A Thinking Reed

Month: April 2012

  • Living Colour, “Leave It Alone”

    Vernon Reid, still amazing.

  • Let’s be clear: Romney’s a conservative

    A major part of the media narrative concerning the all-but-concluded Republican primary has been that Mitt Romney is “really” a moderate who has had to appear more conservative than he is in order to woo G.O.P. primary voters. This assumption of Romney’s moderation is based in part on his legitimately centrist record as governor of Massachusetts. Some have drawn the conclusion that Romney is a man of no fixed principles who will basically say or do anything to get elected. This in turn leads to the inference that Romney will move back to the center during the general election and govern from the center if he’s elected.

    In today’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne throws some cold water on this comforting theory:

    It turns out that there is at least one question on which Mitt Romney is not a flip-flopper: He has a utopian view of what an unfettered, lightly taxed market economy can achieve.

    Similarly, Think Progress has a short piece offering “8 reasons why Mitt Romney is more right-wing than George W. Bush.” These include his call for deeper and more regressive tax cuts, plan for converting Medicare into a voucher system, opposition to existing fuel efficiency standards, and professed agnosticism about the causes of climate change, among other things.

    On the foreign policy front, conservative blogger Daniel Larison has noted that Romney has ratcheted up his belligerent rhetoric on Iran and surrounded himself with neoconservative foreign policy advisors. He has (ludicrously) characterized President Obama’s foreign policy as one of “appeasement” and “apologizing for America,” suggesting a return to Bush-style unilateralism.

    Personally, I don’t think it’s important to try and discover what a politician “really” believes in his heart of hearts. What’s important is the positions he publicly stakes out, the constituencies he’s pledged fealty to, and the type of people he surrounds himself with (and will likely staff his administration with). Any radical about-face will cost political capital. On all these fronts, Romney looks, walks, and quacks like a conservative.

  • Better theology needed in the public debate over homosexuality

    One criticism I’ve seen of mainline churches is that they don’t do a very good job of connecting theology to congregational, individual, or public life. Whether or not this is true as a general matter, one area where it does seem to me to happen is the public debate–particularly in American Christianity–over the place of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the church. To hear people talk, you wouldn’t know that theologians have been grappling with these issues for literally decades or that over this time, a rich body of biblical and theological material has been developed supporting the case for the full equality of LGBT people. (Case in point: this recent exchange between Ross Douthat and William Saletan; to read this, you would never know that there was more than one “Christian” position here.)

    It would seem that very little of the work that has been done in rethinking Christian attitudes toward LGBT people–largely by academics in theology and biblical studies–has filtered down to the congregational level and out into the public sphere. We still find ourselves rehashing the same half-dozen or so “clobber texts” and framing the debate in terms of “traditionalists” who uphold orthodox faith and “liberals” who are moral and doctrinal relativists. What this leaves out is, for example, the robustly theological (or theological-ethical) case for equality that has been developed by people like James Allison, Eugene Rogers, Gareth Moore, and others, or the work that has been done on the meaning and context of the relevant biblical texts. Bringing this to bear on the discussion would scramble the usual narrative of “liberals” being indifferent or hostile to theological arguments.

    Mainline congregations have often exhibited good instincts in this area, basing their stance of equality for LGBT folks more on concrete experience than theory. But this leaves mainline Christians ill-equipped to make the case in theological and biblical terms, and they often end up ceding the theological high ground to their conservative opponents. It also allows more conservative forms of Christianity to be seen as the sole legitimate public expressions of the faith.

  • The Resurrection is not a bludgeon

    If Jesus cannot be accepted as the true revelation of God in his life and teaching, then his resurrection carries no weight. The moral challenge comes first. In his lifetime Jesus had constantly refused to perform supernatural conjuring tricks in order to impress. This still holds good. The resurrection is not there to bludgeon into submission those for whom the Gospel of the sovereignty of God exercised through the absolute and universal law of love is a closed book; for it is a vindication of this sovereignty, and of Jesus as its agent and manifestation. To everyone else it is meaningless and therefore incredible. Appearances to his enemies or to the pagans would thus convey nothing, or, worse still, the wrong thing. Only to those who have already caught the spirit of Jesus’ love will Easter bring true joy, for this joy is precisely that Love reigns at the heart of the universe.

    –John Austin Baker, The Foolishness of God, pp. 259-260

  • The failure of welfare reform

    The 1996 welfare-reform law, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton (who famously said that the “era of big government is over”), has been hailed by people in both parties as a great triumph. It replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (emphasis on “temporary”). The TANF program restructured the funding of federal assistance to the poor, creating block grants to be administered by states. Crucially, it also imposed strict limitations on the amount of time someone could receive benefits, increased requirements to move people off the rolls and into jobs, and gave states much more flexibility in designing their programs.

    At first, it did seem like a success, and the direst predictions of some of the critics (Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned of children sleeping on city grates) didn’t come to pass. Welfare caseloads plummeted, and a booming economy seemed to promise jobs for anyone who wanted one.

    Of course, the story in 2012 is quite a bit different. In the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and a continuing unemployment rate hovering around double digits, the seams of the revamped welfare system are starting to pull. This story from the New York Times details how cash-strapped and jobless people (many of them single mothers) are coping with the absence of state support:

    [M]uch as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.

    Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

    The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

    The article notes a couple of interesting facts. First, because the food stamp program is fully funded by federal dollars, while TANF comes via state block grants, states have been pushing people toward food stamps. (Hence the favorite GOP talking point about soaring food stamp enrollment under President Obama is actually a result, at least in part, of welfare reform.) Second, the “greater flexibility” given to states under TANF allows them to divert funds from providing cash assitance to the poor and unemployed to other uses–and not always ones that directly help the intended beneficiaries of the program. Or, as a representative from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it: “The states use the money to fill budget holes.” The upshot is that, despite increased economic hardship, the flow of direct aid has been slowing to a trickle. (It’s also worth mentioning, as the article points out, that this kind of structure–block grants to states and incresed restrictions–is one that Repbulcians like Rep. Paul Ryan would like to apply to other welfare-state programs, like Medicare.)

    The story notes that “the number of very poor families appears to be growing.”

    Pamela Loprest and Austin Nichols, researchers at the Urban Institute, found that one in four low-income single mothers nationwide — about 1.5 million — are jobless and without cash aid. That is twice the rate the researchers found under the old welfare law. More than 40 percent remain that way for more than a year, and many have mental or physical disabilities, sick children or problems with domestic violence.

    Welfare reform was driven by the assumption that jobs were available and that the only problem was the “perverse incentives” created by the existing welfare program. This was, and is, a popular view in conservative and “neo-liberal” circles. Take away the cash assistance, the theory went, and people would be “incentivized” (i.e., forced) into participation in the workforce. Whatever the merits of this as an explanation for why people remained on welfare, it falls apart if there aren’t enough jobs to go around. And for better or for worse, we aren’t, as a nation, committed to a policy of full employment. (During the Depression, for example, the government just flat-out created jobs for people.) Without the jobs is it any surprise that people turn to dubious means to feed themselves and their families?

    Secular liberalism and Christian social thought agree that a society should be judged, in significant part, by how its worst-off and most vulnerable members fare. By this measure, it’s very difficult to judge welfare reform a success.

  • Good Friday

    So let me offer another picture of why Jesus is treated in this manner: because that’s what happens in the world. Each and every day, people suffer torment – sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, and sometimes spiritual. And so God comes in love in order to live not only with us but also as one of us, taking on our lot and our life and experiencing all that we experience so as to understand us and stand with us completely and fully.

    In the person of Jesus, therefore, we discover not only that God understands us, not only that God loves us enough to take on our lot and our life, but also that all of this suffering, and even death itself, cannot put an end to God’s love. So that as Jesus is raised on the third day, we have hope that our suffering and even our own deaths will not define us or defeat us but that we, too, will be raised by God’s love.

    David Lose, Meditation on Mark 15:16-20

  • Re-thinking Wright

    James K.A. Smith puts his finger on something that’s worried me about N.T. Wright in his review of Wright’s latest book. Wright sometimes gives the impression that post-New Testament development of Christian theology was a decline and that it’s possible–or desirable–for us to re-inhabit the thought-world of the 1st century (with the help of some judiciously applied knowledge of second-temple Judaism, of course). While understanding the historical context of Jesus’ life and mission is obviously important, Christians have always “translated” the gospel into different cultural idioms. Arguably this process starts in the NT itself: the theological frameworks of the synoptic gospels, John’s gospel, Paul’s letters, the letter to the Hebrews, and Revelation all have their differences. In the post-NT period, this picks up steam with the translation of the Christian gospel into language and concepts borrowed from Hellenistic philosophy, culminating in the debates at Nicaea and Chalcedon.

    It’s possible, I suppose, to see all this as a departure from a pristine, “original” gospel. But to do that, you have to explain how we, as 21st-century Christians, are supposed to embrace the worldview (assuming there’s just one worldview) of the NT without qualification. A more promising approach, in my view, is to acknowledge that the gospel is always undergoing a process of reinterpretation and translation, and that this can be done faithfully. The earliest expressions of the faith–while clearly normative in an important sense–aren’t necessarily adequate for all later generations of Christians. For a different, and more positive, take on this process of reinterpreting the gospel through the centuries, I’d recommend Keith Ward’s book Re-thinking Christianity.

  • On Animals: Redemption

    Picking back up the thread of David Clough’s On Animals, let’s look at the third part, which deals with animal redemption. Clough’s argument throughout has been that it makes more sense to understand God’s great acts (creation, reconciliation, redemption) as including non-humans than as exclusively concerned with humans. This is no less true of redemption than of the other two doctrinal themes. He goes so far as to say that they are “different aspects of a single divine act of graciousness by God towards all that is.” The question then is: Will animals share in human deliverance from sin, suffering, and death, or are they destined to be cast aside as a kind of cosmic detritus?

    Clough cites John Wesley, who argued in his sermon “The Great Deliverance” that non-human animals needed–and would receive–redemption, just as humans would, and John Hildrop, who maintained that God brought each individual creature into existence for a reason, and thus God has reason to maintain them in existence. Clough writes that “[j]ust as we are accustomed to picturing human beings as being gathered up in Christ without regard to when they died, so we must become accustomed to think of other animals, too–ammonites and stegosaurs, dodos and Javan tigers–beign gathered up in the divine plan of redemption.” What God has created, God will redeem.

    An alternative argument for animal redemption draws on considerations of theodicy–the suffering of animals should be compensated for by life after death. While he strongly affirms the reality of animal suffering, Clought rejects this line of argument on the grounds that theodicies generally tend to justify suffering–by seeing it as a necessary part of some overarching plan or system. This portrays God as having to compensate animals for an injustice experienced at his hand. Rather, Clough says, “God must be understood to be the redeemer of all creatures, human and other-than-human, because God has determined to be gracious and faithful to them in this sphere, as well as in their creation and reconciliation, not because they would otherwise have a legitimate cause of complaint.”

    Animal redemption is part and parcel of a vision of cosmic redemption that has deep roots in the Christian tradition. Key New Testament texts here are those that speak of “all things being gathered up in Christ” and God being “all in all.” Origen took these and ran with them in his doctrine of universal restoration. In fact, Clough suggests, the same sorts of considerations that point many in the direction of universal salvation tell equally well in favor of animal redemption.

    In the final chapter, Clough goes on to consider “the shape of redeemed living.” While he is postponing discussion of ethical issues to the second volume of his work, he offers some general thoughts on what redeemed relationships between human and non-human animals would look like. He draws on the eschatological vision of “peace between creatures” offered in key Christian texts. These include the early chapters of Genesis, Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, and the portrait of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, as well as the church’s stories of saints who “made peace” with wild animals. These suggest that God’s redemptive purpose is that “all creaturely enmity will be overcome in the new creation, and predator and prey will be reconciled to one another.”

    This gives rise to a number of puzzles to which we can offer only speculative answers, such as: Will individual animals be redeemed, or only species? How can predators be reconciled with their prey without losing their essential nature? What does redemption look like for domesticated animals who have had their natures altered by human intervention? Are all animals ultimately to be “tamed,” or is their room for wilderness in the new creation? Clough offers some tentative answers to these questions with which I’m largely in sympathy, but he also cautions against dogmatic certainty when it comes to specifics.

    But the trajectory, he thinks, is clear: the destiny of creation is to live in peace, even if it now “groans as in the pains of childbirth.” And this has practical implications. Whatever the details of our eschatology,

    a vision of what the reconciliation and redemption of all things by God in Christ through the Spirit might mean for relationships between humans and other animals will cause Christians to be motivated to act in whatever ways they can to witness to redeemed patterns of creaturely relations.

    I think the point here is that creaturely solidarity is, or should be, much more deeply woven into theology–and the Christian life more broadly–than has usually been the case. Animals are as deeply involved in God’s acts of creation, reconciliation, and redemption as we are. This has implications for ethics–and maybe also for community life and politics. For example, what would church life look like if we took seriously the view that we are part of a “mixed community” that includes many different kinds of animals? How should we anticipate the creaturely peace that is to characterize the new creation, even while recognizing that we still live in a fallen world? These are the kinds of questions I’d like to see Clough take up in his second volume.

    Previous posts:

    Reading David Clough’s On Animals

    On Animals: Creation

    On Animals: Reconciliation