I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out.
Month: January 2008
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The left-populist case for Ron Paul?
This Fall I read Jeff Taylor’s Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy, in which he argues that the Democrats have traded a “Jeffersonian” ideology (decentralist, populist, libertarian, and non-interventionist bordering on pacifist) for a “Hamiltonian” one (basically the opposite). Bryan and Humphrey are for Taylor emblematic figures of this transition, with the Great Commoner playing the role of the last Jeffersonian populist and Humphrey representing the rise of centralized technocratic liberalism.
Here (via A Conservative Blog for Peace) Taylor makes the case for Ron Paul. Paul, with his opposition to the warfare state, represents the kind of Jeffersonian values that put him at odds with establishment candidates. Taylor concedes that progressives will disagree with Paul on a variety of issues, but he does his level best to demonstrate a compatibility of spirit, if not policy preferences.
There is something to this, I think. A certain strain of left-populism emphasizes the way that the playing field has been tilted by the influence exercised by powerful special interests on the government. These special privileges are made possible by government intervention, so you can see how this outlook could in principle be made compatible with a certain kind of libertarianism. And Ron Paul’s views on the Fed, NAFTA, the WTO, etc. can be given a left-populist spin if you emphasize the way these institutions act as tools of elite control and privilege. (Of course, the question that liberals and progressives would want to press is whether simply “leveling the playing field” is sufficient or merely necessary, and if more positive government action isn’t required to address social inequalities.)
Taylor recognizes that Paul remains far from perfect, even from the perspective of the decentralist left, but he argues that voting for a candidate who is strongly committed to peace and civil liberties is important in an election where the establishment candidates are already taking anti-war voters for granted:
To me, voting for Kucinich, Gravel, McKinney, or Paul makes some sense even though they’re unlikely to win. At least we’re asking for something honest and principled during the first round of voting. Ron Paul isn’t the perfect candidate and his Jeffersonianism is not as full-bodied as I would prefer (e.g., he’s too weak on the ecological dimension), but at least he’s a step in the right direction and his ability to attract a wide range of grassroots support is commendable. He’s not the only good choice, but he’s no lunatic and there is some logic behind his campaign. It’s not everything, but it is something. In a rigged system with a populace divided by secondary issues and exploited by a bipartisan elite, it may be the best we can do in 2008.
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We’re doomed, the continuing series
When I read things like this, I can understand why people want to ignore the issue of climate change. If things are as bad as writers like McKibben say, and if the measures they describe are what’s called for, then I just can’t see how we’re going to pull off anything that radical in time to avert disaster. I felt this way after finishing George Monbiot’s Heat, too: Monbiot’s aim is to make the case that it is possible to reduce emissions the required amount and still have a modern industrial economy. But, to put it mildly, it’s extremely difficult to see how the political will can be summoned to do the things he says are necessary. It would require, for starters, a wholesale shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. Monbiot says that long-distance flight would have to be cut by upwards of 90%. And so on and so forth. To do all this would require treating climate change as a social emergency on a par with World War II, with all the attendant social and political mobilization. Virtually no politician in America, including most of the Democratic presidential candidate, is treating climate change as this kind of overriding emergency.
Now, maybe McKibben and Monbiot aren’t right and things aren’t as bad as all that. But there’s something troubling about the incentives we have to hope and believe that it’s not as bad as it might be…
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The end of the world as we know it (3)
(See here and here for previous posts.)
The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus, in its illustration of the principle of continuity/discontinuity, provides the key to understanding the future of the cosmos as a whole. Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical promises that God will redeem the entire creation, not just human beings. He envisions a transmutation of the material cosmos into a new cosmos that parallels the transmutation of Jesus’ dead body into his glorified raised body (Polkinghorne suggests that part of the significance of the empty tomb is to be found here; matter is not to be discarded, but taken up into something new).
Eschatology is concerned with hope. What can we hope for in a world in which it appears that human aspirations, both individual and collective, are destined for ultimate defeat? “Hope,” says Polkinghorne
is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect. (p. 94)
But what is hope’s positive content? It’s the conviction that “all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning” (p. 94). But the only thing that can guarantee this kind of meaning is “the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history” (p. 94). Polkinghorne says that a “thick” eschatology requires an equally “thick” theology and Christology. “To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4:17)” (p. 95).
This is a robust, “supernaturalist” eschatology, wherein God will act to bring about a new creation that will supplant the old. Polkinghorne’s background as a physicist may give him a more cosmic perspective here. Theologians frequently seem to reduce eschatology to concerns with human destiny, sometimes even to political aspirations. Polkinghorne distinguishes his view from a fully “realized” eschatology that doesn’t privilege the future over the present (a view he attributes to Kathryn Tanner; I’m not sure if this is right since I find Tanner pretty obscure on that point), as well as from the concept of “objective immortality” favored by some process theologians. Both of these options condemn the lives of countless beings to permanent incompleteness. “Actual eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem” (p. 100).
Polkinghorne thus stakes out a position between a fully “realized” eschatology and a strictly “futurist” one which he calls an “inagurated eschatology.” The pledge of God’s future victory of sin, death, and suffering has been given in the resurrection of Jesus, but the final consummation is still in the future. We can to some extent participate in that future now by being incorporated into Christ’s body through his church and the sacraments. Ethically, this means that follow the way of the crucified and risen one, even though we can’t see exactly where that way is leading us. But we can be assured that “our strivings for the attainment of good within the course of present history are never wasted but will bear everlasting fruit” (p. 102).
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The end of the world as we know it (2)
The key principle that Polkinghorne uses to construct his eschatological vision is that of continuity/discontinuity. If God is going to bring new life out of this fated-for-death universe, it must be both continuous with what has come before and discontinuous in overcoming the frailties, limitations, and evils of the present universe. The paradigmatic expression of this principle for Polkinghorne is the resurrection of Jesus: it is both the same pre-Easter Jesus who has been raised, but he has been raised to a new kind of life that is qualitatively different from earthly life.
In terms of physical continuity, Polkinghorne attempts to isolate some of the fundamental aspects of the universe. He sees the cosmos as essentially a process, a self-evolving spatio-temporal cosmos that eventually gives rise to intelligent, self-aware beings. This cosmos is also characterized by a deep relationality: everything from quarks to human beings find their identity in relation to other parts of the universe; it is imbued with information: patterns and wholes exert genuine causal effect on what happens; and it displays a deep intelligibility and transparency to mathematical reasoning. Polkinghorne’s suggestion is that these deep features of the present universe reflect the will of the Creator and that we can reasonably expect them to persist in some way in the new Creation.
Hope for a new creation, though, can only be rooted in the faithfulness of God. Consequently, it’s important to discern what we can of the divine nature and character if we are to have hope for the future. In a survey of the biblical material that manages to be both extremely concise and comprehensive, Polkinghorne paints a picture of a faithful, loving deity that emerges from the Old and New Testaments. The Bible, for Polkinghorne, is not “a conveniently divinely dictated handbook in which to look up the answers, but it is the record of the persons and events that have been particularly open to the presence of the divine reality and through which the divine nature may most transparently be discerned” (p. 53). In God’s faithfulness to Israel, in its growing eschatological expectations, and preeminently in his raising of Jesus from the dead, Polkinghorne discerns a God who, because of his loving faithfulness, will act to bring about a state of affairs where God’s presence is made immediately apparent to God’s people and in which the sufferings and limitations of this present life are overcome.
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The end of the world as we know it (1)
One of the things I usually make a point of doing when we’re visiting my wife’s family in Indianapolis is to make a trip to Half Price Books. They sell both used books and remainders, and it’s rare that I can’t find some gem at low, low prices. (They also have HPB in California, but I’ve yet to find any on the East Coast.)
Anyway, when we were there over Christmas I picked up John Polkinghorne’s The God of Hope and the End of the World. Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, offers here a meditation on eschatology in the 21st century. His contention in that Christian theologians need to engage with the picture of the destiny of the cosmos delivered to us by modern science: cosmologists are able to predict with a high degree of certainty that the physical universe will end either in a “big crunch” — where the universe essentially collapses back in on itself — or will continue to spread out indefinitely with entropy reigning as everything decays to low grade radiation. More locally, our sun will eventually go nova and destroy any remaining life on earth (assuming we have avoided man-made or biological catastrophes).
Even though these events are billions of years in the future, Polkinghorne says, they still call into question the ultimate significance of the universe. If the cosmos is destined to end with a bang or a whimper, it seems to threaten a kind of ultimate meaninglessness. The human prospect will long since have come to an end and all that will be left is, at best, a dead cosmos. Polkinghorne thinks that a credible eschatology has to take this rather bleak picture seriously. His book is part-apologetic, part-constructive theology as he attempts to show how sense can be made of the biblical promise that God will create a “new heaven and new earth.” In this series of posts I’ll highlight some of what I think are Polkinghorne’s more fruitful and intriguing reflections.
A Thinking Reed 