A Thinking Reed

Month: July 2007

  • The problem with air power

    Powerful piece by Tom Englehardt on the problems with relying on air power in war, something that has become more central to the US’s way of war over the last half-century or so. The problem, in essence, is that so-called collateral damage, the “unintentional” killing of large numbers of civilians, is such an inextricable part of air war that it becomes increasingly dubious to claim that these deaths are really unintended or accidental in any meaningful sense. And this problem will only become more acute as it seems that the US and its allies will increasingly rely on air power as a form of “imperial policing.”

  • Monday metal – return of DSL edition

    Sepultura – “Refuse/Resist”

  • Farm bill victory

    A while back I blogged about opposition to section 123 of the proposed 2007 farm bill from animal welfare and environmental groups, including the Humane Society. The section was widely understood to pre-empt at the federal level any state efforts to regulate or ban food items and animal products over and above the standards set by the feds. This would rule out, for instance, state laws banning particular methods of animal farming like confinement crates.

    It looks like the offending section, as well as a subsidy for the veal industry, has been removed from the bill.

  • Placher’s Triune God

    I see that William C. Placher has a new book out on the Trinity. Placher’s long been a favorite of mine – his Domestication of Transcendence and Jesus Our Savior in particular. Does anyone know anything more about this?

  • Justification and liberation

    Since the previous post on Braaten’s soteriology made it sound like he had a completely negative view of Liberation Theology, I thought I’d try to set out the position he sketches in his chapter on the Two Kingdoms principle, which tries to put liberation in the context of eschatology and the coming Kingdom of God.

    The “Two Kingdoms” view has pretty bad press outside (and even within) Lutheran circles. In distorted forms it seems to bifurcate life into a purely secular realm of politics, economics, and society and a “spiritual” realm of faith. This has led some to charge the Two Kingdoms view with lending support to political quietism in the face of tyranny and oppression.

    Such a perspective seems hard to square with the life of Luther, who had no compunctions against holding political rulers accountable to the standards of God’s justice (obviously Luther’s judgment wasn’t always spot on in this area, but he certainly didn’t take the view that “religion” had no right to influence political life). However, some later Lutherans do seem to have adopted the kind of political quietism or support of the status quo in the name of the “Two Kingdoms” doctrine.

    Braaten’s goal isn’t to defend everything that has sailed under the Two Kingdoms flag, but to identify the permanent insight expressed by this concept. This has two essential parts. The first is that there are two powers at work in the world, God and Satan. Luther’s theology was very dualistic in the sense that he saw the world as the theater of the great struggle between God and the Devil, even though there was never any doubt about the ultimate outcome. “The broad backdrop of the gospel picture of Jesus as the Christ features the power of God against the powers of evil at work in the whole of creation. Jesus brings the power of God’s rule into history, confronts the demonic forces, and wins a victory which spells ultimate freedom for human beings” (p. 133).

    So, God is at work in the world to overcome all the powers of darkness that threaten human beings. However, there is another distinction to be made in the way that God is at work in the world. Luther used the expression of the “two hands” of God to point to these two ways in which God works in the world for the good of human creatures:

    The “left hand of God” is a formula meaning that God is universally at work in human life through structures and principles commonly operative in political, economic, and cultural institutions that affect the life of all. The struggle for human rights occurs within this realm of divine activity. (pp. 133-34)

    The “Right hand of God,” however, refers to the work of the Gospel properly speaking:

    [N]o matter how much peace and justice and liberty are experienced in these common structures of life, they do not mediate “the one thing needful.” This is the function of the gospel of God in Jesus Christ, the work of the “right hand of God.” The scandal of the gospel is that salvation is a sheer gift of grace, given freely by God for Christ’s sake and received through faith alone. It is meritorious for a society to grant and guarantee to all its citizens the basic human rights, but high marks in this area do not translate into the righteousness that counts before God in the absolute dimension. (p. 134)

    The point here isn’t that there are two spheres of life somehow cut off from one another, but that there are two dimensions to God’s work:

    Historical liberation and eternal salvation are not one and the same thing. They should not be equated. The gospel is not one of the truths we hold to be self-evident; it is not an inalienable right which the best government in the world can do anything about. There are many people fighting valiantly on the frontline of legitimate liberation movements who are not in the least animated by the gospel. The hope for liberation is burning in the hearts of millions of little people struggling to free themselves from conditions of poverty and tyranny. When they win this freedom, should they be so fortunate, they have not automatically therewith gained the freedom for which Christ has set us free (Gal. 5:1). This is the barest minimum of what we intend to convey by the two-kingdoms perspective. (pp. 134-5)

    The point here is simple: political liberation, freedom from oppression and poverty, and more just social structures are all things that the Spirit of God is at work to bring about, but they aren’t the whole content of what we mean by the gospel. Even if a perfectly just society were to be realized, human beings would still be oppressed by sin, guilt, anxiety, disease, old age, and death. The gospel is the power to defeat these “last enemies.” I don’t know enough about Liberation Theology to know if it’s accurate to say that some liberation theologians have tended to reduce the gospel to political liberation only. However, it does seem to me that such a reduction has been a temptation of liberal Protestant theology in North America.

    But it still may seem like this account of God’s work in the world is excessively dualistic. Is there some principle that unites both dimensions of the divine work? Braaten thinks that such a principle is found in the “eschatological horizon” of God’s coming kingdom:

    The realm of creation and the realm of redemption share the same eschatological future horizon. The doctrines of creation and law are linked to the eschatological goal of the world to which the church points in its message of the coming kingdom. The theme of eschatology relates not only to the order of salvation (ordo salutis) but also to the fact and future of ongoing creation. The orders of creation are not autonomous; there is an eschatological consummation (apokatastasis ton panton) of all things previewed and preenacted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ of God. (p. 135)

    The order of creation and the order of redemption are thus united in the single future they share as aspects of the coming kingdom:

    The church’s eschatological message thus combines the two dimensions of hope: hope for the poor and hope for sinners. The poor clamor for justice and sinners cry for justification. It is intolerable for the church to separate these concerns. The church is to take the message of the kingdom into the real world where the demons are running riot and where the hand of God is stirring the cauldron of secular existence in all its political, economic, and social dimensions. We must strive for a comprehensive understanding of the kingdom of God which embraces two dimensions at the same time. The vertical dimension of the gospel mediates an encounter with the absolute transcendence of God; the horizontal dimension of the coming kingdom speaks of the encounter with Christ in the person of our needy neighbor. The depth dimension reveals our human condition of sin and estrangement; the breadth dimension tangles with the powers of evil on the plane of everyday historical existence. The personal dimension lifts up each individual as infinitely valuable in the sight of God; the political dimension looks to the quality of justice and liberty that prevails in the land. The symbol of the kingdom of God is multidimensional, uniting these vertical and personal dimensions with horizontal and political dimensions of the coming kingdom. (pp. 135-6)

    Because liberation and justification are two aspects of the same coming kingdom, it’s imperative for Christians to bring the gospel to bear on the struggle for greater justice between people:

    The love of God for Christ’s sake and the commitment to human rights for the sake of humanity are joined in the picture of what God is doing for the world in the history of Jesus Christ. The one God involved in the struggle for human liberation from hunger, misery, oppression, ignorance, and all the powers of sin and evil is none other than the Father of Jesus Christ who is reconciling the whole world to himself. The signs of liberation are anticipations of the total salvation the world is promised in Christ. (p. 137)

    While Braaten clearly wants to keep God’s work of justification as the center of the gospel from which all else radiates, political liberation finds its place as a way in which we anticipate God’s coming kingdom and participate in God’s work of releasing human beings from the powers that oppress them. I think this is definitely a strength of Braaten’s position that it maintains the distinction between these two dimensions while keeping them related to God’s future for the world. What do readers think?

  • Jardine’s Making and Unmaking of Technological Society

    One of the pleasures of moving is that in going through all your earthly possessions you rediscover books that you either hadn’t read or hadn’t fully digested. One such book of mine is Murray Jardine’s The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society. I think I may have blogged about it a bit a few years ago, but I thought I might revisit parts of it.

    Jardine’s central argument is that the moral malaise of modern Western society is the result of the fact that we have acquired massive new powers to alter the natural and human environment but lack a corresponding moral framework for guiding our choices about how to use that power.

    The reason for this is that traditional moral theoires assumed a relatively static view of the natural and social orders and therefore have a difficult time providing guidance to us once we’ve acquired the ability to radically alter those orders. One proposed solution is that offered by liberalism: the proper moral order for society is the one which maximizes individual choice so long as those choices don’t harm others and so long as people don’t impose their values on others.

    However, Jardine makes the now-familiar criticism of liberalism that, since it lacks a substantive concept of the good life, it is unable to give a coherent account of why the non-imposition of values should trump all other values or what constitutes harm to others. Abortion provides an excellent example: all parties to the debate agree that it’s wrong to harm the innocent, but they disagree about whether abortion counts as a case of such harm. Ultimately, Jardine argues, liberalism results in nihilism since it can provide no solid foundation for moral values, and thus doesn’t provide a workable alternative to traditional natural law theories of morality.

    What’s needed, Jardine says, is a moral framework that provides guidance for our choices while recognizing the changeability of the natural and social orders. His view is that recovering a geniunely biblical idea of morality can provide such a framework because it explicitly recognizes human beings as co- or sub-creators, creatures who have a share in the Creator’s power to shape reality.

    I’ll try to post more thoughts on what Jardine takes to be the Christian alternative for grappling with our technological power soon.

  • If only I could get that Theoretical Ideal Candidate guy to run

    My candidate prefrences per this quiz (via Noli Irritare Leones):

    1. Theoretical Ideal Candidate (100%)
    2. Alan Augustson (70%)
    3. Dennis Kucinich (68%)
    4. Ron Paul (63%)
    5. Mike Gravel (62%)
    6. Barack Obama (61%)
    7. Kent McManigal (60%)
    8. Christopher Dodd (59%)
    9. Joseph Biden (51%)
    10. Wesley Clark (48%)
    11. Al Gore (47%)
    12. Hillary Clinton (47%)
    13. John Edwards (47%)
    14. Bill Richardson (46%)
    15. Michael Bloomberg (44%)
    16. Chuck Hagel (39%)
    17. Mike Huckabee (38%)
    18. Mitt Romney (35%)
    19. Duncan Hunter (34%)
    20. Elaine Brown (32%)
    21. Sam Brownback (32%)
    22. Tom Tancredo (32%)
    23. John McCain (28%)
    24. Newt Gingrich (27%)
    25. Tommy Thompson (26%)
    26. Jim Gilmore (25%)
    27. Fred Thompson (22%)
    28. Rudolph Giuliani (12%)

    I had no idea who Alan Auguston was until today – apparently he’s a Green Party candidate who has now declined to seek their presidential nomination and is instead focusing on a congressional run. I’m also gratified to see that Rudy Giuliani is at the bottom of my list.

  • Hopeful Christocentric universalism

    I’ve been re-reading Carl Braaten’s Principles of Lutheran Theology – it’s really a good read and a great encapsulation of some classic Lutheran themes.

    One of the best chapters is the one on The Christocentric Principle. Here Braaten discusses the work of Christ and its implications.

    He recognizes that soteriology has fallen on hard times, especially with a shift from an otherworldly to a more this-wordly focus. Liberation and other political theologies have taken their cue from the story of the Hebrews in the OT, especially the Exodus, as the paradigmatic act of God’s liberation for his people.

    However valid this insight might be, Braaten thinks that it is at best a partial account of salvation and shortchanges the gospel. Liberation, understood as political praxis has two major shortcomings: it shifts the burden of providing salvation from God to human beings. It is at best synergisitc and at wost Pelagian. Secondly, it doesn’t sufficiently reckon with the enemies of human life and flourishing that go beyond the structural injustice and political oppression. “[F]or all the liberating praxis in history can do nothing to produce love and freedom and can do nothing about human bondage to sin and death” (p. 78).

    Instead, Braaten contends, Christians need to hold on to the cosmic and universal signficance of Jesus. “The most important notion, common to preaching, piety, and dogmatics, is that ‘Christ died for us.’ This is the sin qua non of every doctrine of atonement.”

    He goes on to say:

    In dying for us, Jesus did not die instead of us, for we all still have to die. In suffering for us, he did not suffer instead of us, for we all have to suffer. Yet he represents us before God. He speaks for us when we are silenced by death. He claims that each one of us is unique, indispensable, and absolutely irreplaceable even though the world treats us as expendable and exchangeable and as mere statistical units. Here we have the solid ground of personal identity free of charge, while people are madly searching for security in a supermarket full of answers with high price tags. In this world in which the value of individual human beings is becoming infinitesimally low, Jesus is our representative in his life and in his vicarious death and in his victorious resurrection.

    Faith is an act of letting Jesus be our representative. Because he died for us, we never die alone without representation, without hope for personal identity beyond the grave. We will never have to die alone on a Godforsaken hill outside the gate. We can die in a communion of his love, in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins, with undying hope for resurrectoin and eternal life. Because Jesus died the death of the sinner as the sinless one, assuming our lot by his love, he can be our representative. Because he died the death under the law as the man of love, full of life to share and taking time for others, he can be our representative. He can be our representative because, in being raised from the dead, he was approved by God as having the right credentials to be the ambassador of the human race. (pp. 72-3)

    This seems similar to what some theologians have described as “inclusive substitution.” Jesus doesn’t die instead of us so much as he enters into our condition and transforms it. We still have to die, but death has been transformed; it need no longer be a source of terror and hopelessness.

    Braaten goes on to discuss the universal implications of Jesus’ saving death and resurrection. He acknowledges that Christians have to take account of the other great religions of the world in a way that wasn’t always clear to Christians in the past. However, he also doesn’t think that Christians can sacrifice the uniqueness of Jesus as God’s “only saving bridge to the world.”

    He identifies two unsatisfactory positions about salvation. There’s the old-fashioned view which requires as a condition of salvation that one be a member of the Church in good standing (the traditional Catholic view) or that one have explicit faith in Jesus (the conservative Protestant view). Both of these variations consign possibly the majority of the human race to eternal damnation by God’s sovereign decree. Then there’s the modern pluralism that sees all the great religions of the world as equally valid means of attaining salvation (the position of someone like John Hick).

    Braaten points out that the first view, held by traditionalist Catholics and conservative Protestants has already been forced to create various loopholes (for infants, virtuous pagans, the Old Testament patriarchs, etc.) and thus isn’t as rigorous as it first appears.

    The second view frankly sacrifices the universal significance of Jesus, treating him essentially as one potential savior among many. This is hardly compatible with the main thrust of the New Testament witness, which sees Jesus not simply as the savior of a small band of followers, but as the cosmic Christ and Lord of all.

    Parenthetically, it’s always seemed to me that the “hard pluralist” position claims to know a lot more about the divine than seems to be justified. If particular religious traditions are relativized in their truth claims, on what grounds does the pluralist claim to know that God/the divine can be reached by any of these channels? It seems to me, rather, that Christian assurance of God’s good will is rooted firmly in the revelation of God in Jesus, which requires the kind of robust Christology and doctrine of the Atonement that is anathema to pluralists.

    In Braaten’s view, a Christian hope for the salvation for all people has to be firmly rooted in the person and work of Christ. “The Christian hope for salvation, whether for the believing few or the unbelieving many, is grounded in the person and meaning of Christ alone–not in the potential of the world’s religions to save or in the moral seriousness of humanists and people of goodwill or even in the good works of pious Christians and church people, who perhaps are compulsively believing too many things and going to church more than is good for them[!]” (p. 82).

    It’s important to note, I think, that Braaten is also ruling out what we might call the modern “inclusive” Christian view that wants to hold on to the uniqueness of Jesus, but nevertheless holds that everyone who “does their best” can be saved. This ends up being semi-Pelagian at best. If all I need to do is the best I can, what need is there for a savior in the first place? This is precisely the attitude that Luther railed against – the view that God would give his grace to those who “do what is in them.”

    Lutherans have traditionally not followed Calvinists in holding to double predestination and limited atonement. However, there is an unresolved tension there in that the implication of monergism (human beings don’t contribute to their salvation; all is a gift from God) and unlimited atonement would seem to be some form of universalism. After all, if Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for the sins of all, and we can do nothing to secure that salvation for ourselves, and God doesn’t predestine to reprobation, then it seems like all will be saved.

    The traditional response has been to say that God predestines for salvation but not perdition. But it’s far from clear that this is more than a verbal distinction. What we might say, though, is that the mysteries of the divine will remain permanently inscutable to us, at least conernign these matters.

    Braaten writes:

    Will, then, all people be saved in the end? We do not already know the answer. The final answer is stored up in the mystery of God’s own future. All he has let us know in advance is that he will judge the world according to the measure of his grace and love made known in Jesus Christ, which is ultimately greater than the fierceness of his wrath or the hideousness of our sin. (p. 84)

    This has always seemed to me like the best answer. We hope that all will be saved, but that hope rests in Christ, not in us.

  • SVR in their own words

    If you’re interested in the issues of secession and localism raised by the Bill Kauffman article I linked to the other day you might want to check out Vermont Commons, the online home of the Second Vermont Republic folks. They have a lot of interesting-looking articles by people like Thomas Naylor, Kirkpatrick Sale, Bill McKibben, and James Howard Kunstler on a variety of topics related to politics and community from a localist/decentralist perspective.

  • Home in DC and Back to Wittenberg?

    We’ve successfully made the move from Boston to Washington DC! Actually, we’ve been here since last Saturday. Our place is a scant seven blocks or so from the Capitol and in a very cool neighborhood. My wife is starting a new job next week, hence the move. Yours truly has now joined the ranks of the “telecommuting.”

    I’m looking forward to getting to know DC, a city I’ve always enjoyed visiting. And as someone who has a bit of a love-hate relationship with politics it should be stimulating to live here during the next year or so.

    This Sunday I imagine we’ll start visiting churches. Despite our good experiences over the last year with the Anglicans I think we’ll probably initially scout out some of the local ELCA congregations. I don’t think Anglo-Catholicism quite “took” for either one of us, though I do feel like I’ve benefited greatly from certain aspects of Anglo-Catholic spirituality. In particular I’ve developed a budding devotion to the Blessed Virgin, not something that Lutheran churches tend to be very big on!

    Still, the Christ-and-gospel-centeredness of Lutheranism at its best, along with the distinctive Lutheran themes of justification by faith, simul justus et peccator, and the Law/Gospel dialectic still seem to me to best capture a lot of what I think Christianity is all about. Of course, most people don’t find a church home based exclusively or even primarily on theology, but I’m hoping we can find a sound Lutheran community here.

    Finally, we are, alas, still running on a dial-up connection until next week, so no Friday metal today.