Looking forward to the new album from these guys next month. 2009’s Existence Is Futile was one of the best metal albums that came out that year.
Month: July 2011
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The witness of John Stott
I’ve been reading some of the remembrances of John Stott, the Church of England pastor and evangelical icon who passed away today at the age of 90. One of the most striking things is that Stott seems to be fondly remembered by nearly everyone across the spectrum of evangelicalism. He combined theological orthodoxy (even conservatism) with a passion for social justice and social action in a way that looks slightly odd from a U.S. perspective–where we tend to think that conservative evangelicalism goes hand-in-hand with right-wing politics. (He was also, by all accounts, a genuinely humble and gracious man.) R.I.P.
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New atheism as 19th-century positivism redux
This article puts its finger on one of the problems I’ve long had with the so-called new atheism:
[I]n its basic outlines [A.C.] Grayling’s humanism is that of the nineteenth-century positivists, who built a philosophy around their belief in the perfectability of human nature. For Grayling, and for the other New Atheists, reason doesn’t just answer questions about our origins and our ethics; it moves us toward that city on a hill where, [Grayling’s] The Good Book promises, “the best future might inhabit, and the true promise of humanity be realized at last.”
Meanwhile, this article published in the Nation a few months ago makes a similar point, and also notes how positivism can be yoked to a reactionary political agenda (such as Christopher Hitchens’ and Sam Harris’s embrace of the “war on terror” as an Enlightenment crusade against religion).
What’s striking about all this is that you still have, in the 21st century, people claiming with a straight face that science and reason are the royal roads to absolute truth and moral and political progress. At one time it had become something of a truism that the 20th century, with its world wars, revolutions, and genocide, had put paid to 19th-century optimism on behalf of capital-R Reason and capital-P Progress. And the gas chambers and the atomic bomb were thought to have demonstrated pretty definitively that scientific, technocratic reason could be neatly yoked to the most abominable moral and political goals imaginable.
Both religious and atheistic thought responded to this sense of disillusionment. Christian theology rediscovered its doctrines of human brokenness and original sin; atheism, in the form of existentialism and Freudianism, honed in on the irrational impulses and drives that actually govern much of our lives. Neither was much inclined any longer to speak blithely about the omni-competence of reason or the inevitability of progress. Moreover, both were willing to attend to sources of insight that fell outside of the scientific, narrowly construed. 20th century thought, across a wide swath of disciplines, came to see reason, understood solely as discursive or deductive thought, and empiricism, understood in the manner of logical positivists and their verifiability criterion, as only a part of how we experience and make sense of the world. By contrast, the neo-positivism of the new atheists looks downright old-fashioned.
I certainly don’t think Christians should despise the Enlightenment, as has now become fashionable in some theological circles. At the same time, the version of the Enlightenment embodied by positivism invariably ends in reductionism and scientism. This in turn produces a very narrow understanding of what “reason” is and a correspondingly constricted view of truth, morality, and human experience generally. Religion and humanism alike should oppose it.
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The Lord God made them all
Bertram of Minden, “Creation of the Animals,” from the Grabow altarpiece (1383)
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A word for Borders
If you care about books, you’ve probably heard that Borders is finally shutting its doors for good.
I’m so old I can remember when big national bookseller chains were villified for driving out small independent booksellers. Now these big national chains are being run out of business by Amazon and e-readers. One era’s Goliath is another’s David.
Anyway, I could never work up quite the same righteous ire against Borders and B&N that others could. Maybe that’s because where I grew up, there were no small, quirky independent booksellers. The best bookstore within a 50-mile radius was the Waldenbooks at the local mall.
So, the first time I visited a Barnes & Noble, I was pretty much in book heaven. As an undergrad studying philosophy in rural northwest Pennsylvania, I lusted after their selection of books–one that far outstripped any other bookstore I’d ever been in. Over the years, I’ve dropped a lot of dough at B&N and Borders and spent a lot of time browsing their shelves. Like most people, in recent years my book buying has shifted dramatically to online retailers like Amazon, so I can’t exactly lament what seems to be the inevitable. But there’s a part of me that’s defintely sorry to see them go.
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Macquarrie on hell and universalism
If heaven is fullness of being and the upper limit of human existence, hell may be taken as loss of being and the lower limit. Loss of being need not mean annihilation, but includes every declination from a genuinely personal existence and every divergence from the fulfillment of authentic potentialities for being. Thus hell, like the other eschatological ideas, can stand for a present phenomenon and can in varying degrees be experienced here and now. To talk of hell as a “punishment” is just as unsatisfactory as to talk of heaven as a “reward.” Hell is not some external or arbitrary punishment that gets assigned for sin, but is simply the working out of sin itself, as it destroys the distinctively personal being of the sinner.
Whether in fact anyone ever comes to the point of utterly losing his personal being, or of falling away altogether from the potentialities of such being, may be doubted. If this should happen, then we would be committed to a doctrine of “conditional immortality,” as we have already mentioned. This utter limit of hell would be annihilation, or at least the annihilation of the possibility of personal being. Since salvation is itself personal, and must therefore be freely accepted, God cannot impose it upon anyone, so we must at least leave open the possibility that this kind of annihilation might be the final destiny for some. Yet since we have refused to draw a sharp line between the “righteous” and the “wicked,” and since we have suggested that even for the man made righteous, heaven is not finally attained, but each heaven opens up new possibilities of perfection, so on the other side we seem compelled to say that the sinner never gets to the point of complete loss and so never gets beyond the reconciling activity of God. Needless to say, we utterly reject the idea of a hell where God everlastingly punishes the wicked, without hope of deliverance. Even earthly penologists are more enlightened nowadays. Rather we must believe that God will never cease from his quest for universal reconciliation, and we can firmly hope for his victory in this quest, though recognizing this victory can only come when at last there is free cooperation of every responsible creature.
–John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, Revised Edition, SCM Press: 1977, pp. 366-7.
One of the striking things about this passage is that, although it was written over 30 years ago, Macquarrie barely considers the so-called traditional doctrine of hell to be worth discussing (“Needless to say, we utterly reject…”). Despite all the brouhaha around Rob Bell’s recent book, it’s worth remembering that universalism in some form or another has been a live option in Christian theology for some time. And many of the giants of 20th-century theology (Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, Rahner, Von Balthasar, etc.) seem to have rejected hell, at least if we understand hell as “eternal, conscious torment.” (Did any major theologian of this era defend the traditional view?) This shift was no doubt partly because they all rejected biblical literalism and partly because of a certain moral revulsion toward the traditional view, even though none could be called theological liberals in any straightforward sense. And I would say Macquarrie belongs firmly in this camp too. The fact that Macquarrie dismisses the idea of hell as eternal punishment so readily also suggests that this had become something like a consensus, at least in certain theological circles, by the latter half of the 20th century.
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We’ve all got issues
I can get behind the idea that the long-term debt is an issue we need to address. What I don’t get is the urgency it’s attracted in our current political debate.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of any number of more pressing issues:
–Global warming
–Unemployment
–Global poverty
–Nuclear proliferationI leave adding to the list as an exercise for the reader.
I’m also pretty skeptical that conservative Republicans are actually that worried about the debt, considering they want to rule out tax increases (including, apparently, closing loopholes) as part of the solution. It’s almost as if what they really object to is domestic government spending that benefits non-rich people.
And from the President’s perspective, does he really think people are more likely to vote based on his plan for reducing the debt than on whether or not they have a job?
A Thinking Reed 