A Thinking Reed

Month: August 2010

  • Social justice and Christianity are inseparable

    I’ve honestly not paid much attention to Glenn Beck–I’ve never even seen a clip of his show, and most of what I know about him comes from blogs and other media reports. This past weekend’s “Beckfest” on the Mall, though, significantly raised his profile. It’s even being suggested that he’s now the head of a new religious movement.

    It seems that one of Beck’s signature themes is that Christians should have nothing to do with “social justice”–apparently he even told his viewers to leave their churches(!) if their pastors advocated social justice. Social justice has long been a bogey of the political Right–in the view of many conservatives it stands for an attempt to engineer socio-economic outcomes rather than leaving those outcomes to the workings of the free market. Libertarian thinker F. A. Hayek even claimed to find the phrase “social justice” vacuous.

    The inconvenient fact, though, is that Christianity is inseparable from the quest for social justice. We could define social justice, in a rough and ready way, as social institutions oriented toward the common good and the flourishing of all people. The key point here is the attention to institutions. “Changes of heart” where people become more generous, loving, etc. are perhaps a necessary but not a sufficient condition for social justice. The structures of society (e.g., law, economy, or government) result from human decisions, and when they are unjust, humans are responsible for changing them. The idea of individual improvement divorced from efforts at social reform is a peculiarly American heresy.

    This is not some fringe, lefty view of the matter. Everwhere Christianity has garnered significant influence, that influence has spilled over into attempts to reform social institutions (for both good and ill, it should be admitted–viz. prohibition). Christianity has always been a significant impetus for social reform, including playing a role the creation of a welfare and regulatory state to provide a safety net and rein in the excesses of the market.

    In contrast to the majority Christian tradition, the knee-jerk vulgar libertarianism of Beck seems to oppose any efforts on the part of the government to temper the workings of the market to ensure, for instance, that no one goes without basic necessities of life or the goods they need to flourish as human persons (goods like health care, education, and a clean and healthy environment). But mainstream Christian social thought doesn’t recognize an absolute “right” to unlimited accumulation of private property severed from an orientation to the common good, and its ideal is not a government that is studiously “neutral” with respect to the outcomes of markets or other social structures. For instance, as I’ve pointed out before, the general consensus of the tradition has been that the poor are entitled, by right, to the excess wealth of the rich, so long as they lack basic necessities.

    Justice, it has been said, is simply the social form of love. Clearly there’s room for reasonable disagreement about what the best means are for reforming social institutions to bring about greater justice. But it has to be said: the idea of a totally hands-off government indifferent to institutional outcomes is, at best, a minority position within Christian social thought.

  • History’s greatest monster strikes again

    Is there no end to his evil?

    Aijalon Mahli Gomes, the American held in North Korea since January, reunited with his family here Friday after flying in with former President Jimmy Carter.

    A day after Mr. Carter secured his release in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, Mr. Gomes stepped off a private plane at Logan International Airport at about 2 p.m. and was immediately surrounded by more than a dozen relatives who enveloped him in a group hug.

    Neither Mr. Gomes nor Mr. Carter spoke with reporters upon arriving, and it was unclear if or when either man would share details of Mr. Gomes’s detainment and release. Mr. Gomes, 31, quickly left the airport with his family, but in a statement, the family thanked Mr. Carter and others involved in his release and asked for privacy.

  • Friday Metal: Irish folk edition

    The traditional Irish folk song “Whiskey in the Jar” as performed by…

    The Chieftans: The Dubliners:

    Thin Lizzy:

    and Metallica:

  • Guest in the House wrap-up

    Readers may have noticed that my posts on Williamson’s book haven’t been very critical. That’s in part because I think he’s right about a lot of things. But it has more to do with the fact that I was mainly trying to get clear in my own mind about what he’s saying.

    I think a large part of the value I got out of reading this book is analogous to what I got from reading Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is last year. (See post here, here, here, and here.) Just as I was familiar with the concerns raised by feminists about traditional theology, I was aware, in a general sort of way, that anti-Judaism was part of the baggage of the church. But I had never thought about its pervasive effect on theology and what it would take to fix it in any deep or systematic way. And just as I came away from Johnson’s book convinced that incorporating feminist insights and addressing feminist concerns was a critical task for theology (even as I didn’t necessarily agree with all of Johnson’s specific positions), Williamson has convinced me that the same is true for Christianity’s legacy of anti-Judaism.

  • Williamson on Christology

    A question that naturally arises for any Christian theology that attempts to recognize the ongoing reality of Jewish faith and life is What about Jesus? That is, do Christians need to sacrifice, or at least modify, their convictions about the uniqueness and salvific importance of Jesus in order to avoid supersessionism?

    In A Guest in the House of Israel, Clark Williamson makes a number of critical comments about both traditional and modern Christologies. Traditional Christology tended to emphasize Christ’s divinity to the exclusion of his humanity, despite official dogmatic statements to the contrary. It was never able to provide a metaphysically satisfactory account of the “two natures.” Inevitably, this neglect of Jesus’ humanity resulted in downplaying his Jewishness. Moreover, much traditional Christology, he contends, describes Jesus as acting in such a way as to make it possible for God to welcome us back into fellowship, whereas for the Reformation, “[t]ransformation of life is the result of God’s gracious gift, not its condition” (p. 172).

    Modern Christologies don’t always fare much better in his view. Instead of grounding the uniqueness of Christ in his metaphysical nature, they ground it in his “empirical-historical” character as supposedly revealed by modern scholarship. While they have, commendably, recovered an awareness of the genuine humanity of Jesus, they try to ground their christological convictions in the supposedly unique (but ultimately unverifiable) character of the “empirical-historical” Jesus. Williamson finds this pattern in Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Harnack–Jesus can save us from “authoritarian religion” (usually identified with Judaism) because of his perfect faith or “God-consciousness.” “In modern critical-historical Christologies, the only way to establish the uniqueness of Jesus is to contrast him with his context; he is unique precisely to the extent that he is differentiated from and opposed to Jews and Judaism” (p. 174).

    “A post-Holocaust Christology,” Williamson writes, “will make it clear that to encounter Jesus Christ is to encounter the God of Israel, maker and redeemer of heaven and earth” (p. 188). Christology is not based on an “appeal to the empirical-historical Jesus” (though historical scholarship can provide a corrective to defective Christologies). When it is, Christians inevitably end up projecting onto the “historical” Jesus their own concerns and values (thus we get the feminist Jesus, the Marxist Jesus, etc.). But Jesus, Williamson insists, is not a norm, but a savior:

    In bringing us to face the decision whether we will understand ourselves in any ultimate sense in terms of and only in terms of the love of God graciously offered to us and in terms of the command of God that we love God and the neighbor, Jesus Christ offers us salvation and is properly spoken of as our savior. (p. 191)

    What we need to be aware of, however, is that Jesus points beyond himself to God the Father. We need to consistently “monotheize” our Christology, which, Williamson says, is what the doctrine of the Trinity is all about. The Trinity safeguards the oneness of God by maintaining that it was the God of Israel who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Jesus is the medium through which we are encountered by the singular promise and command of God.

    To believe in Jesus Christ is to confess that it is through Jesus Christ as witnessed to in the church that we are brought to understand ourselves in terms of the love of God freely offered to us, as accepted and justified, and in terms of the command of God that we love God and our neighbors in turn, called to a new and radically transformed life. (p. 192)

    Drawing on the thought of Paul Tillich, H. R. Niebuhr, and Schubert Ogden, Williamson warns against “absolutizing” the person of Jesus, which is a form of idolatry. Jesus is the medium of revelation, but not the revelation itself (see pp. 188-190). When we encounter the crucified and risen Lord in the church’s life and proclamation, we are presented anew with God’s promise and command–the promise of unconditional love and the command to love God and the neighbor. Jesus Christ is the gift given from within the Israel of God that we (Gentiles) might know the God of Israel. The work of Christ, so to speak, is to “re-present” God’s promise and command to us and to bring us face to face with that promise and command (see p. 190).

    Some might worry that Williamson’s Christology is “gnostic”–that is, that the role of Christ is that of a revealer of a truth (God’s love and command) that could, theoretically, be known by other means. In fact, he holds that it has been known by other means, namely through Israel’s relationship with God. Williamson even goes to far as to say that “salvation…at least in part, is authentic self-understanding” (p. 231), and “[o]ur salvation does not ‘become possible’ in Christ–a statement that the New Testament nowhere affirms–but in him what was previously possible and actual in the history of Israel ‘becomes manifest’” (p. 162).

    What Williamson would say in reply, I think, is that a Christology in which Christ functions to “make possible” our salvation sets limits on God’s grace. If we say that Jesus Christ as a condition apart from which God is not (or cannot be) gracious, then we are promoting a form of works-righteousness. “If we fail to remember that all christological and soteriological have God as their subject–God is the author of our salvation–we will render Christ into a limit on the grace of God and claim that apart from Christ there is no saving knowledge of God” (p. 198). In his view, the grace revealed in Jesus is the same grace that was and is present in the life of Israel.

  • Speak rightly of God

    I have one or two more posts on Williamson’s Guest in the House of Israel in the works, but if you’re interested in what I’ve been writing about so far you might want to check out this article–Speak Rightly of God: Clark M. Williamson as a Church Theologian–which provides an overview of his work. I haven’t read Wiliamson’s Way of Blessing, Way of Life, which is his attempt at a more systematic Christian theology, but I hope to get my hands on a copy at some point.

  • Israel and the church: co-witnesses to the love and kingdom of God

    I’m not going to blog exhaustively about the remaining chapters in Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel, where he applies the insights of a post-Holocaust theology to various topics (covenant, scripture, Christology, doctrine of God) with interesting results. What I thought I’d do instead is take a look at one area–the doctrine of the church–to see how his approach plays out. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Williamson is explicitly doing theology in the context of and for the church.

    The problem with traditional thinking about the church, Williamson says, is that it has been deformed by the insistence that the church replaces Israel as the people of God:

    What must first be taken into account in a post-Holocaust church theology is the underside of Christian teaching on the church, how the marks of the church were systematically distorted by the anti-Jewish, supersessionist connotations with which they were endowed. (p. 233)

    In its traditional understanding of the church as the “ark of salvation,” Christian theology has correspondingly downgraded the status of Judaism. “The more universalistic the doctrine of the church became, the more anti-Jewish it was” (p. 235). The idea of the church as the replacement people, the new Israel, was a popular theme among the church fathers. Later, Reformers such as Luther projected their criticisms of medieval Catholicism back onto 1st-century Judaism, a trend continued into the modern era by both “liberal” and “orthodox” theologians.

    In light of this, Williamson says, the Jewish “no” to the church’s claims is “a proper and faithful response to the church’s distortion of the gospel”:

    The Jewish “no” is quite real, but it was a “no” to a displacement ideology of the covenant; a “no” to a spiritualized and dehistoricized understanding of redemption emptied of its this-worldly promises of the end of oppression, war, and injustice; and a “no” to the claim that salvation was now the property of Gentiles and accessible to Jews only on condition that they turn their backs on the God of the Exodus and Sinai. (p. 243)

    Instead of seeing itself as the exclusive ark of salvation or the replacement people, the church should learn to “de-center” itself. It needs to move away from “ecclesio”-centrism and toward theo-centrism:

    The church needs to see that its reality can only appropriately be understood and stated in a way that takes the church out of the center of the picture and in place of itself sees there, instead, God, Christ, the neighbor, and God’s promise of what is to come. (p. 246)

    Accompanying the church’s distorted understanding of its mission is the relativization of the Kingdom of God. Since the church saw itself as the replacement people, it could see itself as the fulfillment of God’s promises. “Any sense of disappointment on God’s part, at having wanted the kingdom of God and having gotten the church instead, was missing” (p. 252). As the church gained more temporal power, it became natural to view the extension of that influence as the kingdom of God coming in fullness. This conflation of the church with the kingdom eclipses the sense of anticipation or expectation of God’s hoped-for kingdom where death, suffering, and sorrow are brought to an end. “With a loss of the sense of contrast between the present realities of life and the hoped-for kingdom of God, the church was free to aggrandize itself at the expense of Judaism and the Jewish people” (p. 254).

    Williamson proposes that the purpose of the church

    is to make known in the world the promise and command, the call and claim, of the God of Israel, to spread abroad the love of God and of the neighbor. It is to do this through words and deeds, neither words alone nor deeds uninterrupted by words, but both. Words separated from deeds are empty; deeds separated from words are blind. The mission of the church is one that it shares with the people Israel, not one that it is to take to the people Israel. Its mission is its call from God to bear witness before the world of the promise and command, the grace and task, of God. This mission is itself a gracious gift to the church from the God of Israel, as Israel’s mission of being “a light to the Gentiles” a gracious gift to Israel from the God of Israel. The relationship of the church to the Jewish people today is based on the fact that both have been graciously and irrevocably called and claimed by God. Hence, the church has no conversionary mission to the Israel of God. Its mission to the people Israel is one of service (diakonia), not one of proclamation (kerygma). Its service may be critical; there may be times when Christians will want to call Jews back to faithfulness to the God of Israel, but its service is never to call Jews to convert from the God of Israel. Jews, too, may serve the church critically by reminding it of what it is all too prone to forget, that it is called and claimed by the God of Israel. (p. 250)

    He emphasizes that “Christian mission is a shared mission, one in which both the church and synagogue are called to be witnesses of the God of Israel before the world and each other” (p. 251).

    Recovering this shared mission, along with a sense of eschatological expectation, will allow the church to recognize that it is not the final form of the people of God. Williamson envisions a “future changed relationship between the church and the Jewish people…when the first schism within the people of God will be overcome, when both church and synagogue will look different from the way they do now, when the church’s days of wandering in the wilderness of exclusivist anti-Judaism finally come to an end and we all enter into God’s promise to the children of Abraham” (p. 265).

  • The Crusades, Fox News edition

    This would seem to tell you all you really need to know about Rodney Stark’s God’s Batallions: The Case for the Crusades:

    Clearly this is not the politically correct version of the Crusades, and that is fine: there is little that was politically correct about the Crusades in the first place. The difficulty I have with Stark’s account is not that it is controversial and even confrontational, but that his conclusions are often grounded in outdated historical sources—many of the same sources responsible for creating the portrayal of backward, barbaric Muslims in the first place.

    Stark concedes that his book is not based on his own exploration of the primary sources. He writes: “Many superb historians have devoted their careers to studying aspects of the Crusades. I am not one of them.” Instead, he describes himself a synthesizer of existing research. The curious thing is that much of the research he uses to refute the historical accounts of the past generation is itself over 30 years old. Does God’s Battalions, then, prove that the accounts of contemporary historians are wrong, or does it merely revisit and resurrect the scholarly accounts that gave rise to contemporary Crusades historiography in the first place?

    If you’re writing as a popularizer or a synthesizer, you’re conceding that you don’t have first-hand expertise in the subject matter. All the more important, then, to rely on state-of-the-art scholarship. Unless, that is, your goal is to grind a particular ideological axe.

  • By what authority?

    After surveying the issue of anti-Judaism in Christian theology, Clark Williamson proposes some criteria for a post-Holocaust theology:

    – Beware of unchanged “pre-Shoah” theological statements (i.e., we need to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to traditional formulations).

    – Do theology in conversation with Jews.

    – Say nothing that could not be said “in the presence of the burning children” (e.g., theological statements that imply that God willed–or permitted–the Holocaust to happen).

    – Stress discipleship (i.e., faith as a “Way of life).

    But if post-Holocaust/Shoah theology is to be a genuinely Christian theology, it also needs a Christian-specific norm against which it can be tested. What is the authority by which we could be justified in undertaking a reconstruction of traditional theology?

    Williamson rejects two contrasting models of authority. The first looks to the past, to some Golden Age of the church, as a perfected ideal against which to measure all subsequent theology and church life. Williamson identifies this with a “Roman” model of authority and quotes the early church historian Robert Wilken: “There never was a Golden Age when the church was whole, perfect, pure–virginal. The faith was not purer, the Christians were not braver, the church was not whole and undivided” (A Guest in the House of Israel, p. 16).

    The second model takes an opposite approach; it views authority as residing in present needs and experiences. The problem with this view is that there is no external criteria or standpoint for critically assessing theological reconstruction authorized by present-day needs. The so-called German Christians in Nazi Germany are an example of how badly wrong theology can go when it isn’t tied to such a criteria.

    Williamson argues instead that we can find the kind of norm we need by looking to the tradition itself–and its long history of self-criticism and reinterpretation. He calls this “canonical criticism”: “It stresses that at whatever historical juncture we encounter the biblical community of faith, we find it reinterpreting its faith” (p. 21).

    He identifies three “hermeneutical principles” that Israel used to reinterpret its faith:

    – a monotheizing principle: the struggle against and within polytheistic context to affirm God’s oneness (shades of H. R. Niebuhr’s “radical monotheism);

    – a prophetic principle: the call to widen the circle of moral concern (God is the God of all); and

    – a constitutive principle: the emphasis on God’s particular love for us (the community of faith).

    Williamson proposes that these three principles or emphases can be combined into a single “gospel norm” for Christian faith:

    The good news is that God is the God of a singular promise and a singular command: the promise is that God’s love is freely, graciously, offered to each and all, and the command is the twofold requirement that we are to love God with our whole selves and to love and do justice to our neighbors as ourselves. (p. 22)

    This is a Christian norm because “we find our sources of it and access to it in the testified-to Jesus and Paul” (p. 22). And because “the process of interpretation and reinterpretation did not cease in the Apostolic Age but continues and will continue throughout the history of the church” and “it is appropriate to interpret the tradition (including the canon) in the way in which it interpreted itself,” this gospel-statement can be a “standard of appropriateness in the light of which all interpretations of the Christian faith can be critically scrutinized” (p. 23).

    Williamson calls this norm of appropriateness “an ellipse with two foci” because it holds together God’s promise and God’s command. The promise is that God’s love is “radically free” and “unconditional,” but it also empowers us to do justice. Lose the radical nature of grace and you have works-righteousness; lose the command to love and to do justice and you have “cheap grace.”

    Too often, Christians have interpreted Judaism as promoting salvation by works, but Jews see God’s liberation and election of the people of Israel and the giving of the Torah as acts of radical grace. Living according to the pattern laid out by the Torah is a response to God’s love, empowered by liberating grace. (Just as for Christians, faith without works is dead.) Conversely, Christians historically have fallen into a form of works-righteousness when they set conditions on God’s grace. For example, saying that outside the church there is not salvation, or that only those who consciously accept Jesus as their savior can be saved.

    What this gospel-norm provides, according to Williamson, is a means of critiquing Christian exclusivism and anti-Judaism. Traditional doctrines of covenant, scriptural authority, Christology, God, and the church can all be scrutinized in light of the gospel norm. If, for example, they set conditions on God’s grace or require us to narrow the scope of neighbor-love, they should be modified or rejected. The bulk of the rest of Williamson’s book is an undertaking in just this direction.

  • What is Christian anti-Judaism?

    Brandon points out in a comment to this post that I haven’t really defined what Williamson means by “anti-Judaism.” So here goes. First, it’s distinguishable from, though obviously related to, anti-Semitism. Anti-Judaism refers more broadly to the notion that Christianity is superior to, completes, and/or replaces Judaism as an ongoing religious enterprise. Williamson’s argument is that Christian doctrine and practice have been shaped, in pretty fundamental ways, by this binary view of Christianity: good/Judaism: bad.

    Here are some quotes to fill out the details:

    As Rosemary Ruether analyzes the anti-Jewish ideology of the church, it turns upon two major themes: rejection/election and inferiority/superiority. According to the first, in rejecting Jesus Christ the Jews are rejected by God, and in accepting Jesus Christ the Gentiles are elected. The price of the election of the Gentiles is the rejection of the Jews. Gentile believers displace them in the economy of salvation and in God’s favor. This motif pays a lot of attention to the “two peoples” allegory, the elder/younger brother stories in the Bible, and the claim that Jewish history is a “trail of crimes” culminating in deicide. According to the second theme, everything about Jewish faith and life is inferior to Christian faith and life, which is, in all respects, better. Christian ethics, worship, and biblical interpretation improve upon Jewish “law,” worship, and exegesis. The Christian way of doing things “fulfills” biblical promises, which Jews, being blind to the meaning of their own scriptures, misunderstand. Only Christians can rightly interpret the Hebrew Bible, which they make over into an “Old Testament.” Jews fail to recognize that their covenant has been superseded and continue to presume patently invalid modes of commitment to it. (Guest in the House of Israel, pp. 4-5)

    He continues:

    David P. Efroymson’s somewhat different analysis looks upon anti-Judaism as a double-edged model, a model of and a model for. First, it is a model of Judaism, on which Judaism is a system and Jews a people “rejected by God, unfaithful to God, opposed to Christianity, and caught up in the crimes appropriate to their carnality, hardness, blindness, and vetustas [obdurate commitment to what is past and gone, oldness].” Jews are a people of oldness, Judaism a religion of oldness. On the same model, Christians, by contrast, are “a people and a system of newness, of fidelity, of spirituality, of moral vigor, and of universality.” At the same time, anti Judaism is a model for how Christians are to be Christians. It is [quoting Elfroymson]

    a model for action, for acting “ethically,” for praying or worshiping “spiritually,” for reading the Bible accurately–all in specific and clearly focused distinction from the Jewish way of acting, praying, and of reading the Bible.

    If we ask what Christianity is, the anti-Jewish answer is: everything new, good, spiritual, and universal that the old, bad, carnal, and ethnocentric Jews can never be. (p. 5)

    This isn’t just being critical of Judaism, it’s defining essential features of Christianity in terms of its opposition to Judaism. As Williamson says:

    Every Christian doctrine can be and was interpreted through the lens of this anti-Jewish hermeneutic. God is the God who displaces Jews and replaces them with Christians. Christ is the mediator on behalf of Christians who cuts a displacement deal with God. The church is the replacement people who displace Jews in the covenant. The covenant is a new covenant, replacing the old. The scriptures and their interpretation warrant these understandings. (p. 5)

    Obviously, Williamson doesn’t think that Christianity is irredeemably anti-Jewish (he’s a Christian theologian, after all). What he’s contending is that anti-Judaism has been a pervasive influence on Christian teaching and practice for the better part of its history. And the result has been, directly, a distorted view of what Judaism is (Williamson points out that Judaism is just as capable of talking about God’s grace as Christianity is, for instance), and, indirectly, centuries of Christian persecution of Jews.