A Thinking Reed

Month: November 2011

  • Participatory soteriology and the shape of Christian life together

    Christopher offers a semi-defense of Pelagius (a semi-Pelagian defense?) and calls for a movement of “Advent asceticism” that sees a particular form of communal obedience not as an attempt to earn heaven, but as a response to Heaven as it has come to live among us in the Incarnation. He notes that much Protestant theology, with its focus on a once-for-all transactional account of salvation, has a hard time underwriting this kind of response. Instead, he advocates a “participatory soteriology”:

    What this means is not that we save ourselves, or that salvation has not been given once-for-all, but rather in Christ we receive this Life as pure gift and participate in and live out of the Life of this One who is our salvation, our healing, our reharmonization as a leavening society and as a people of and friends of the earth, that is, the whole of creation and every creature.

    Somewhat relatedly, I’m reading Keith Ward’s Religion and Human Nature, which is the third volume in his four-volume “comparative theology.” In it, Ward is trying to develop a Christian theology that is open to the insights of other traditions while still remaining a distinctively Christian theology.

    An important distinction Ward makes in this volume is between “forensic” and “soterial” models of sin and salvation. In short, for a forensic model, the fundamental human problem is guilt and the solution is remittance of guilt (whether through punishment, satisfaction, or forgiveness). For a soterial model, by contrast, the fundamental problem is the the sickness of the human self: its affections and desires are disordered. The self is turned in on itself, to borrow Luther’s phrase, loving itself in a disordered way. The corresponding solution is healing: we need a re-orientation of our deepest selves toward love of God and neighbor.

    Writing about different forms of Hinduism (but in a way that he intends, I think, to apply to Christianity) Ward observes that “a concentration on a forensic notion of desert misses something basic to the religious perception”:

    What is missing is the idea…that the goal of human life lies in a relationship of devotion to the supreme Lord. A mechanical and forensic model, concentrating on individual moral success of failure, misses this element of personal relationship that lies at the heart of devotional faith….[A] soterial model…construes the spiritual state of the human self primarily in terms of analogies to disease and health. The healthy soul is one that is in a state of devoted login service to the Lord, that is transfigured by the beauty of the Lord, and empowered by the Lord’s love. The sick soul is one that withers and atrophies because it is incapable either of giving or receiving the love that alone gives life. (p. 53)

    A lot of traditional theology, particularly Protestant, has favored the forensic account. Jesus dies on the cross so that our sins can be forgiven. The problem, as Christopher notes, is that Protestantism (particularly Lutheranism) hasn’t always had a good account of what we’re supposed to do after that. The result has all too often been a complacent conformity rather than lives conformed to the image of Christ.

    Correspdonding to the forensic and soterial models, Ward distinguishes two understandings of “justification.” The first, which has dominated much Protestant theology, understands it as a kind of declaration of legal innocence. God “imputes” the righteousness of Christ to us, even though in ourselves we remain sinful. Arguing for a different view, Ward suggests understanding it more relationally. Justification is being rightly related to God.

    When ‘justification’ is taken to mean, ‘a declaration of legal innocence’, one faces the difficulty that a guilty person has to be declared innocent by God. But, if God is perfectly just, how is this possible? As I have interpreted it, justification means ‘establishing the possibility of being rightly related to God’. How can a person whose deepest motives and dispositions are to cause great harm be rightly related to God? Only if those motivations and dispositions are wholly changed, by an inward turning of the mind, a metanoia. (p. 190).

    What is accomplished in the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection is that God unites humanity to divinity and makes possible this restored relationship. The cross shows both “the suffering that self-regard causes to self, to others, and to God [and] the life of obedient self-giving that God requires” (p. 191). But it is more than that: it is “the historical vehicle of divine power to forgive and heal” (p. 191).

    Instead of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’, it might be better to speak of ‘healing’ and ‘participation’. What God requires of sinners is a transformation of life in penitence and obedient love. This requirement is met by participation in the power of the Spirit, which is luminously expressed in and mediated through the life and self-sacrificial death of Jesus. Jesus’ sacrifice gives particular form to the Spirit’s activity, and founds the community of the new covenant in which the Spirit can transform human lives into the image of cruciform love. (p. 214)

    That last point strikes me as key in light of Christopher’s observation that Protestant Christianity often lacks forms of disciplined community that give a paritcular shape to the Christian life. Participation in the Spirit is participation in the particular cruciform shape of Jesus’ humanity. This incorporation into Christ restores our relationship to God and makes possible a re-ordering of our desires. We “put on the mind of Christ,” to use Paul’s phrase, and are renewed in our humanity. This is a gradual process, one that may not be complete until after death. But by being “in Christ” we are empowered to receive a new self, one that is rightly related to God, our neighbor, and the rest of creation.

  • Darkest Era, “Heathen Burial”

    From The Last Caress of Light, one of my favorite albums of 2011.

  • Pelagius for the rest of us?

    (I tweeted a bit about this earlier, but I thought I might as well write some thoughts into a proper blog post.)

    As if to confirm our most stereotypical expectations, a proposal is being put before a diocese of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta to “rehabilitate” Pelagius by reversing the Council of Carthage’s (5th century) condemnation of Pelagian teachings.

    Now, I’m willing to believe that Pelagius got a raw deal in being tarred as an arch-heretic. Given the dearth of extant writings, it’s quite possible that he was unfairly targeted by the ecclesiastical powers that be. And certainly modern mainstream Christianity is–for better or worse–more doctrinally latitudinarian than the early church was.

    Nevertheless, I can’t shake the impression that, possibly because of the lack of reliable primary sources, Pelagius has become a kind of cipher–a blank screen upon which modern liberal Christians like to project their idealized version of an optimistic, nature-loving, life-affirming Christianity. In other words, the opposite of everything they dislike about Augustinian Christianity (in what is usually caricatured form).

    This is similar and even related to the vogue for a vaguely mystical, eco-sensitive “Celtic Christianity” that, again, often bears little resemblance to the real historical deal. Pelagius is often upheld (by J. Philip Newell, for example) as the paragon and forefather of Celtic Christian spirituality.

    What ought to tip us off that something fishy is afoot here is that the popular version of Pelagian-Celtic Christianity is strikingly conformable to the concerns of comfortable, middle-class westerners: the affirmation of everyone’s inherent goodness, a rejection of the doctrine of original sin, a generalized eco-spirituality, and a belief in an immanent God that resembles a vague life-force more than the rather demanding God of the Bible.

    A good antidote to this whole line of thinking that still takes some of the underlying concerns seriously is Paul Santmire’s Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology. Santmire, a Lutheran eco-theologian, wants to recover theological themes that can support care for the environment, but he also departs from the Matthew Fox-neo-Pelagian crowd at a couple of key points.

    First, Santmire strongly affirms that eco-justice must go hand-in-hand with social justice. The slums of the globe’s vast mega-cities teem with millions of desperately poor people for whom the reality of injustice and radical evil are palpable everyday realities. From this, Santmire infers a need for a robust theology of sin and atonement:

    [A]lthough Fox talks regularly about “justice-making,” he chiefly seems to be thinking about a revolution of consciousness that is going to transform the world, not unlike the idea of “Consciousness III,” proposed by Charles Reich in The Greening of America during the heyday of the 1960s. In Fox’s major works, we encounter little attention to the often stalemated, anguished struggles of the oppressed, which sometimes can last for decades, even longer, and then, with some regularity, still be lost.

    The Christian masses throughout the ages have likewise lived and died with the bitter reality of struggle. Struggle against overwhelming odds has been their daily bread. This is why they have turned again and again to the figure of the crucified, and have struggled all the more desperately in this instance to make sense out of this apparently senseless but nevertheless redemptive death. (p. 22)

    A neo-Pelagian gospel of personal self-improvement and consciousness-raising may resonate with a certain small strata of the global elite, but what Santmire calls the “Christian masses” are all too aware that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot save ourselves.”

    Further, Santmire commends what he takes to be some of the authentic insights of Celtic Christian spirituality–but these differ rather starkly from the kind of feel-good New Agey themes often associated with that tradition. According to Santmire, the eco-sensitivity of Celtic Christians was rooted in orthodox Trinitarian and Christological affirmations, and these worked themselves out in a fairly severe spirituality that might make some contemporary devotees of “Celtic” Christianity blanch.

    Santmire isn’t blind to the flaws of traditional Augustinian Christianity–but he maintains that it preserves important truths and provides resources for a more cosmic and creation-friendly vision (as evidenced by the mature Augustine’s thought, as well as that of Irenaeus, Luther, Calvin, etc.). Traditional theology’s vision is of a creation (human and non-human) in bondage that can only be freed by God’s overflowing, unmerited grace. In Santmire’s view, this speaks much more profoundly and hopefully to our contemporary situation of mass poverty and ecological devastation.