A Thinking Reed

Month: September 2011

  • Prong, “Whose Fist Is This Anyway?”

  • Libertarianism and the politics of human frailty

    Jim Henley, who’s long been one of my favorite bloggers, has been writing a really interesting series of posts touching on aspects of his defection from libertarianism toward a more liberal/social-democratic politics. In his most recent post, Jim wonders if libertarianism is “an inevitably temporary political outlook.” He notes that many people seem to “outgrow” libertarianism as they age or have kids, or when some other particular circumstance seems to call for deviation from the True Faith, even if they still call themselves libertarians (e.g., pro-war libertarians, pro-welfare-state libertarians). He goes on to admit that part of what moved him away from it was a realization of the concrete effects that some of the policies he’d formerly advocated–Social Security privatization in his case–would have on his family and families less well off than his once they seemed to enjoy some real chance of being enacted.

    I was never a “professional” or even semi-professional libertarian, but I did identify with libertarianism for much of my mid-20s. I read Nozick, Friedman, Sowell, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, etc., and even penned a handful of articles for some libertarian websites. I think that, like Jim, my disaffection was partly intellectual and partly personal. On the intellectual side, I came to see the logical endpoint of libertarianism as a society in which your status is ultimately determined by your ability to pay. In the anarcho-capitalist utopia, for example, people’s rights are supposed to be secured by competing private protection agencies, which presumably operate according to the profit motive. Consequently, anyone unable to pay their way is at the mercy of others. Conversely, the most compelling case for a robust government is precisely the protection of the interests of the weak, and a leveling of the playing field between the weak and the strong. Moreover, the intellectual foundations of rights-based libertarianism (Lockean views of property rights, a strong distinction between “positive” and “negative” freedom, etc.) revealed themselves to be much shakier than I thought.

    On the more personal side, I had to admit that most of the (modest) success I’ve enjoyed in life wouldn’t have been possible without the support of many of the public institutions that libertarians scorn. My family weathered the storms of Reaganomics partly through the benefit of public assistance; after that, my father was disabled by an accident at work, and our family survived through a combination of worker’s compensation and Social Security benefits; I went to public schools and public universities, partly with the assistance of government-guaranteed student loans and Pell grants. How could I consistently advocate the dismantling of these institutions that had made my life possible? A society without them would be meaner, less equal, and less just than one with them–or so I now believe.

    As I’ve gotten older and started a family, my political views have been more informed by what I like to think is a greater appreciation for human frailty. People are not, in general, rugged individualists, including those who think they are. Each one of us is just one accident or piece of bad luck away from becoming utterly dependent on others. The idea that you could tear down the institutions that we’ve built for collective support–rickety and ad hoc though they are–without causing a lot of human suffering is not remotely plausible. And the view that private institutions would spontaneously arise to take their place strikes me as naive.

    But at the same time, because of that very fragility, I’ve become more tolerant of human difference and diversity. I’m less convinced than ever that there’s one “right” way to live which can be prescribed for everybody.* As often as not, people are simply making the best they can of whatever hand nature/society/luck has dealt them. Parenting is a good example: there is no end of advice on how to raise the “perfect” kid (however you define that); but in practice, you end up just muddling through a great deal, hoping not to damge your kids too much in the process. Trying to impose a one-size-fits-all model onto human life is likely to do more damage than good. A welfare-liberalism that respects pluralism best approximates the politics appropriate to such a view.
    ———————————————————————–
    *This isn’t moral relativism, but rather an admission that there can be a variety of legitimate forms of life or “experiments in living,” to use J.S. Mill’s phrase.

  • Machine Head, “A Thousand Lies”

    This is from their epic 1994 debut “Burn My Eyes.” Their new album “Unto the Locust,” a follow-up to 2007’s excellent “The Blackening,” comes out next week. I’m probably looking forward to it more than any other metal release this year. (Well, maybe neck-and-neck with Anthrax and Mastodon.)

  • The story so far…

    In the eighth and final chapter of The God of Israel and Christian Theology, R. Kendall Soulen provides a helpful summary of the argument thus far, which I’m going to quote at length:

    The gospel is the story of the God of Israel’s victory in Jesus over powers that destroy. Just so, God’s victory in Jesus is the center but not the totality of Christian faith. Faith in the gospel presupposes the God of Israel’s antecedent purpose for creation, a purpose threatened by destructive powers but vindicated by God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

    Christians have almost universally assented to the truth of the previous paragraph. But, as we saw in Part One, they have commonly accounted for its truth by means of a construal of the Bible’s narrative unity that–paradoxically enough–renders God’s identity as the God of Israel and the center of the Hebrew Scriptures almost wholly indecisive for grasping God’s antecedent purpose for human creation. As an alternative to the standard construal, I have sketched in the previous chapters one way in which God’s identity as the God of Israel becomes decisive for grasping God’s antecedent purpose for creation. I have argued that God’s work as the Consummator of creation promises life and the fullness of life to creation and to the human family in and through earthly economies of difference and mutual dependence. In the context of God’s six-days’ blessing, God’s economy is embodied in the distinction and mutual relation of the natural world and the human family, of female and male, of parent and child, of one generation and the next. In the context of God’s crowning Sabbath blessing, God’s economy is irrevocably embodied in the carnal election of the Jewish people and in the consequent distinction between Jew and Gentile, between Israel and the nations. Furthermore, I have argued that God’s work as Consummator is oriented from the outset toward God’s eschatological shalom, where God intends to fulfill the economies of difference and reciprocity…in unsurpassable fashion to the mutual blessing of all in a reign of wholeness, righteousness, and peace. (pp. 156-7)

    In the next post I’ll look at how Soulen thinks the story of Jesus fits into this.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

  • Redemption for the sake of blessing

    If the great theme of the Bible is one of blessing, it can’t be denied that sin, or curse, and redemption is an important sub-theme. The God who is Consummator is also Redeemer and Deliverer. So how should this theme fit into the canonical narrative that Soulen is proposing as an alternative to the traditional one?

    Soulen notes that

    the primeval history (Gen 1-11) knows nothing of a single catastrophic fall that introduces a major turning point into the biblical story. On the contrary…the central theme of the primeval history and of Genesis as a whole is the continuity, resilience, and growth of God’s work as the Consummator of creation. Nevertheless, the creation sagas are nothing if not utterly unsentimental about the seriousness of human sin and dreadful weight of the divine curse. The creation sagas trace the human family’s readiness to receive God’s blessing through a series of social pairs: male and female (Gen 2-3), brother and brother (Gen 4), comrade and comrade (Gen 11). In each case, the result is distressingly negative. (p. 142)

    Seen in this light, Soulen understands sin to be the refusal to receive God’s blessing as mediated through the other. This can refer to the divine Other, as in Adam and Eve’s failure to trust God as the source of their fullness, or it can refer to the human other, as in Cain’s refusal to accept blessing through his brother Abel. Instead of receiving God’s blessing “through economies of difference and mutual dependence” (p. 143), we try to secure our own blessing on our own terms. “Sin assaults the link that joins blessing and otherness. Sin seeks blessing apart from its source in the divine Other and apart from life with the human other” (p. 144).

    When humanity rejects the divinely ordained economy of mutual dependence, it invites the divine curse. In the story of the Exodus we learn of Egypt’s rejection of the mutually beneficial relationship it had established with the family of Jacob, turning instead to exploitation. In turn, God’s curse falls upon the Egyptians and God delivers the people that would become Israel. But lest this seem to be just national egoism on Israel’s part, the Scriptures speak just as if not more often of God’s judgment on Israel. “Like the nations, Israel is prone to forget that God’s covenant is the only trustworthy source of benediction for Israel and for creation” (p. 146).

    As we saw with blessing, redemption is ultimately oriented to the advent of God’s eschatological shalom. Both persecution by the nations and Israel’s own sin “threat[en] God’s intentions to bring Israel to final consummation” (p. 147). The Scriptures are ambivalent about whether this means simply judgment of the nations and vindication for Israel, or whether it means a restoration and final fulfillment of the economy of mutual blessing God always intended. This is a question Soulen returns to when considering the meaning of Jesus in the next chapter.

    For the time being, the key point is that redemption or deliverance is for the sake of consummation. In the Pentateuch, the story of deliverance is framed by stories of God’s blessing (in Genesis and Deuteronomy). There are hints in the Exodus story itself that Israel will be blessed in the company of the nations (Moses delivered by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in Pharaoh’s house, Moses’ marriage into a gentile household, and the “mixed crowd” that escapes Egypt with the Hebrews). The institution of the Jubilee is another instance of redemption (forgiveness of debts) for the sake of blessing (a restored relationship with land and community), and the Scriptures’ eschatological hope is not just for deliverance from evil, but for the positive blessings of life and wholeness.

    [L]iberation from the powers that destroy is a matter of utmost urgency precisely because these powers threaten to cut off the human family from the arena in which God’s blessings are bestowed. The antithesis of sin and redemption is misunderstood if it is torn from its context in God’s work as Consummator and from the economies of mutual blessing that God establishes and sustains. (p. 52)

    It should be clear at this point that from this perspective redemption does not mean erasing the distinction between Jew and Gentile, as the church has maintained for most of its history. Rather it means forging a new community in which Jew and Gentile exist in a relationship of mutual blessing without ceasing to be Jew and Gentile.

    Previous posts:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

  • Blessing and difference

    In the second part of The God of Israel and Christian Theology, R. Kendall Soulen provides the outline of an alternative framework for reading the Bible that, he argues, avoids the supersessionism inherent to the traditional canonical narrative.

    Key to this is a reorientation of the narrative away from the drama of sin and redemption. Quoting Bonhoeffer, Soulen notes that the religion of the Old Testament is not primarily a religion of redemption. Rather, he says, it is a religion of blessing. Specifically, God’s work as Consummator takes precedence over God’s work as Redeemer. The work that God is about is blessing through difference.

    In contrast to God’s work as Redeemer, God’s work as Consummator concerns not God’s power to deliver the creature from sin, evil, and oppression, but rather the ultimate good that God intends for human creation antecedent and subsequent to the calamity of sin. As represented in the Scriptures, God’s work as Consummator revolves around God’s blessing and its power to communicate life, wholeness, well-being, and joy to that which is other than God. (p. 115)

    This ultimate good is life and well-being in its most comprehensive sense, which entails difference and mutual dependence. In the act of creation, God brings into being that which is not God. This provides the occasion for mutual blessing between God and creation as creatures bless God through praise and thanksgiving. Further, the differentiation inherent in creation itself–between male and female, between humanity and nature, between the generations–provides further opportunities for mutual blessing-in-difference. “Economies of difference and mutual dependence” provide the form that blessing takes in God’s world.

    In this view, God’s historical covenantal acts are part and parcel of this mode of mutual blessing-in-difference. “Contrary to a common Christian assumption,” the calling of Abraham is not a response to the problem of sin. “To the contrary, God’s motive seems chiefly to be the sheer fecundity and capaciousness of the divine good pleasure” (p. 120). In establishing the covenant with Abraham and his posterity, God is establishing a new way of blessing the world. Hereafter, humanity is divided into Jew and Gentile, but this is not a division of conflict or opposition, where one benefits at the expense of another. Rather it is to be another differentiation of mutual dependence and blessing. “[T]he Scriptures view the distinction between Israel and the nations as a part of the abiding constitution of reality in God, anticipated from the beginning and present at the end of all things (p. 121).”

    In this scheme, Israel is blessed by being made a people and by receiving the Torah and the land. And Israel in return blesses God by praising God’s name before the nations. But this is not to be a blessing at the expense of the nations, but for their sake as well. “To be a Gentile is to be the other of Israel and as such an indispensable partner in a single economy of blessing that embraces the whole human family” (p. 126). Gentiles have a distinct, but still positive, role to play in God’s economy of blessing. This is symbolized by the story of Joseph in which Egypt and Joseph’s family are mutually blessed and enriched through their relationship, without ceasing to be distinct.

    This economy of mutual blessing is ordered to an eschatological end: the reign of God’s shalom in all creation. The Scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament) make it clear that this eschatological peace includes the well-being of both Israel and the nations (Gentiles). “God’s history with Israel and the nations is ordered from the outset toward a final reign of shalom in which the distinction between Israel and the nations is not abrogated and overcome but affirmed within a single economy of mutual blessing” (p. 132).

    The eschatological blessing has both a “historical” and a “cosmic” dimension: one referring to the climax of history (what we might call a this-worldly utopia) and the other to the establishment of the “new heaven and new earth” wherein God will dwell in glory with God’s people. This is the consummation of God’s work to bless creation precisely through the creation of fruitful difference rather than its abrogation.

    The next chapter puts the drama of sin and redemption into this framework, and the final one focuses on the work of Jesus Christ as the promissory note of God’s consummating work.

    Previous posts:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

  • King’s X, “Black the Sky”

    (Continuing my exploration of the King’s X back catalogue.)

    For their fifth studio album, King’s X took a slight turn from their signature progressive, soulful hard rock toward a heavier, more grunge-influenced sound. No doubt this was in part due to hooking up with storied producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, etc.). The result, 1994’s “Dogman” album, is, however, a remarkably successful marriage of the “traditional” King’s X sound with a heavier, more stripped-down approach.

  • What you see is what you get

    Parts of the Internet are abuzz with some dumb comments made by filmmaker and lefty gadfly Michael Moore about Presdient Obama “governing like a white guy.”

    The racist nature of these comments aside, what continues to surprise me is how many people apparently thought they were electing a wild-eyed liberal when they voted for Obama. An entire minin-genre of writing has been dedicated to this “Obama betrayed us” lament. It’s surprising because anyone who paid attention to Obama’s speeches, voting record, books, etc. prior to the election would’ve realized that he’s essentially now what he always has been: a moderate, center-left pragmatist.

    To be more specific, Obama appears to share the values or goals of many liberals, but he’s also committed to the path of cautious, incremental reform. Health care reform is a good example: despite overheated conservative rhetoric, the Affordable Care Act was actually an attempt to provide relatively modest, technocratic tweaks to the existing health insurance system. It was emphatically not a wholesale overhaul of the system, much less a “government takeover.”

    That’s not to say that the President should be above criticism–far from it! But it’s helpful to keep in mind that Obama is governing pretty much as expected–if you actually see him for who he is, not who liberals wish he was.

    UPDATE: It’s probably bad blog form to quote yourself, but to illustrate my point, here are a few things I wrote during the months leading up to the 2008 election and shortly thereafter (some of which, I humbly add, have been borne out by subsequent events):

    Jan. 5, 2008 “I have so far been less impressed by Obama than some of my friends; his vaunted oratory which seemed to promise to magically transport us to a post-partisan, post-race, post-conflict happy land always struck me as so much hot air.”

    Sept. 12, 2008 “I personally find Obama’s backpedaling on FISA and his disinclination to challenge head-on the Bush/GOP paradigm for foreign policy the most troubling. It’s also clear to me that Obama just doesn’t share my views on, say, the scope of U.S. interventionism.”

    Oct. 8, 2008 “If anything, my worry about Obama is that he’ll be too pragmatic, too prone to compromise, and too beholden to the Washington bipartisan consensus on a host of matters.”

    Dec. 30, 2008 “Obama has given little indication that he dissents in any radical way from the US consensus on foreign policy.”

    Now, if even I could see at the time that Barack Obama was essentially a center-left moderate, how come Michael Moore, et al. persist in this “We voted for a liberal gut-fighter, but he turned out to be a conciliatory, deal-making moderate” line?

  • Supersessionism and the flight from history

    R. Kendall Soulen brings the first, critical part of his God of Israel and Christian Theology to a close with two chapters on early modern and 20th-century theology, respectively.

    In chapter 3 he examines the thought of two influential thinkers who tried to reconcile the core of Christian belief with the worldview of the Englightenment–Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both of these thinkers, in Soulen’s evaluation, did this at the cost of severing Christianity more profoundly from its Jewish roots than the traditional canonical narrative they inherited. This is because both emphasized, in different ways, the universal, ahistorical “foreground” of the canonical narrative–the arc of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation–to such a degree that the Jewish matrix of Christian faith becomes something to discard. For Kant, religion is to be understood “within the limits of reason alone”–which for him means the demands of morality understood as a rational, universal law. Jesus is an exemplar of perfect humanity because of his moral perfection, not because of anything having to do with his role in the ongoing story of God’s history with Israel. Similarly, Schleiermacher sees religion as an expression of a universal human consciousness of dependence. Jesus is the redeemer because he had a perfect “God-consciousness” that is transmitted to others through the community he founded, the church.

    In both cases, Soulen argues, the drama of redemption has been removed from public history to inner realm of experience–whether it be moral experience or religious experience. The result is that both Kant and Schleiermacher view Christianity as the universal, “spiritual” alternative to the particularistic, “carnal” Judaism. (Schleiermacher even goes so far as to suggest that the OT be relegated to a “historical appendix” to the NT!) For Soulen, supersessionism goes hand in hand with a semi-gnostic “flight from history.” God’s action is not defined by what God does in historical relationship with particular people; rather it’s shaped by an ahistorical template of providing a solution to a universal human problem (moral frailty or lack of God-consciousness). By transposing the divine-human relationship to this inner, ashistorical realm, Kant and Schleiermacher pry open the fissure that already existed in the traditional narrative between the “foreground” of creation-fall-redemption-consummation and the “background” of God’s dealing with Israel. Their God is a “Christian divinity without Jewish flesh.”

    Soulen then turns in chapter 4 to the two great “Karls” of 20th-century theology: Barth and Rahner. In different ways both theologians worked to ground God’s acts of redemption and consummation more firmly in history (both were influenced by and reacting to Schleiermacher). For Barth, forming a covenant relationship with humanity just is the point of creation. And God’s covenant with Israel is part of his work to consummate this relationship with creation; thus God’s very being is, in a sense, shaped by history. Rahner takes a very different approach, but tries to arrive at a similar conclusion. God’s self-bestowal on creatures is the point of creation, but this takes place in and through the medium of what Rahner calls humanity’s “supernatural existential.” This refers to a certain inner dynamism toward relationship with God that is a universal–although contingent–feature of the human condition–it is bestowed by God’s grace, not an inherent feature of human nature as such. Thus history is for both Karls the medium of God’s consummating activity in a way that it wasn’t for Kant and Schleiermacher.

    However, Soulen sees in both Barth and Rahner problems that recapitulate the supersessionist tendencies of their predecessors. In Barth’s thought, he says, God’s history with Israel is “collapsed” into the person of Jesus Christ. This is part and parcel of Barth’s effort to retrieve the “ec-centric” or “extra nos” aspect of the Reformer’s thought–everything is accomplished in Jesus and we benefit from it in virtue of its universal efficacy. History effectively “ends” with the resurrection and thus the ongoing history of Israel has no particular significance as part of God’s consummating work. For Rahner, the problem is that while formally his “supernatural existential” is a historical phenomenon, in practice it is utterly detached from historical events. It serves as a clever solution to an intellectual problem of reconciling grace and nature, but Rahner doesn’t tie this abstract historicity to the concrete history of God’s dealings with Israel. In both cases, covenant history is collapsed to a single point (the person of Jesus or the dynamism of the human creature), relegating God’s covenant-history with Israel to insignificance. What’s needed instead, Soulen says, is a view that sees God’s work as Consummator engag[ing] creation in the total, open-ended, and still ongoing history that unfolds between the Lord, Israel, and the nations” (p. 106). Outlining such a view will be the task of the second part of the book.

    Previous posts on Soulen’s book:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

  • Don’t blog angry

    I’m sorry to see that Marvin is apparently hanging up his blogging spurs, although I understand and respect his reasons for doing so. Still, it’s a loss for those of us who’ve been edified by his writing but aren’t part of the academic or religious milieus where he plans to re-focus his energy. I have some hope though. Blogging is a bit like the mafia–no matter how hard you try to get out, it finds a way of dragging you back in.

    One reason Marvin offers for quitting is that his blog had become a place for venting anger rather than for constructive writing. Although personally I rarely found his posts to have an angry tone, I agree that there’s a danger of blogging being nothing more than a forum for angry rants. Over time, I’ve become less interested in the “someone is wrong on the Internet” model of blogging and drawn toward an a more exploratory approach focused on working through texts or ideas and hopefully coming to some clearer understanding of things. In other words, less polemic and more inquiry. Which is not to say that I always succeed, but it’s definitely the direction I’ve found my energies going in.

    Anyway, best of luck on the dissertation, Marvin!