A Thinking Reed

Month: August 2011

  • The Christian politics of Mark O. Hatfield

    Former senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon passed away this week at the age of 89. He was one of the last of the liberal Republicans–someone who bucked his party on many issues.

    But Hatfield wasn’t simply a liberal Republican in the Nelson Rockefeller mold. He was a devout evangelical Christian, a virtual pacifist, and a “seamless garment” pro-lifer who opposed abortion and capital punishment.

    Hatfield played an important role in the rise of the nascent evangelical Left in the ’70s. This article from Religion Dispatches describes his unique political outlook:

    Hatfield did not embody the evangelical left perfectly; he was, after all, an anti-New Deal fiscal conservative in the Republican Party. But he pursued its unorthodox agenda in most respects. He was an unambiguous social conservative on abortion, but against capital punishment. He was an anti-war environmentalist. His populist call for “genuine political, economic, and ecological self-determination” meant reducing “excessive concentration of power” everywhere—not only in the executive branch of government and labor unions, but also in big corporations and the military.

    At Reason magazine, Jesse Walker points out that Hatfield once expressed sympathy with the ultra-libertarianism of economist Murray Rothbard, even reading one of Rothbard’s articles into the Congressional Record. Hatfield was so admired on the Right and the Left that both George McGovern and Richard Nixon considered him as a potential running mate!

    Hatfield’s outlook seemed to be equal parts evangelical Christianity and New Left counterculturalism. I’m not sure what larger lessons should be drawn from this except to note that there were times when the boundaries between Left and Right seemed much more fluid then they are now, and the role of Christianity in U.S. politics was up for grabs. An alternate history where the most influential version of Christian politics was decentralist, anti-war, environmentalist, and consistently pro-life would certainly be an interesting one.

  • Is “Christocentrism” the proper alternative to “biblicism”?

    I’m against “biblicism” if by that we mean treating each and every passage of the Bible as equally inspired and authoritative. However, I’m not sure a “Christocentric” reading is a viable alternative if it means this:

    The Bible is about Jesus Christ, and the only way to read the Bible is read it from beginning to end to be about Jesus, and to read each passage as about Jesus Christ and to be unlocked only through the gospel about Jesus Christ.

    Two thoughts here. First, on a plain reading, every passage in the Bible just isn’t about Jesus, and trying to read it as if they were will probably result in bad readings. Second, such an approach seems to me to risk shortchanging the integrity of the Old Testament witness, ultimately re-inscribing a form of supersessionism.

    Now, perhaps there’s a way of re-stating this that avoids these problems. Jesus is, so Christians believe, the incarnate Word or Wisdom of God. So in that sense, it may be true to say that the Bible as a whole is about Christ–because the Bible is ultimately about God. Although, even this has to be qualified because I don’t think we can say that each and every passage in the Bible reflects the Wisdom of God. Some passages attribute qualities or actions to God that are unworthy of God as we have come to know him through the biblical witness.

    I would say that our Bible reading should be Christocentric in this sense: we believe that Jesus is the clearest expression of the nature and character of God. That means that this revelation should be the controlling image for how we read the Bible. When we come across a passage that seems to conflict with the divine nature as it has been disclosed in Jesus, we have to ask whether it is really a revelation of God, or a human projection. This is hardly a straightforward task, but some kind of “canon within a canon” does seem necessary if we’re going to avoid “flat” theories of biblical authority and inspiration (which I don’t think anyone consistently sticks to in practice anyway).

    This might seem like splitting hairs, but the difference is that this kind of “Christocentric” view would allow the biblical witness to speak in all its plurality, without trying to harmonize seemingly inconsistent passages by asserting that they’re “really” about Jesus. And yet Jesus remains the controlling image or icon of God for Christians–even while we recognize that the same Wisdom that was incarnate in Jesus was present to ancient Israel (and continues to be present in other traditions, including contemporary Judaism).

  • What mainliners can learn from evangelicals

    Mainliners can be awfully smug in their (our) attitude toward evangelicals. There is a certain “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other people” syndrome in the way mainliners view evangelicals. In some mainline churches I’ve been in, evangelicals are the perpetual “other” over against whom we define ourselves. We’re NOT conservative, NOT homophobic, NOT biblical literalists, etc.

    But in case you haven’t noticed, mainline churches aren’t doing all that great nowadays. And while evangelicalism certainly has its problems, mainliners would be foolish to think that there’s nothing they can learn from their evangelical co-religionists.

    This post from Frederick Schmidt highlights some things that evangelicals have but mainliners don’t, and I think it’s well worth considering:

    Evangelicals believe something. To name a few things: They believe in God, the Trinity, the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ, the Resurrection, and the authority of Scripture. These things define reality in a particular way for Evangelicals.

    […]

    Evangelicals are actively committed to what they believe. Both the Old and New Testaments connect what is known about God with living for God. The Book of Deuteronomy admonishes Israel to “Teach your children the Law and to do it.” The Epistle of James picks up on the same theme: “Faith without works is dead.” And Paul connects the facts of the faith with imperatives in his letters. To embrace truth, it must be lived.

    […]

    Evangelicals also think that thinking about what they believe is important. Stott and, before him, C.S. Lewis, gave their lives to the effort to be clear about what they believed and they engaged others in the effort. Being clear opened both of them to criticisms, of course, but nearly fifty years after his death Lewis is still widely read and continues to engage his readers in that conversation.

    As Schmidt points out, these things are “not unique to Evangelicalism [but] are as old Christianity itself—and present when and where it thrives.” I think we could quibble about the extent to which evangelicalism consistently manifests these qualities and the extent to which mainline churches lack them. But on the whole, the generalization strikes me as having a lot of truth to it.

    This is a drum I’ve beaten before. And there are no easy answers. For one thing, if mainline churches are committed to a critical approach to the Bible and church tradition (as I think they should be), it will always be harder for them to confidently say “This is what we believe.” But the alternative–watering down the faith to a vague, lowest common denominator–is just as bad. Somehow we have to learn to walk that tightrope of critical faithfulness.

  • Friday Metal: King’s X, “Ooh Song”

    I’ve become kind of obsessed with this band and have been methodically collecting their back catalogue. This is from their fourth, self-titled album, which came out in 1992.

  • God, hell, and the Euthyphro dilemma

    There’s a discussion over at Jesus Creed on a new book called Erasing Hell, which is, I take it, a response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins. I haven’t read either book, but the argument of Erasing Hell, as sketched by the author at Jesus Creed, calls for some comment. From the post:

    A central claim of [Erasing Hell authors] Chan and Sprinkle—which creates their foundation (and breathing room) for embracing the traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment—is the idea that whatever God chooses to do is, by definition, “right”. At the outset, the writers in defining the purpose of their book say,

    “This book is actually much more than a book on hell. It’s a book about embracing a God who isn’t always easy to understand, and whose ways are far beyond us; a God whose thoughts are much higher than our thoughts; a God who, as the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of all things, has the right to do, as the psalmist says, ‘whatever He pleases’ (Ps. 115:3). God has the right to do WHATEVER he pleases. If I’ve learned one thing from studying hell, it’s this last line. And whether or not you end up agreeing with everything I say about hell, you must agree with Psalm 115:3″ (p.17, emphasis theirs).

    Though the word “right” (which adds a moral element) does not appear in Psalm 115, this is a foundational idea at work in Erasing Hell. The writers fall back on this argument and use the language of God having the “right” to do whatever he wishes throughout the text, and from this argument they establish that, because God is supremely powerful and all-knowing, God has the moral authority to create a state of eternal conscious torment if he so desires.

    As noted in the post, this looks like a rather extreme example of the divine command theory of ethics. This view holds that right and wrong are dependent on the will of God. If God decides to torture people for eternity, then this is, by definition, the right thing to do. There are no “external” criteria by which we could judge such an action.

    I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t the view of mainstream Christian theology. The issue actually pre-dates Christianity and goes back to the famed dilemma proposed in Plato’s Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” The problem is that embracing the first horn of the dilemma seems to set up a standard of right and wrong which is independent of the divine, while the other makes right and wrong a matter of seemingly arbitrary choice. Christian theology has, I think wisely, tried to sidestep the dilemma by proposing that the nature of good flows from (or is identical with) the divine nature, thus making good neither independent of God nor simply a result of a choice that could’ve just as easily been otherwise.

    C.S. Lewis summarizes the traditional view in his essay “The Poison of Subjectivism” (found in the collection Christian Reflections):

    God neither obeys nor creates the moral law. The good is uncreated; it never could have been otherwise; it has in it no shadow of contingency; it lies, as Plato said, on the other side of existence. It is the Rita of the Hindus by which the gods themselves are divine, the Tao of the Chinese from which all realities proceed. But we, favoured beyond the wisest pagans, know what lies beyond existence, what admits no contingency, what lends divinity to all else, what is the ground of all existence, is not simply a law but also a begetting love, a love begotten, and the love which, being these two, is also imminent in all those who are caught up to share the unity of their self-caused life. God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

    Consequently, Christians can say that God is the supreme reality, but also that God is good. This isn’t to deny that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. Our apprehension of the good is always fragmentary and tainted by self-interest. But we do genuinely apprehend it. Just as there is a minority report in Christendom that holds that right is just whatever God happens to will, so there is a sub-tradition that holds that human reason is so damaged by the Fall that we are unable to perceive goodness. But again, the mainstream tradition has wisely steered a middle course, holding that human reason is capable of attaining to a genuine knowledge of good and evil. “Natural law” theory in its many variations is one expression of this basic conviction.

    This by itself doesn’t show that hell can’t exist. But it does call into question the strategy of defending the idea of hell by appealing to a God who is, in effect, beyond good and evil.

  • What does Oxford have to do with Jerusalem?

    I’m reading Keith Ward’s More than Matter? and found it interesting to learn that two of Ward’s teachers were the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer. Ryle was famous for characterizing Cartesian dualism as “the ghost in the machine,” and Ayer was the famed proponent of logical positivism. Ward says that he came to believe that neither Ryle’s quasi-behaviorist “ordinary language” philosophy nor Ayer’s logical positivism provided a satisfying explanation of the nature of the human person. (Or, by extension, the nature of reality more generally.) The book goes on to defend a version of idealism–the view, broadly speaking, that mind or spirit is the most fundamental reality upon which everything else depends.

    Here’s Ward discussing his move from atheism to Christianity and the celebrity culture surrounding the debates over the new atheism: