A Thinking Reed

Month: May 2012

  • Iron Maiden, “The Duellists”

  • Praying with Marjorie Suchocki

    I’ve found that of all the process theologians I’ve read, Marjorie Suchocki is the best at applying process categories and concepts in a meaningful way that avoids much of the forbidding technical jargon. He short book In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer is a good example of this.

    Suchocki applies a “process-relational” understanding of God and God’s interaction of the world to some of the thornier problems of prayer, such as: How can prayer make a difference to what happens in the world? In doing so, she illuminates both the practice of prayer and the process understanding of God.

    In the first two chapters, Suchocki provides a succinct and elegant summary of her overall epistemological and metaphysical approach. In brief, God, in Suchocki’s process-based understanding, is continually providing the world with an impulse toward realizing its best available possibility for increasing well-being. In turn, in each moment, the world is offering back to God its realization of new possibilities–whether these are the ones God hopes for or whether we fall short in some way. God experiences this new actuality and responds to it in a new set of possibilities. And so on. This “dance” of mutual relation is how Suchocki understands God’s relation to the world. Unlike some traditional understandings of God, the process view sees God as working with and through the created order, rather than bringing things about by divine fiat.

    So imagine with me the dynamics of relationship between God and the world. Think of it as a dance, whereby in every moment of existence God touches the world with guidance toward its communal good in that time and place, and that just as the world receives energy from God it also returns its own energy to God. God gives to the world and receives from the world; the world receives from God and gives to God, ever in interdependent exchange. Imagine this dance to be initiated by the everlasting God acting out of divine freedom, and therefore out of everlasting faithfulness–for if God is free, then God is free to act in consistency with God’s own character. Thus every touch of God is a giftedness reflecting to some degree God’s own character. But only to some degree. For if this dancing God truly relates to the manyness of the world, then God relates to the particularities of the world. God relates not to some ideal world, but to the reality of this world. (p. 24)

    Prayer, then, is a special case of this more general relationship between God and the world. In prayer, we self-consciously make ourselves aware of God’s presence–listening for the voice of God in calling us to realize our possibilities for greater well-being, and offering our prayers to God, to be incorporated into God’s self and made part of future possibilities for the world. Prayer thus “makes a difference” both to us and God.

    In a series of chapters, Suchocki applies this understanding of prayer to intercession, prayers for healing, confession, and other traditional topics. But she puts her unique spin on these by showing how her view of God affects how we understand them. For example, when we pray for someone else, God receives our prayers into the divine experience, and they become part of future possibilities presented to the world. Thus our prayers may have effects far beyond what we can imagine. This threads a line between quasi-magical views of prayer that simply expect God to do what we ask and reductionistic views that see the effects of prayer merely as psychological.

    Suchocki boldly says that God needs prayer because it is part of how God works with creatures to bring about the divine purposes, which she identifies with “communal well-being” for the entire creation. Suchocki doesn’t try to prove that God must do it this way–which is helpful if, like me, you find aspects of process theology appealing, but aren’t necessarily prepared to swallow the whole complicated conceptual apparatus. What she denies, though, that God works without us, which will put her at odds with at least some traditional understandings of prayer, as will her insistence that God is changed and affected by our prayer.

    One strength of the book is that it shows how process thought can make sense of our practices of prayer–we often do pray as though our prayers of petition, intercession, etc. make a difference to God and how things go in the world. On the assumption that God is utterly unchangeable, by contrast, these are harder to make sense of (though theologians have tried to do so in a variety of ways). So you could see In God’s Presence as a kind of argument for the superiority of the process-relational view on the grounds that it makes better sense of certain religious experiences. At the same time, it provides an impetus for praying–prayer really does make a difference and is an indispensable part of the church’s calling.

    Lest this makes it sound like this is a dry, academic tome, Suchocki writes very straightforwardly, avoiding most of the convoluted jargon associated with process theology. She also uses (gasp!) concrete examples–stories of prayer in her life and the life of others–to illustrate her points. While I don’t necessarily agree with the whole of the process perspective, this book changed my perspective on prayer–and more importantly, it made me want to put the book down and actually pray.

  • Beastie Boys, “An Open Letter to NYC”

    I didn’t properly observe the passing of Adam “MCA” Yauch on this blog, so in lieu of the usual Friday metal, here’s a clip from the Beasties’ “To the 5 Boroughs” album:

  • Prong, “Revenge…Best Served Cold”

    From their new album “Carved into Stone,” which is great.

  • Do the evolution

    As everyone not living under a rock now knows, in an interview with ABC yesterday, President Obama–who recently had said that his views were “evolving”–announced that he now supports the right of same-sex couples to get married.

    Some liberal critics complained that Obama’s announcement does nothing to change the status quo, with marriage still being essentially a state matter. This of course was vividly demonstrated just two days ago by North Carolina’s amendment of its state constituion to exclude recognition of any relationships other than heterosexual marriage, even civil unions.

    But others pointed out–such as in this article–that this may be part of a broader strategy on the part of the administration. This strategy includes its ending of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and its decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court. In addition to being good ideas on the merits, these may help set the legal stage down the road for the courts to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As Chris Geidner, the author of the article, sums it up, “Obama’s legal, policy and personal views are not in any way contradictory and present a clear path forward toward the advancement of marriage equality across the country.”

    Also worth noting is that the president couched his change of mind in explicitly religious terms. Writing at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner highlights this part of Obama’s comments:

    when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.

    Posner goes on to contend that

    Obama didn’t just endorse same-sex marriage today. He abandoned conservative religious rhetoric about it and signaled that religious conservatives, even his close religious advisors, don’t own the conversation on what Christianity has to say about marriage.

    Similarly, Ed Kilgore writes today that Obama’s “evolution” actually puts him in closer alignment with his own relgious tradition, the United Church of Christ, which has affirmed same-sex relationships as a denomination since 2005:

    Relgious conservatives may scoff at the UCC (or the Episcopalians, or other mainline denominations that are, to use the buzzword, “open and affirming” to gay people). But the UCC is the country’s oldest Christian religious community, and among other things, was spearheading the fight against slavery back when many of the religious conservatives of the early nineteenth century were largely defending it as a divinely and scripturally ordained instituion.

    So Obama has pretty strong authority for saying there’s no conflict between his faith and support for same-sex marriage.

    Liberals are prone to arguing in bloodless, technocratic terms, so it was nice to see Obama making the case in explicitly moral–even religious–language. I personally think liberals could stand to do this more often.

    Of course, no one seriously doubts, I think, that there was at least some degree of political calculation in this announcement. (Do presidents ever say anything that isn’t politically calculated to some degree?) And it remains to be seen if that calculation will pay off in November. But even granting mixed nature of his motives (and Christians of all people should be the first to acknowledge that we never act from completely pure motives), it was the right thing to do. Nice job, Mr. President.

  • A dime’s worth of difference, 2012 edition

    If you follow writers associated with what I’ll broadly call the “disaffected Left,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are few if any substantive differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Both, we’re told, are content with the corporate plutocracy, support a hawkish foreign policy and an ever-expanding surveillance state, are open to making cuts to entitlement programs, and generally do not present significantly different choices for the future of American society.

    Dig a little deeper and you’ll get into a common litany of betrayals that Obama has perpetrated: the expansion of drone warfare, continuation of Bush-era civil liberties abuses, a timid and incremental approach to health-care reform, and excessive obsequiousness to Wall Street being among the most often cited.

    And there’s truth to virtually all of this! Obama hasn’t governed as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal nor has he transcended partisan animosity to usher in a new era of beyond-red-and-blue politics. He’s done stuff that anyone on the “Left,” broadly defined, should oppose. I personally have been most disappointed in his record on civil liberties and foreign affairs, but I also agree with much of the left-wing criticism of his domestic and economic policies.

    All that said, however, there remain significant differences between Obama and Romney that will have major effects on people’s lives, depending on who’s elected. Here’s Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly’s “Political Animal” blog to summarize:

    Okay, I get it. But even if you think Obama has been a disastrous failure, or has betrayed the progressive coalition that supported him in 2008, the fact remains that if Mitt Romney is elected president and (as will probably happen if he wins) Republicans maintain control of the House and secure control of the Senate, the Ryan budget will almost certainly be enacted and implemented during 2013. If Obama wins, it won’t. If Romney wins, the odds of a constitutional right to abortion surviving the next four years go down to something like single digits; If Obama wins, it’s a very different proposition. If Romney wins, a war with Iran becomes something like a 50-50 proposition; not so much if Obama wins.

    Perhaps none of these things matter as much as Obama’s failure to reverse many Bush-era civil liberties policies, his failure to pursue single-payer health reform; his failure to nationalize the banks or pursue criminal penalties against corporate malefactors; his failure to convince the country that Keynes was right after all. But they actually do matter to a lot of people who will be affected by little things like the destruction of the New Deal and Great Society social net, and the potential unravelling of the constitutional structure that has made anything approaching progressive policies possible over the last several decades.

    Now Kilgore is a longtime Democratic strategist, but even allowing for some partisan cheerleading, this seems about right to me. Although he wants to tinker with it in a (possibly misguided) attempt to make it more fiscally sustainable, Obama accepts and even defends the basic post-New Deal social compact. The Romney-Ryan G.O.P., however, is a different story. In fact, opposition to the New Deal–and its principle that the government should ensure a basic level of economic security–is arguably the animating impulse of the modern conservative movement.

    Similarly with foreign policy. Do I wish Obama was more dovish? Why, yes I do. But there are still important differences between his brand of liberal internationalism and the vision of unilateral hegemony favored by conservatives. And these are literally differences of life and death, possibly for many thousands of people.

    To be clear, I’m not arguing that anyone is morally obliged to vote for Obama. But there are real differences between the candidates, even if not as many–or as significant–as we might like.

  • Torche, “Kicking”

    Insanely catchy and fun. As is the whole album.

  • Evolution and “making God the author of evil”

    I’ve argued before that the question of a “historical” Adam and Eve and the related question of a “historical” Fall is not a “gospel issue.” That is to say, universal human sinfulness is such a self-evident fact that the question of its origin is secondary. The gospel speaks to this phenomenon of universal sinfulness with its offer of universal grace.

    But as Richard Beck points out in a thought-provoking post, the hard problem evolution poses for orthodox Christian theology isn’t one of soteriology (what are we saved from and how are we saved) but one of theodicy (how can an all-good God permit such evil as we see in our world). Beck is responding to a critique of evangelical scholar Peter Enns’ book The Evolution of Adam by neo-Calvinist theologian James K.A. Smith. Briefly, Smith doesn’t think Enns takes seriously enough the importance of the orthodox doctrine of the Fall. And Beck thinks that Smith may be right that Enns, by focusing on the origin of humanity, may overlook the broader context that brings the theodicy issue to the fore.

    The problem is this: if the evolutionary story of how life came into being is right (and it’s cleary the best account going), then it looks like evil (suffering, death, sickness, predation, etc.) is built into creation so to speak. In other words, if God uses evolution to bring life into existence–as “theistic” evolutionists contend–then it seems that God is directly responsible for the evil that attends this process. And if that’s so, then can we say that God is truly wholly good?

    Beck argues that the point of the traditional doctrine of the Fall isn’t so much to account for human sinfulness as it is to safeguard God’s goodness by exculpating God from responsibility for the existence of evil. He goes on to point out, however, that the orthodox story isn’t quite as air-tight in safeguarding God’s goodness as we might think. He notes, for instance, that in the Bible the serpent (representing evil?) is already present in the garden, tempting Adam and Eve. No account is given of its origin. Only much later was the story of a “fall” of Satan and his angels from heaven posited as a kind of prequel to the Adam and Eve story. And needless to say, this just pushes the problem back a step–after all, whence comes the angels’ propensity toward sin? St. Augustine, for one, rather famously wrestled with this question and never reached a wholly satisfactory solution.

    Beck concludes:

    At the end of the day, theodicy doesn’t really boil down to the origins of evil. It boils down to this: Why’d God do it in the first place? Why, given how things turned out, did an all-knowing and all-loving God pull the trigger on Creation? Why’d God do it?

    No one knows of course. Not Smith. Not Enns. Not me. My point here is simply to note that this is a live and acute question for everybody. So I think it right and proper for Smith to point this out for Enns. But the same question is pointed at orthodox theology and it doesn’t have any better answers, just a “mystery” that allows it, often in cowardly ways, to retreat from answering the questions directly.

    Theodicy has always been the root problem of Christian theology, orthodox or heterodox. There’s no getting around that. The problem is no less acute here than there.

    Readers may be aware of my ongoing interest in this problem. For instance, in my blogging on Christopher Southgate’s book on animal theodicy, I discussed his “only way” argument. This is the argument that creating by means of an evolutionary process–with all that entails in terms of evil and suffering–was the only way for God to get creatures like us in the context of a law-governed universe. God is “off the hook” as it were because there was no other way for God to achieve his ends. Whatever problems there may be with this view (and there are some), it does try to account for evil in a way that doesn’t make God the author of (avoidable) evil. But as Beck says, this is a challenge for all theology, whether it accepts evolution or not.