A Thinking Reed

Month: August 2007

  • Liberation, human and animal

    (This post actually started out short. Honest!)

    Christopher (at his new blog) directs our attention to this article by Andrew Linzey on the connection between violence against animals and violence against humans.

    Clearly it’s not a matter of cruelty to animals causing violence against human beings in a straightforward way. Rather, as Linzey says, “cruelty to animals is one of a cluster of potential or actual characteristics held in common by those who commit violence or seriously anti-social acts.”

    This raises the question of how animal liberation and human liberation might be connected. Animal liberationists are often faced with the objection that human oppression is so severe and widespread that to divert efforts and resources to injustices against animals would be irresponsible at best and misanthropic at worst.

    In this article philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark suggests, however, that while some proponents of animal welfare and liberation have neglected issues of human oppression, the two causes are actually integrally connected. In his words, “[a]s long as we live, as human beings, in hierarchical, class and caste-divided societies, we must expect us to be cruel,” and a “genuinely humane endeavour on behalf of the non-human cannot be separated from a similarly humane endeavour on behalf of humans.” The idea being, I think, that as long as we have the mindset which takes domination and exploitation as natural and inevitable, neither animals nor weaker and more vulnerable humans are safe.

    At the level of our general view of the world, at least, there is a significant connection between our view of other human beings and our view of other animals. If God creates all this is out of love, then, to the extent that we share in or imitate the divine love, we will see other beings as having a value and integrity and mystery that is independent of whatever benefits we might get from them. As Clark says “[i]n love, we attend to things as being beautiful. Willing their good, we come to know what ‘good’ is in their case. False love imposes burdens, fantasizes, and grows angry when the ‘beloved’ is not as we wish. True love puts aside concupiscence.”

    Love isn’t just a sentiment; it’s the most truthful and accurate perception of reality there is. Our typical perception of reality is in terms of how things affect us. This is natural and probably inevitable to a great degree, but moral progress largely consists in moving beyond this egocentric perspective and recognizing the independent reality and value of beings other than ourselves. “Love is the recognition, the realization, of a creature chosen from eternity by God, who ‘hates nothing that He has made (why else would He have made it?)’…What God has chosen is not only what is, literally, human: every thing is a message of love, which we misread or miss entirely as long as we suppose that we are ourselves the only centre of the universe.”

    Consequently, when we perpetrate violence against others, or exploit them for our own gain, we are denying their independent reality and treating them as mere means to our ends. Humanism and most traditional forms of Christianity agree in holding that only human beings are genuinely ends-in-themselves. But unlike humanism, Christianity has a certain built in trajectory toward a wider apprehension of the value of all created being.

    The worry, of course, is that a greater appreciation of the value of non-human creatures will somehow downgrade the moral status of human beings. Though rarely is actual evidence offered to back this up, critics can point to thinkers like Peter Singer who simultaneously advocate for better treatment of animals and argue for the permissibility of killing “defective” or “unwanted” infants. Thus in the minds of the critics any blurring of the line between the value of human and non-human life seems inextricably tied to a diminished appreciation of the dignity of human beings.

    But I don’t see why this has to be the case. Singer is a bit of a unique case because, as an ultra-consistent consequentialist, he is willing to follow the premises of his arguments to the bitter end where someone else might balk at his conclusions, many of which are highly counterintuitive to say the least! But it by no means follows that someone arriving at similar conclusions about our treatment of animals by a different route needs to embrace the same conclusions as Singer regarding, e.g. abortion or infanticide. Andrew Linzey, for instance, not only argues for a paradigm shift in the way we look at animals, he has also argued against using human embryos as experimental subjects on the similar grounds that life is not simply ours to do with what we will as long as it seems to serve our interests.

    In other words, concern for animals isn’t properly understood as an attempt to downgrade the moral status of human beings but as an attempt to upgrade the status of other animals. No one (well not no one) thinks that feminism must necessarily result in downgrading the moral worth of men. As the somewhat sardonic bumper sticker puts it, “Feminism is the radical idea that women are people.” We might say, less pithily, that animal liberation is the radical idea that living, sentient creatures are more than mere objects or material to be used in whatever way we see fit. Human beings should feel threatened by that assertion only to the extent that our present lifestyles are premised upon its denial.

    This doesn’t mean that genuine human and animal interests won’t ever conflict (though I’d argue far less so than some anti-animal liberation polemicists would lead you to believe). But to the extent that the moral life is about learning to see others as independent realities having their own worth and goods proper to their nature, I don’t think we can, at least on religious grounds, set the limits of our moral concern at the boundary of the human kingdom.

    But even if that’s right it doesn’t resolve the question of priorities. Even if we agree in principle that animals are beings whose welfare and dignity ought, in an ideal world, to be safeguarded and that concern for animal well-being and human well-being is part of the same view of created being as intrinsically valuable, how can we justify attending to animals when there is so much human misery in the world? Shouldn’t we focus on the most important issues first?

    I think the response to this objection has at least three parts. First, much of our mistreatment of animals would be abated merely by ceasing to do certain things. This doesn’t require us to dedicate new resources to the well-being of animals, but merely to stop harming them. I’m not going to claim that, say, vegetarianism is morally obligatory, but the greatest source of human-inflicted animal suffering, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is almost certainly animal agriculture. Virtually all of us (meaning those of us in the industrialized West, the kind of people with reliable internet connections. ;-)) have it in our power to stop contributing to this by, at least, seeking alternatives to factory farmed meat.

    Secondly, in allocating our resources dedicated to alleviating suffering or improving the lot of others, very few of us adhere to a strict utilitarian ordering by focusing all our efforts on the single most serious problem currently facing the world. For instance, you could argue that nuclear disarmament is the most serious moral problem there is because it alone has the potential to result in the utter destruction of the human race (and most other life for that matter). By this standard, pretty much every other problem pales in comparison. And yet many people feel eminently justified in dedicating time and resources to causes other than nuclear disarmament.

    Why is this? I think it’s partly because we don’t order our priorities in quite that rationalistic a fashion. Different people feel drawn to different issues or causes for a variety of reasons that often have more to do with personal experience than a dispassionate ordering of priorities. And this applies to people who’ve dedicated part of their lives to working toward improving the lot of animals. Is someone who works on behalf of animals to be criticized for spending that much less time working to alleviate poverty or fight illiteracy if the person who has taken up those causes isn’t to be criticized for failing to dedicate all their efforts toward eradicating war or disease? There is properly a kind of division of labor, it seems, based on interest, personality, experience, and sympathy that doesn’t admit of a simple hirearchical ordering.

    Third, it can be argued that we have, by our assertion of dominion over other living creatures, incurred special obligations toward them. Our obligations, for instance, to animals in the wild may largely be to “do no harm,” but our obligations toward domesticated animals may well be stronger precisely in light of the fact that we have taken them into our service. Just as a man has obligations to his own children that he doesn’t have to the children of strangers, we may well have special duties of care to “our” animals as a consequence of the rights we have asserted over them and the use we make of them.

    We also often recognize special duties to the weak and vulnerable; contrary to some theories of morality, moral considerability isn’t directly dependent to one’s abilities as a free, independent agent capable of discharging duties and entering into agreements. In fact, our moral sentiments often point in quite the opposite direction: those who are weak and unable to fend for themselves call for greater care just because they are at our mercy.

    It’s also worth pointing out that some of the most important efforts on behalf of animals were undertaken by those with impressive humanitarian records. William Wilberforce, not exactly a slouch in the area of human rights, co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It may be that widening the circle of moral concern, far from being some kind of zero-sum game where some can benefit only at the expense of others, actually reinforces benign attitudes, making people more sensitive to suffering and injustice wherever it’s found. And it may even be that proper attention to the rightful claims of humans and animals will only be acheived together.

    [Note: this post has been slightly edited for clarity.]

  • CO2 emissions for me, not for thee

    Ross Clark points out that certain high-profile policies in the developed world ostensibly aimed at reducing global warming actually function as a protectionist racket against the developing world.

    The two most significant that he mentions are the attempt to enforce caps on emissions on countries like China and India without taking per capita emissions into account and the popularization of “food miles” as short hand for carbon emissions – thus favoring local food over imported – when the reality is far more complex (Jim Mason and Peter Singer talk about this in their The Ethics of What We Eat – “buy local” may often serve as a good rule of thumb, but not as a hard-and-fast rule).

    The entire article is well worth a read. Clark worries that “increasingly the politics appear to be shifting the burden of cutting carbon emissions on to the world’s poor: they must be kept in a state of noble peasanthood so that we can carry on living pretty much as before.”

  • KsE “Holy Diver”

    Eric mentioned that the Killswitch Engage cover of Dio’s “Holy Diver” that I posted last week no longer appears to be available at YouTube.

    For those interested, you can see the video in a variety of formats at the band’s webpage at Roadrunner Records: here.

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises:

    In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

    Roepke was a free market economist, widely credited with Germany’s post-war economic recovery. He was also a deeply conservative thinker in the best sense who recognized that life is more than the market. His A Humane Economy argues that the market requires strong social, cultural and legal frameworks in order to function as it should without reducing social values to market values.

    Here’s a snippet:

    The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses. Conservative respect for the past and its preservation are indispensable conditions of a sound society, but to cling exclusively to tradition, history, and established customs is an exaggeration leading to intolerable rigidity. The liberal predilection for movement and progress is an equally indispensable counterweight, but if it sets no limits and recognizes nothing as lasting and worth preserving, it ends in disintegration and destruction. The rights of the community are no less imperative than those of the individual, but exaggeration of the rights of the community in the form of collectivism is just as dangerous as exaggerated individualism and its extreme form, anarchism. Ownership ends up in plutocracy, authority in bondage and despotism, democracy in arbitrariness and demagogy. Whatever political tendencies or currents we choose as examples, it will be found that they always sow the seed of their own destruction when they lose their sense of proportion and overstep their limits. In this field, suicide is the normal cause of death.

    The market economy is no exception to the rule. Indeed, its advocates, in so far as they are at all intellectually fastidious, have always recognized that the sphere of the market, of competition, of the system where supply and demand move prices and thereby govern production, may be regarded and defended only as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power. Society as a whole cannot be ruled by the laws of supply and demand, and the state is more than a sort of business company, as has been the conviction of the best conservative opinion since the time of Burke. Individuals who compete on the market and there pursue their own advantage stand all the more in need of the social and moral bonds of community, without which competition degenerates most grievously. As we have said before, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature. Man can wholly fulfill his nature only by freely becoming part of a community and having a sense of solidarity with it. Otherwise he leads a miserable existence and he knows it. (A Humane Economy, pp. 90-91)

    Here Roepke sounds a bit like John Paul II, who recognized the value and importance of markets for production and exchange, but the equal or greater importance of maintaining the value of things, especially human life, that cannot be reduced to exchange value. As he wrote in the encyclical Centesimus annus:

    It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. But this is true only for those needs which are “solvent”, insofar as they are endowed with purchasing power, and for those resources which are “marketable”, insofar as they are capable of obtaining a satisfactory price. But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish. It is also necessary to help these needy people to acquire expertise, to enter the circle of exchange, and to develop their skills in order to make the best use of their capacities and resources. Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity. Inseparable from that required “something” is the possibility to survive and, at the same time, to make an active contribution to the common good of humanity. (Para. 34)

    It’s probably no coincidence that Roepke, the son of a Lutheran pastor, enunciated a similar kind of Christian Democratic vision. American conservatism has, unfortunately, tended toward a kind of “vulgar libertarianism” in theory, which valorizes “the market” as the solution to all social problems. And in practice it has ironically tended toward corporatism – favors for big business that actually end up shielding them from the vicissitudes of the market.

    The interesting question to me is whether there is a space for Roepke-style “humane conservatism” to join with McKibbon-style grass-roots progressivism in offering an alternative to the kind of neoliberal version of globalization that many would argue threatens the social, moral, political, and ecological health of our society.

  • Why creation?

    (Talk about a presumptuous title!)

    In this post I touched briefly on the question of why God creates the universe in the first place. Keith Ward, following Hegel, suggests that in creating God is able to realize a kind of love and relationship, one with creatures capable of not responding to God, that would otherwise be impossible, and that this constitutes a great good.

    It may be that there is no more impious or fruitlessly speculative question than asking why God created the world. Still, the Christian tradition has certainly grappled with it, and it’s intimately bound up with questions about the divine nature, the purpose of our existence, and our ultimate redemption, so maybe some reflection isn’t entirely out of order.

    My impression is that the tradition has, in thinking about creation, tried to hold together two ideas that are, or at least appear to be, in some kind of tension. The first is the idea of creation ex nihilo and its corollary of creation as the free act of God. Unlike some of its pagan competitors, biblical religion has held from early on that God brings the world into being out of nothing, that is, there is no preexistent material or chaos that limits God’s creative will. And God is not constrained by any external force or reality to create; creation is an utterly free act of God.

    The second idea that stands, I think, in some tension with creation ex nihilo and the freedom of God is the notion that God’s nature is love and that creation is in some sense an expression of the divine nature. Love, it can be said, longs to share itself and the creation of something other than God for God to share the divine self with seems “natural” or “fitting” if not necessary.

    In this view it shouldn’t be said that God creates because God “lacks” something, but because it is of the divine nature to share itself. A popular image has been that of a fountain of being that almost can’t help but overflow, bringing other contingent beings into existence. The worry here, however, is that this looks like a kind of neoplatonic doctrine of “emanation” in which creation is a kind of divine effulgence rather than the result of a free purposive choice.

    So, we have what looks like a paradox of sorts: we want to say both that creation is a free choice of God and that it is an expression of the divine nature which is love. Whether or not this is an irresolvable paradox will depend, among other things, on how we understand divine freedom. Do we think of freedom as the ability to choose A or B such that God could have just as easily chosen not to create? Or is freedom better thought of as the ability to express one’s nature without being in any way constrained by external forces or realities?

    It should be noted here that we run into a similar paradox with the idea of grace. Grace is God’s unmerited favor and freely bestowed on us without our doing anything to earn or deserve it. And yet, graciousness isn’t, we think, just an accidental property of God as though God could’ve just as easily chosen not to be gracious. God’s freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to not be good, loving, and holy, or at least that’s what I think most Christians would want to say if they thought about it.

    Interestingly, the contemporary Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer explicitly makes the connection between God’s graciousness in justifying sinners and God’s graciousness in creation.

    He writes:

    The world was not called into being because of any this-worldly necessity, but out of pure freedom and goodness. Creation out of nothing means that all that is exists out of pure goodness; it is unmerited: “All this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!” (Bayer, “Justification as the Basis and Boundary of Theology,” Lutheran Quarterly, Fall 2001, p. 277; the quote is from Luther’s commentary on the first article of the creed in his catechism)

    So, God’s freedom in creation means at least that God isn’t constrained by anything outside of God, but at the same time creation is an expression of God’s grace and goodness. Creation and redemption aren’t two different stories, but part of the same story of God’s self-communication to that which is not God.

    Another tradition that saw God’s purposes in creation and redemption closely aligned is the so-called Franciscan tradition (because of its association with Franciscan thinkers like Duns Scotus and Bonaventure). In this view, the Incarnation, the manifestation and communication of the divine nature, becomes itself the purpose of creation. In other words, the Incarnation isn’t simply God’s afterthought or Plan B for dealing with human sin; there would’ve been an Incarnation even in an unfallen world. And creation is a kind of theatre for God’s self-manifestation. You might say that Jesus doesn’t exist for us, but we, and everything else, exist for him!

    This tradition draws on John’s logos Christology as well as the cosmic Christ imagery from Colossians in viewing the creation itself as a visible reflection of the divine Word, which is both the reflection of the Father and the archetype for the created world. Created being, in its multitude of forms, refracts the light of the logos in an unlimited variety of ways:

    He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col. 1:15-17)

    What this suggests, of course, is that the Incarnation isn’t some kind of deus ex machina inserted late in the story to salvage a plot gone badly awry, but the underlying theme of the entire story from the very beginning. Christ is the image of the Father, and creation is, in a manner of speaking, the image of Christ.

    But if (part of) God’s purpose in creating is to share the divine self with creation, with what is not God, then it’s fitting that it be shared in the manner most fitting to the particular kind of creature. The medievals had the principle that there must be a certain affinity between the knower and the object of knowledge in order for true knowledge to take place. In light of that an Incarnation would seem to be the ideal way for personal beings like ourselves to know God, i.e. a fully personal mode of knowledge. A line of reasoning similar to this led thinkers in this tradition to suppose that God would’ve become Incarnate to share himself with his creatures even had sin never entered the world.

    But as we know all too well there is sin in the world, so the Incarnation necessarily takes a redemptive form in our world. In a fallen world, the communication of divine love has a cruciform shape. But the divine nature that takes human form in the Incarnation is the same divine nature that is reflected (if imperfectly) in the rest of creation.

    I think one of the helpful aspects of seeing creation as an expression or reflection of the divine nature is that it helps us to see non-human creation as something possessing value in its own right. Our perspective on creation has made it increasingly difficult for us to see the entire cosmos as existing for the sake of human beings alone, as a mere backdrop to the human drama of fall and redemption.* In his book Pascal’s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding, Ward writes:

    [A]nyone who believes in a creator God can affirm that the cosmos is created so that God can enjoy its beauty. After all, theists believe that the cosmos is a product of the divine mind, so its creation can be compared to the work of a supreme artist, enjoyable and worthwhile for its own sake, without any reference to possible finite persons at all. The universe could still have a point, and that point would be its expression of the power and wisdom of the creator, and God’s enjoyment both of the process of creating and of the created universe itself. This is part of the traditional view — the Hebrew Bible depicts the divine Wisdom as ‘rejoicing in his [God’s] inhabited world, and delighting in the human race’ (Proverbs 8:30). And if Wisdom delights in the human race, it surely also delights in the beauty of the stars. If there is a God, the universe has a point, as the creative expression of the master creator, and the object of divine delight. (pp. 15-16)

    Needless to say, I would add that God delights in his other non-human living creatures and that these creatures don’t exist solely to fulfill human needs and wants. Seeing all created being as an expression of the divine Logos should move us toward a more theocentric perspective and a less anthropocentric one.

    And yet it remains the case that we believe that God became human, and that the Incarnation represents something like the pinnacle of creation, that in Jesus the divine finds expression in way that is different in kind from the way it is expressed elsewhere. Or to put it another way, that the story finds its climax in this event even if the theme has been present all along.

    But holding that all of creation is or can be an expression of the divine nature and glory doesn’t commit us to the view that all parts of creation are of equal value. Personal life does seem to have qualities and capabilities that make it more valuable in some respects. And our tradition has consistently taught that God is personal (or tri-personal), or at least that personal language is the least misleading language we can use about God. Which would seem to imply that, within creation, God could only find adequate expression as a person and could only adequately relate to his personal creatures in this way.

    So where, if anywhere, have we gotten to? We started by asking if we could shed any light on why God creates. Does God need to create in some sense, in order to determine the divine identity, say, or to enrich the divine experience? Following the tradition I ruled out the possibility that God is constrained to create by anything external to the divine nature, but I suggested that maybe there is something “natural” or “fitting” in the fact that God, in the fecundity of the divine being, creates a world both as an expression of the divine being and as something to which God can communicate divine love. In this perspective, the Incarnation can be seen as the climax or focal point of the divine self-communication rather than a late add-on to the divine plan or a contingency measure (allowing, of course, that the form the Incarnation takes is partly determined by the exigency of human sin). God wills to share the divine being with creation and will go to whatever lengths necessary to do so, even, as we see in our own case, to the point of death on a cross.

    Obviously this is all fairly speculative, open to revision, and to be taken with more than a grain of salt. 😉
    ——————————————————————-
    *It’s worth mentioning, however, that there are those who maintain that, given the constraints of very fundamental aspects of the laws governing the physical world, a universe roughly the size and age of our own would be necessary for the emergence of intelligent life on even one planet. Even if that’s right, though, it in no way rule out God choosing the rest of the cosmos for its own sake since God, presumably, can be quite parsimonious in choosing means to realize his ends.

  • Friday metal – Suicidal Tendencies, “You Can’t Bring Me Down”

    Though probably best known for their early punk material (“Institutionalized,” “I Saw Your Mommy”), ST’s two best albums (IMO), How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… and Lights, Camera, Revolution are pretty much pure thrash metal. This clip is from the latter.

    It’s not entirely clear from the video why the authorities are cracking down on ST. We can only assume it’s because they rock that hard.

    p.s. Bassist Robert Trujillo is, of course, now in Metallica.

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in.

    It seems to me that a lot of the climate change “skepticism” (which I put in scarequotes because much of it is an industry-funded attempt to muddy the waters, not a good faith pursuit of the truth; see the chapter on climate change skepticism/denial in George Monbiot’s Heat for some damning details) is about pouncing on uncertainty at the level of detail, whereas the big picture remains pretty clear. Take for instance the way that skeptics jumped on some recent minor revision by NASA of some temperature rankings for the US (see this post for some clarification, via Confessing Evangelical).

    As Daly says, if the big picture is clear, then by asking the right questions, like “can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes?” or “what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere?” or “does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer?” can yield a fairly definitive answer to the question of what direction we should be going in.

    As he puts it:

    Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

    I discussed Daly and theologian John Cobb’s book For the Common Good a bit here and here.

    In a similar vein, D.W. Congdon is asking some questions for churches about consumerism, which is surely relevant to this topic.

  • Bad Protestant

    I’m late posting on this obviously but last night I went to a Mass in honor of Our Lady’s Glorious Assumption. It was heart-breakingly beautiful in parts, set as it was to music from Mozart’s Spatzen-Messe, KV 220 (Those words mean nothing to me; I copied them directly from the bulletin. All I know is that the music was amazing).

    Here I wrote that my theology had shifted away from Lutheranism over the last couple of years. One of the respects in which that’s the case is in my attitude toward devotion to the Blessed Virgin (and the Saints in general). I worked through the theological arguments to my own satisfaction some time ago, but more recently it’s become an increasingly important part of my own devotional life.

    I know that there are Lutherans who accept devotion to Mary and the other Saints, but the fact of the matter is that it’s simply not part of the practice of any Lutheran church I’ve ever been to. At some point it becomes exhausting to try and maintain such practices without the support of a church community. Not that this would necessarily be a “deal-breaker” for me, but I like being part of a congregation that can pray the Ave together or sing “Ye Who Own the Faith of Jesus.”

  • The “Progs for Paul” myth redux

    I’ve never bought into the “Progressives for Paul” myth – the idea that there was a burgeoning groundswell of support on the anti-war Left for maverick GOP congressman Ron Paul.

    Gaius links to this rather silly piece saying that Paul’s “support” on the Left may be shot now that he’s “revealed” his radical small-government views.

    Look, Ron Paul is a staunch decentralist, small-government libertarian (paleo division). He hasn’t exactly kept that a secret and talks about his desire to drastically reduce the size and scope of the federal government at pretty much every available opportunity.

    Now, sure, some anti-war writers on the Left have given Paul some good press. And for good reason: he’s a voice of sanity in the la-la land inhabited by the rest of the GOP field. Progressives and other anti-war types ought to be glad whenever Paul gets some attention paid to his “extremist” views on foreign policy (extreme outside of the DC “bipartisan consensus” that is).

    But how likely was it that lefties were ever going to vote en masse for Paul? There is a perfectly good progressive anti-war candidate running for the Democratic ticket. His name’s Dennis Kucinich. Though not exactly a progressive myself, or a registered Democrat for that matter, I think there’s a lot to like about him. And, there’s also the curmudgeonly Mike Gravel and Bill Richardson as options for the liberal anti-war voter.

    Ron Paul is against the war in Iraq and our imperialist foreign policy more generally. And he’s also shares certain other positions with liberals: he’s against the drug war, for instance. And the post-9/11 expansion of the national security state. But he’s not a liberal or a progressive, and I imagine folks on the Left are smart enough to know that.

  • Re-thinking Hegel

    In the second half (or maybe last third) of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity he discusses some of the post-Enlightenment developments of Christian thought and the prospects for a 21st century liberal-yet-orthodox Christianity.

    Interestingly, Ward attempts a partial rehabilitation of one of the currently most unfashionable theological thinkers of the post-Enlightenment era: Hegel. Since at least Kierkegaard Hegel has been the poster boy for hubristic metaphysical system-building and the attempt to reduce Christian particularity to philosophical generality. But Ward thinks that Hegel still has valuable contributions to make to Christian theology.

    Ward concedes that Hegel overreached in identifying the progress of history with the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, and in his confidence in speculative reason. However, he argues that Christianity necessarily involves doing metaphysics and the strictures against “Hellenism” by German liberal theologians like Harnack, et al. aren’t sustainable. On the positive side Hegel contributed a new understanding of God that departed from the static deity of classical Greek philosophy and is more congenial to the biblical picture of God as deeply involved in history. Thus a “chastened” Hegelianism that properly qualifies Hegel’s historical optimism and his inattention to the particularity and importance of Jesus, can still be of some use:

    For Hegel, history both expresses and changes God, as it realises aspects of the divine that would otherwise have remained potential in the divine being, and as God truly relates to these aspects in new and creative ways. It is compatible with this view to say that God also has a proper divine actuality even without creation, and certainly without this specific universe. So we may not wish to say that this universe is necessary if God is to be conscious of the divine nature. However, there is a great deal of force in the thought that, if God is to realise the divine nature as love — in the sense of relation to truly free personal agents — then the creation of some universe in which true freedom is possible will be needed.

    The sort of love that obtains between God and created persons — a kenotic love that enters into humility and suffering, that seeks those who are lost and reconciles those who are estranged — is not possible solely within the being of God itself. Because of that, the creation of a universe is the necessary condition of the actualisation of kenotic love in God. A stronger stress on the value of personal relationships leads to involving God more in time and change than classical theologians like Aquinas thought. We may not want to follow Hegel in the detail of his philosophy, but this is a move that he was the first major philosopher to make. (p. 156)

    This sort of thing is apt to make more traditional thinkers nervous. It seems to imply that the divine being in itself is somehow incomplete and requires the creation of something in addition to God in order for the divine potentiality to be actualized.

    There’s a connection here to the doctrine of the Trinity: Ward is suspicious of more “social” versions of the Trinity that emphasize the fully personal existence of each trinitarian person. These models see the “inner” life of the Trinity as a fully complete interchange of self-giving love; consequently, there is no need for creation to actualize God’s nature as love.

    Ward writes, in criticism of this kind of view:

    In any case, it is hard to see what sort of love could exist between persons who are all parts of the same being. It is as if different parts of a human being with three different personalities could all be said to love one another. That would be a very peculiar, even pathological, sort of love.

    […]

    If the love of Jesus is our model for the love of God, then God, as love, must go out to persons who are other than God, who are capable of rejecting God, but who can be healed by divine love and united to the divine life by compassion nad co-operation. This is not a love of one hypostasis of God for another hypostasis of God. It is a love for what is other than God but can be united to the life of God in fellowship. It is a love that requires a created other, perhaps, but not a love that can be operative within the divine being itself, where there is no possible scope for rejection, compassion, healing or a real autonomy of the other. (pp. 76-77)

    This is an interesting argument because it suggests that the intra-trinitarian divine love is in some sense inferior to the extra-trinitarian reconciling love that seeks the lost. In some sense I can see the force of this: it does seem that a love where there is literally no possibility of the beloved not reciprocating is somehow diminished in that there is no risk or vulnerability involved.

    On the other hand, it is somewhat worrisome to say that God must create a world in which there is a risk of rejection and estrangement in order to actualize this aspect of the divine love. For one thing, this seems to suggest that evil is necessary for God’s being to be fully actualized: for a world in which rejection and estrangement are a live possibility is one that would seem to (necessarily?) contain suffering. This is the same worry I have about Robert Jenson’s theology, that God’s self-determination is so bound up with the historical process that evil becomes part of the very being of God.

    Maybe there can be a mediating position: perhaps it’s possible (at least logically) for God to create creatures who are capable of estrangement without necessarily falling into it. In other words, the kind of risky love demonstrated in God’s decision to create free creatures who may fail to respond to the divine love does differ from God’s self-love, and is thus something good to be actualized, but it doesn’t necessarily entail the existence of evil.

    Regardless of what we want to say about this, I do think Ward is right to distinguish between the kind of love we might imagine between the persons of the Trinity and the kind of love that exists between God and finite persons, or between finite persons themselves. Some theologians have taken to seeing the relationship between the persons of the Trinity as a model for human community, but this seems like a bad idea for a couple of reasons.

    First, a lot of the descriptions of the nature of the love between the Persons is, let’s face it, rank speculation. And using fancy Greek terms like “perichoresis” doesn’t really change the fact that we have only the dimmest idea of what the “inner” life of God is like, much less does it provide some kind of blueprint for human relationships.

    Secondly, the life of the Trinity, we’re told, instantiates a perfect union of wills, a unity of wills in fact. The three Persons will all and only the same things. But this is a very bad model of human relationships. There is never perfect agreement of will in human communities, and to try and ensure such unity would be a recipe for tyranny. Conflict is an essential part of human living, due both to our differing interests and limited knowledge about what is good. Human beings are different from each other in a way that the Persons of the Trinity aren’t. So, it is, I would suggest, an inadequate model for human relationships to say the least.