A Thinking Reed

Month: March 2008

  • Thoughts for Good Friday

    “Christ’s death on the cross and his descent into Hell … reassure us that we can never wander so far astray as to be outside the humanity with which Christ has identified.” – William Placher

    “Jesus came to forgive sin unconditionally for God. Our sin, our unbelief, consists precisely in the fact that we cannot and will not tolerate such forgiveness. So we move to kill him. There is nothing for him to do then but to die ‘for our sins,’ ‘on our behalf,’ ‘give his life as a ransom for many.’ For him to stop and ask us to ‘shape up’ would be to deny the forgiveness he came to give, to put conditions on the unconditional. Thus he must ‘bear our sins in his body’—not theoretically in some fashion, but actually. He is beaten, spit upon, mocked, wasted.” – Gerhard Forde

    “Sin and death are brought to submission by the persistence of Christ’s love. All their forces are spent upon him, but he carries on loving. In the end the voices of the thief asking to be remembered in God’s kingdom, the forgiven soldier at the foot of the cross recognizing by Christ’s death that he is the Son of God, witness to love’s triumph.” – Stephen Cottrell

    “The single central thing is the conviction that for us to be at peace Jesus’ life had to be given up. It isn’t that a vengeful and inflexible God demands satisfaction, more that the way the world is makes it unavoidable that the way to our freedom lies through the self-giving of Jesus, even to the point of death. In the kind of world that you and I inhabit, the kind of world that you and I make or collude with, this is what the price of unrestricted love looks like.” – Rowan Williams

    “And what is this Gospel? It is nothing less than the conviction and experience that God loves the whole world. What we see in Jesus is the revelation of an inclusive, all-embracing, generous loving. A loving that washes the feet of the world. A loving that heals individuals from oppression, both physical and spiritual. A loving that takes sides with the poor, vulnerable, diseased, hated, despised, and outcasts of his day. A loving that is summed up in his absolute commitment to love at all costs, even in extreme suffering and death. As Sydney Evans once wrote, ‘What Jesus did on the Cross was to demonstrate the truth of what he had taught: he showed a quality of love—such that the worst that evil could do to such love was to give such love ever fresh opportunities for loving.’” – Andrew Linzey

    “The kenosis, or self-emptying, of Jesus, which expresses in historical time the kenosis, the long-suffering of God, is the sacrifice which makes possible the theosis, or raising to God of human life, enabling it to share in the eternal life of a God of limitless love.” – Keith Ward

    “God in Christ crucified cancels the curse of human vulnerability to horrors. For the very horrors, participation in which threatened to undo the positive value of created personality, now become secure points of identification with the crucified God. To paraphrase St. Paul, neither the very worst humans can suffer, nor the most abominable things we can do can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:31-39).” – Marilyn McCord Adams

    “The cross of Christ was not an inexplicable or chance event, which happened to strike [Jesus], like illness or accident. To accept the cross as his destiny, to move toward it and even to provoke it, when he could well have done otherwise, was Jesus’ constantly reiterated free choice. He warns his disciples lest their embarking on the same path be less conscious of its costs (Luke 14:25-33). The cross of Calvary was not a difficult family situation, nor a frustration of visions of personal fulfillment, a crushing debt, or a nagging in-law; it was the political, legally-to-be-expected result of a moral clash with the powers ruling his society.” – John Howard Yoder

    “That God, out of love and concern for us, would so humble Godself as to unite Godself with not just lowly humanity but humanity in the most dire straits—that is the sacrifice, made by God in Christ on our behalf, in death as over the course of Jesus’ whole life.” – Kathryn Tanner

    “God’s forgiveness is indiscriminate. That’s the bedrock conviction of the Christian faith. ‘One has died for all,’ wrote the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 5:14). That simple claim has immense implications. All means all, without exception. There are no people who are sufficiently good so that God doesn’t need to forgive them and Christ didn’t die for them. There are no people who are too wicked for God to forgive them and for Christ to die for them. And there are no people whom God, for some inscrutable reason, decided not to forgive.” – Miroslav Volf

    “The taking on of the servile and sinful human condition, as foretold in Second Isaiah, is presented by Paul as an act of voluntary impoverishment: ‘For you know how generous our Lord Jesus Christ has been: He was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich’ (2 Cor. 8:9). This is the humiliation of Christ, his kenosis (Phil. 2:6-11). But he does not take on the human sinful condition and its consequences to idealize it. It is rather because of love for and solidarity with others who suffer in it. It is to redeem them from their sin and to enrich them with his poverty. It is to struggle against human selfishness and everything that divides persons and allows there to be rich and poor, possessors and dispossessed, oppressors and oppressed.” – Gustavo Gutierrez

    “Because Jesus is at once the ‘yes’ of God to humans in fidelity and also humanity’s ‘yes’ to God in faith, we are lifted into a higher life than we could ever imagine, a sharing in the life—and the eternal dance of gifts given and received—of the triune God.” – Luke Timothy Johnson

    “[W]hat was really exciting to Paul was that it was obvious from Jesus’ self-giving, and the ‘out-pouring of Jesus’ blood,’ that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us ‘free from our sins’—‘our sins’ being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called ‘wrath.’” – James Alison

    “Because [Jesus] 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 resurrection 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. — Carl Braaten

    Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
    Guilty of dust and sin.
    But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
    From my first entrance in,
    Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
    If I lacked anything.
    A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
    Love said, You shall be he.
    I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
    I cannot look on thee.
    Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
    Who made the eyes but I?
    Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
    Go where it doth deserve.
    And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
    My dear, then I will serve.
    You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
    So I did sit and eat.
    —George Herbert

  • Conscience of a torturer

    I’ve really been enjoying the subscription to Mother Jones my in-laws got me for my birthday. They do exactly what you’d want a monthly magazine to do: run long, in-depth investigative articles that go beyond the surface coverage you tend to get in weeklies or dailies. I used to subcribe to half a dozen or more political magazines, but over the years I’ve whittled it down to two (First Things is the other one).

    Anyway, this month’s issue focuses on torture, and I thought this article was particularly powerful. It consists of interviews with several men involved with handling detainees in Iraq.

  • The dismal prospects of anti-war conservatism

    Speaking of the prospects for anti-war conservatism, Michael Tomasky reviews (free registration required) Bill Kauffman’s upcoming Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism. Tomasky gives a largely sympathetic hearing to Kauffman’s history-cum-commendation of conservative isolationism and notes that “it wouldn’t be a bad thing to see the Republican Party, and even a good third to 40 percent of the Democrats in Washington (the ones who voted for the Iraq War and continue to support it or the Bush doctrine to some degree), pay the man some heed.”

    However, Tomasky dissents (rightly, in my view) from Kauffman’s revisionist take on World War II, and, to a lesser extent, the Cold War. This has always seemed to me to be a weak spot in the paleocon/libertarian take on US military history. It’s well and good to point out, for instance, that the US didn’t face an imminent threat in World War II, but are we supposed to have been sanguine about the prospect of Hitler overruning Western Europe?

    Where Tomasky and Kauffman agree, of course, is that the present-day GOP and the conservative movement are precisely 180 degrees away from the non-interventionism of the Anti-Imperialist League and the other conservative stalwarts who populate Kauffman’s story. As Tomasky puts it:

    The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.

    I once thought that the Republican Party could be the anti-war party. During the 90s Republicans in Congress opposed the Clinton administration’s military adventures, and some even talked in ways that suggested we could become a normal country again rather than a globe-straddling colossus. I even remember a New Republic cover in the late 90s asserting that the parties had switched places: the Republicans were now the doves and the Democrats the hawks (to the liberal hawks of TNR this was a welcome development). But, in any event, we’ve all seen how that turned out.

    For the foreseeable future, whatever opposition to a policy of US global hegemony there’s likely to be will largely come from the Left. Paleocon isolationist-types make up a miniscule part of the conservative movement and the GOP coalition, as Ron Paul’s candidacy amply demonstrated. We can talk about the betrayal of “true conservatism” till the cows come home, but conservatism–like any political perspective–is as conservatism does. To moan about the loss of true conservatism is like Marxists complaining that “real” socialism hasn’t been tried yet.

    P.S. I reviewed Kauffman’s last book here.

  • Marty and Wright

    One noteworthy fact mentioned in this Nicholas Kristof column on the Obama/Jeremiah Wright brouhaha is that, apparently, noted religious historian and veritable dean of American mainline Lutheranism Martin Marty is a longtime associate of Wright’s:

    Many well-meaning Americans perceive Mr. Wright as fundamentally a hate-monger who preaches antagonism toward whites. But those who know his church say that is an unrecognizable caricature: He is a complex figure and sometimes a reckless speaker, but one of his central messages is not anti-white hostility but black self-reliance.

    “The big thing for Wright is hope,” said Martin Marty, one of America’s foremost theologians, who has known the Rev. Wright for 35 years and attended many of his services. “You hear ‘hope, hope, hope.’ Lots of ordinary people are there, and they’re there not to blast the whites. They’re there to get hope.”

    Professor Marty said that as a white person, he sticks out in the largely black congregation but is always greeted with warmth and hospitality. “It’s not anti-white,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who’s white who walks out of there not feeling affirmed.”

  • Why resurrection?

    Slate has a pretty decent article on why resurrection, rather than the immortality of the soul, is the key Christian belief about life after death. Though I do sometimes think these two notions are needlessly set in opposition. It seems to me that the insistence of bodily resurrection qualifies a too spiritualistic idea of human life, but on the other hand, the NT, Paul in particular, is keen to qualify a too physicalistic notion of resurrection.

  • Bacevich on Obama

    Andrew Bacevich offers a cold-blooded argument for an Obama presidency. The key point is that electing Obama will serve as a repudiation of the Iraq war and, to a lesser extent, the imperial trajectory of which it’s a key part. This, Bacevich thinks, could set the stage for a revival of “genuine conservatism,” which he identifies with restraint at home and prudence abroad.

    The question, though, is how many present-day “conservatives” actually identify with Bacevich’s version of conservatism?

  • The progress delusion

    It’s become commonplace to observe that atheism can display many of the same traits as the religions it criticzes, but British political thinker John Gray is a master of exploring the quasi-religious themes in the myth-making of secular modernity, something he’s done for everything from communism, to global capitalism, to human uniqueness, to the idea of progress itself. Here he takes on the “new atheists” (via The Topmost Apple).

  • Environmentalism for the rest of us

    I meant to link to this piece from Orion magazine earlier (via Russell I think). It’s all about cultivating an environmentalism that can appeal to working class people (specifically white ones in this case), not just by appealing to their interests, but by understanding and sympathizing with their culture.

    It’s no secret that much of the explicit appeal of American-style conservatism to working class voters has been made by bashing the “liberal elites” who disdain working class culture and values. And it works because in a lot of cases it’s true. I know that I embraced conservatism to some extent because being a kid from a working-class background I found several of the upper-class liberals I encountered in grad school to be insufferable snobs. (I still find this to be the case sometimes, however much my “conservatism” has mutated since then.)

  • What I did on my winter vacation

    I wanted to say something about my trip to Germany. I stayed in Berlin, in what was formerly part of East Berlin, a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg. Under communism it was a locus for dissidents and artists but is now almost indistinguishable from trendy yuppie neighborhoods in DC or about a dozen other cities I could think of. My college buddy Patrick has been working as a reporter over there for about 7 years, so he hosted me and gave me the grand tour.

    Berlin’s a fascinating city for reasons almost too obvious to mention, with visible remnants of the imperial, Nazi, and Cold War eras intermingling alongside the modern post-1989 Berlin. Not far from the Reichstag there’s a sparkling new complex of ultra-contemporary glass and metal government buildings that spans the eastern and western parts of the city, symbolizing reunification and transparency in government. And capitalism has sprung up with a vengeance in what used to be the heart of socialist East Berlin; Communist-era apartment buildings house trendy shops and restaurants.

    I spent my days on long meandering walks through the city, visiting churches and museums, gawking at Stalinist-era architecture on “Karl Marx Allee,” checking out the remnants of the Berlin Wall, eating a lot of surprisingly good Italian food, visiting the graves of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hegel, and just trying to soak up the atmosphere. The nights were spent hanging out with Patrick and his motley assortment of ex-pat reporter friends (mostly Brits as it happens) and partaking liberally of the many fine beers Germany has to offer.

    On my second to last day there Patrick and I took a day trip to Wittenberg (or Lutherstadt Wittenberg, to use the official name). Unlike Berlin, which has relatively few traces of the pre-modern era, downtown Wittenberg still looks like a medieval village with its windy cobblestone streets lined with shops and presided over by the Castle hurch. That’s where Luther nailed up the 95 theses (now immortalized in bronze on the church door) and where he and Philipp Melancthon are buried. We also saw St. Mary’s, the parish church where Luther preached and where the first Protestant service was held, and which is still, I’m happy to say, a functioning parish. See pics here. We then spent some time at the house Luther and Katie lived in, a former monastery, which now houses the world’s largest Reformation museum, containing neat Reformation-era artifacts like the robe Luther preached in and a copy of an indulgence.

    I’ve been reading Alister McGrath’s recent book on Protestantism, and the differences he discusses between the iconoclastic Reformed protestants and the Lutherans are well-illustrated by Wittenberg. St. Mary’s church, far from being whitewashed and bereft of images like so many other Protestant churches were, still looks like a medieval church in a lot of ways. There is a beautiful altarpiece by Lucas Cranach illustrating the principles of the Lutheran reformation as well as other highly pictoral and symbolic art around the inside of the church. McGrath suggests that Reformed Christians might have felt the nead to “cleanse” the churches of their imagery not only because of a rigorist reading of the second commandment, but to break decisively with the catholic past. However, he says, the human urge and need to use images to depict the transcendent was too strong to be suppressed permanently. Luther seems to have recognized this with his affirmation of religious art and music as both catechetical tools and means for praising God.

    The last six months have definitely been a spritual dry spell for me. Pracitces of daily devotion have gone out the window, I’ve missed church more times than I’d care to admit, and there have been at least one or two times when I’d seriously considered hanging up the whole business. But I did feel a connection being there at the birthplace of Protestantism, similar to what I’d felt at the catacombs in Rome a couple of years ago: a sense of being a link in a chain stretching back centuries. I’m not sure just feeling like part of a tradition is sufficient for the life of faith, but it’s something. And Luther himself was no stranger to doubt, after all.

    Anyway, the best part of the whole trip, really, was just getting to spend a lot of time hanging out with an old friend, doing the things we used to do in college: talk about love and relationships, argue about politics, and joke around. Most of my longtime friends are scattered to the four winds these days and quality time is hard to come by. I’ve moved around a lot over the last 10 years and have found, unsurprisingly, that it can get really tough to maintain those close friendships. In college in particular you spend a lot of time with your friends, an experience it’s hard to replicate in the “real world.” (I’ve even heard it suggested that the reason people look back so fondly on college is because it’s the closest most of us come to the experience of living in primate packs, which is likely the kind of social environment we evolved in.) So it was nice to relive it a little bit, even if we’re all a bit older and wrinklier than we were then.

  • The speech

    I haven’t read much of the commentary, but I thought this Obama speech was pretty darn brilliant. Not only did he convincingly refute the worries that he was too close to his fiery and eccentric pastor, he wove the issue into a broader narrative about race, resentment, and injustice in America. Not only that, but Obama gave the best articulation I’ve seen yet of how his “unity” theme flows into his policy positions: we can overcome what divides us precisely by dedicating ourselves to a vision of the common good, a vision oriented around rectifying those injustices which give rise to division and resentment in the first place.

    This isn’t to say I buy all of Obama’s policy prescriptions, but he’s shown that he can tell a compelling story about them and how they fit into his larger vision. And can you imagine any other major politician in the US giving a speech this honest and reflective? Obama continues to sound like a real person and not a poll-tested automaton (or at least less so than most other pols), which, to me, is a big part of his appeal.