes. But of all the sins in the world I shd have thought homosexuality was the one that least concerns the State. We hear too much of the State. Government is at its best a necessary evil. Let’s keep it in its place.

    I don’t agree with Lewis that homosexuality is a sin, but his view here is pretty progressive all things considered. Elsewhere he talks about defending gay people from the interference of “snoopers and busybodies” (letter to Delmar Banner, May 27, 1960). It’s clear that one of the things Lewis loathed the most was the moral busybody; he wrote in God in the Dock that

    of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

    I think Lewis was in many ways an old-fashioned liberal who wanted the State to mind its own business and leave him to mind his. Here he’s enunciating a version of J.S. Mill’s harm principle: that the State is only justified in using force against someone to prevent harm to others.

    This is a kind of libertarianism, or at least classical liberalism, but one based more on man’s fallen nature than on his intrinsic goodness like you get with the techno-utopian brand of libertarianism. Liberty is important not because people can be trusted to always do the right thing, but because it creates a sphere that protect us from other people’s moral certainties.

  • C. S. Lewis on the Bible

    A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters:

    To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952:

    It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

    To Clyde S. Kilby, May 7, 1959:

    To me the curious thing is that neither in own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question [of the inspiration of the Bible] in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone — both first class as literature — is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question “Is Ruth historical?” (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain…

    …That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.

  • Friday metal – Killswitch Engage, “Rose of Sharyn”

  • Jesus got out of the way

    In lieu of our weekly community group/Bible study, we attended the Solemn Mass for the Feast of the Ascension last night. Lovely as usual. The guest preacher was the Rev. Charles Hefling, a professor of theology at BC and editor of the Anglican Theological Review.

    Fr. Hefling asked: why did Jesus leave? I have to admit this isn’t a question that really ever occurred to me, but it’s a darn good one. As part of an answer he quoted a line from Rowan Williams to the effect that, since Jesus is “the Way” he had to “get out of the way.” This is a clever way of saying that Jesus opened the door to our union and fellowship with God by reconciling us to God, but we now have to go through that door by treading the path he trod.

    But this is only part of the answer because, Fr. Hefling pointed out, we can’t follow this way, at least not by ourselves. Following the way of the cross, the way of self-giving (and forgiving) love, doesn’t come naturally to us. This is why God sends the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God with us; the Spirit is God within us, empowering and enabling us to follow Jesus.