Been listening to Florida “neo-thrash” act Trivium’s new album Shogun. Pretty good stuff–in some ways a better Metallica album than Death Magnetic. 🙂
Here’s “Down From the Sky”:
Month: October 2008
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The sacrifice to end all sacrifices
Here’s a very thoughtful post on the Atonement from the fine blog Sub Ratione Dei. I wouldn’t call myself a “Girardian,” but I’ve definitely learned from the Girardian perspective, especially via James Alison‘s work. I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy of Mark Heim’s Saved from Sacrifice soon too.
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Disappearing act
Apparently there was some controversy about the remains of John Henry Newman. The Catholic Church wanted to exhume the remains of the soon-to-be-sainted cardinal (and famous convert from Anglicanism) and display them for veneration. But Newman had explicitly requested burial next to his longtime friend Father Ambrose St John, which is further complicated by the fact that many people think that Newman was gay and that he and Fr. Ambrose were in love (though probably celibate).
Whatever the truth, Cardinal Newman seems to have taken matters into his own hands by disappearing from the grave altogether!
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Don’t forget Prop 2!
A pre-Election Day reminder about Proposition 2 in California. This modest measure could not only make a dramatic difference to the lives of millions of animals, but establishing these protections in the largest state in the Union could have a dramatic ripple effect on animal welfare across the country.
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Tagged!
From Rick Ritchie – five people (living or dead) who have been a positive influence on your spiritual life. It’s kind of tricky question for a few reasons. For one, I don’t know that my spiritual life is anything to write home about. For another, I’m sure that what spiritual life I do have has been formed in large part by influences I’m not always consciously aware of (participating in the liturgy on a regular basis, for instance). But here goes:
1. C.S. Lewis: Probably my biggest theological influence at the end of the day. I’ve read plenty of theologians and philosophers who make tighter and more sophisticated arguments, and I don’t agree with Lewis on everything, but more than anyone else, his writing (both fiction and non-fiction) imparted to me a sense of what it would actually be like to inhabit a Christian universe.
2. Andrew Linzey: Helped show me that you could, and should, incorporate concern for animals and the rest of the non-human world into an orthodox, trinitarian theology. This has greatly enlarged my vision of what the gospel is.
3. Miguel de Unamuno: I don’t know that this Spanish Catholic existentialist philosopher is much read anymore, but his passionate case for the Kierkegaardian leap of faith (laid out in his Tragic Sense of Life and elsewhere) left a permanent mark on me. There are plenty of times when I find myself doubting the truth of Christianity or the existence of God, but Unamuno emphasized that when we can’t believe that it’s true, we can hope that it is, and try to live accordingly. Being a skeptical, ironic Christian is undoubtedly not ideal, but sometimes it’s the best I can manage.
4. I doubt he would even remember me, but the campus Lutheran minister when I was in grad school was extremely helpful to me when I was taking my first, tentative steps back toward church life and my first steps into Lutheranism period. He was very welcoming and also provided sound counsel during a personal crisis of sorts.
5. My wife. Probably the most significant influence on my life, period.I tag, should they wish to participate, Chris, Derek, Jennifer, Marvin, Christopher and anyone else interested in playing.
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Flex time
My pal Mary links to this article from Newsweek on “flexitarians” – folks who, for a variety of reasons, eat meat sparingly but without being full-bore vegetarians (or vegans).
I think this is all to the good. In particular, as veggie options become more widespread and palatable, people will recognize that you can eat well without eating meat.
Nevertheless, while I prefer the more irenic approach of the Humane Society, I’m still glad there are groups like PETA out there making the case that animals are subjects in their own right who deserve to be treated as such. Health and environmental concerns are completely legitimate reasons for cutting back on meat, but I think the more radical position merits a hearing too.
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More thoughts on omnipotence and creation
In the previous post I talked about Jay McDaniel’s proposal for a revised account of divine omnipotence and creation based on the suggestion of a primordial chaos that coexists with God, a chaos out of which God creates the world and which limits the divine ability to shape creation.
I agree with McDaniel about the need to re-think some traditional notions of divine omnipotence, and that the Old Testament is ambiguous in affirming creation ex nihilo, but I’m not persuaded to go all the way with him. First, for Christians at least, the prologue to John’s Gospel and other New Testament passages do seem to affirm creation ex nihilo, and this should carry significant weight.
Second, the idea of a primordial chaos co-existent with God throughout all time seems ill-justified. Is it more parsimonious to posit two uncreated realities than one? McDaniel suggests that there may have been a series of universes, contracting and expanding, as suggested by some astrophysicists, and that the chaos of energy events is the remnants of the previous cosmos, but why should there be any cosmos at all? This is the question at the base of the cosmological argument: why is there anything rather than nothing?
Christians should only let themselves be pushed to such a drastically revisionist stance if there are no better alternatives available. And I think there are better ways of dealing with the problem of theodicy available. One is, instead of positing a primordial chaos that limits God’s ability to shape creation, to think in terms of the possibilities that exist in the divine mind. This sea of possibility, if you will, is not an actually existing “stuff” alongside God, but is comprised by the concepts of all the possible worlds that could self-consistently exist.
To create, God can only choose to actualize a world that is, in fact, possible. And, as we saw in the discussion of Southgate’s book, there are reasons for thinking that complex life as we know it is only possible by means of a process that also involves suffering and frustration. So, what limits God is not the recalcitrance of some primordial stuff, but the very logical structure of reality, as expressed by the divine mind.
Further, rather than restricting divine power to the ability to “lure” by presenting possibilities (a notion of dubious coherence when applied to inorganic matter), it might make more sense to see God as intentionally choosing to limit the divine power in order to allow creatures a certain autonomy. This “kenotic” understanding of divine power emphasizes that God wants and chooses to allow creatures to live and develop according to their own divinely-given natures. In restricting the divine power to that of persuasion, the process understanding doesn’t seem to do justice to the biblical and Christian picture of God, which is that of, among other things, a sovereign creator.
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Creation and omnipotence: a process perspective
As a follow-up of sorts to my reading of Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation, I picked up Jay McDaniel’s Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life, which Southgate refers to a number of times in his book.
McDaniel is a process theologian who has also been influenced by feminist theology, as well as Zen Buddhism. His goal is to develop–as the subtitle suggests–a “biocentric” theology and ethic for what he calls a “postpatriarchal” Christianity.
Like Southgate, one of the issues that concerns McDaniel is the problem of animal suffering. However, McDaniel goes further in revising the concept of God than Southgate would. Along with several other process theologians, McDaniel questions the traditional notion of creation ex nihilo (or creation out of nothing).
Instead McDaniel suggests that, alongside God, there existed at the time of creation a “primordial chaos” out of which God forms patterns of order and complexity, ultimately giving rise to the world as we know it. The chaos has its own internal principle of energy and spontaneity, which also sets limits to what God can do in creating the world.
…for [process theologians], God did not create the world out of nothing. Rather he–or, better, she–created the world out of a chaos of energy events present at the beginning of our cosmic epoch. […] At that stage the chaos was within her as part of her body, and while it was devoid of order and novelty, it was nevertheless possessive of its own ability to actualize possibilities, its own creativity. By availing the chaos of possibilities for order and novelty, god gave birth to the universe within herself, and the birth process continues. (p. 36)*
Thus the world should be seen as at least partly independent of God and outside of strict divine control. Indeed, God’s power is conceived by McDaniel not as determining events unilaterally but as presenting possibilities that are creatively actualized (or not) by finite beings. Drawing on quantum theory he contends that, even at the subatomic level, “pulses of energy” may go in more than one possible direction and are not strictly predictable or determined. And as matter becomes more complex, and eventually gives rise to living beings, this principle of creativity and unpredictability becomes ever more pronounced.
This explains, according to McDaniel, why the creation proceeds along paths that seem inimical to the will of an all-loving God. God can creatively respond to what happens in creation and try to “lure” it along more life-giving paths, but cannot strictly determine what happens. Hence creation tends toward ever more complex forms of life, but also contains a great deal of apparently pointless suffering.
McDaniel argues that, even though it departs from tradition, his approach is justified because it takes God’s love, rather than power, as its starting point. While much traditional theology has understood God’s power as the ability to unilaterally determine events, many have had trouble reconciling this kind of power with the love that Christians attribute to God. If God is love, does it make sense to attribute a unilateral determining power to him, or do our notions of power need to be re-thought in light of the kind of self-giving love we see in Jesus?
More thoughts on this in the next post…
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*McDaniel writes, “I use the feminine pronoun purposefully, though I do not mean to imply that masculine language cannot also be helpful. Within contemporary Christian communities, different images can and should be used to indicate the all-loving God of Christian faith, female as well as male” (p. 36).
A Thinking Reed 