A Thinking Reed

Month: June 2012

  • American democracy: not dead yet

    Aside from its consequences for people’s actual lives, what I feared most about a potential overturning of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) was what it would say about our ability, as a nation, to tackle major challenges. I mean, if we couldn’t even get a moderate, market-based reform of our healthcare system–of the sort that was being touted by conservative think-tanks and major Republican politicians just a few years ago–what hope was there for ever addressing this problem? (Not to mention other big problems like climate change.) But the fact that it survived suggests that “the system,” however creaky, is still capable of delivering.

  • Rand Paul’s top-down conservatism

    Continuing the grand congressional tradition of monkeying with local D.C. affairs, supposedly libertarian G.O.P. senator Rand Paul has introduced amendments to a bill granting the District budget autonomy that would dictate city policies on guns, abortion, and unions.

    From the Washington Post:

    One Paul amendment would require the District to allow residents to obtain concealed weapon permits for handguns, and would require the city to honor permits issued to residents of other states. Another amendment would make the District “establish an office for the purpose of facilitating the purchase and registration of firearms by DC residents,” in response to reports that there is only one licensed gun dealer in the city.

    Paul has also submitted an amendment to codify the city-funded abortion ban. The prohibition — a continuing source of frustration for local leaders that is strongly supported by anti-abortion groups — has been extended via appropriations bills every year that Republicans have controlled one or both chambers of Congress since the mid-1990s.

    Paul proposed another amendment saying “membership in a labor organization may not be applied as a precondition for employment” in the District, and protecting employees “from discrimination on the basis of their membership status” in a union.

    Note that what’s at issue in this bill is whether or not the District gets to decide how to spend its own money raised by local taxes. (“Wait,” you say, “D.C. doesn’t already have that authority? But that’s crazy!” Indeed.) But for freedom-loving Rand Paul, it’s an opportunity to engage in some social engineering, conservative-style.

  • Skepticism, orthodoxy, and the life of faith

    Ben Myers at Faith and Theology wrote a post recently on the Virgin Birth in which he made the case for accepting the historic faith of the church rather than criticizing beliefs that may not seem to pass the test of critical historical investigation. “It’s a good thing to believe something that you didn’t invent for yourself. It’s a good thing to have a certain framework, a story that tells you what kind of place the world really is, so that there are some basic questions that are already settled, that you don’t have to go on wringing your hands and wondering about.”

    This generated a vigorous response from Jeremy at An und für sich, who characterizes Myers position as “provid[ing] the individual a way to escape the existential anxiety of life by offering a coherent narrative that diminishes the stress of having to make decisions and take responsibility for his/her desires.” Jeremy identifies as a Christian but agrees with, inter alia, Wolfhart Pannenberg that “theology has to be historical” and that certain doctrines should be rejected “if they do not stand up to the historical method, a method that Ben finds irrelevant.”

    When I read Ben Myers’ post, I did have a problem with the view that he attributes to Karl Barth about the historical status of miracles:

    Barth always insists that acts of divine revelation are ‘not historical’. But he doesn’t mean they never happened. All he means is that revelation is a unique event, an act of God. It’s not part of the normal historical sequence, it doesn’t belong to a chain of cause-and-effect, and so there’s no use trying to verify or disprove it on historical grounds.

    So in the case of the virgin birth, Barth argues that it’s not subject to the methods of historiography. Its truth isn’t for historians to decide. But he certainly believes that it really happened, that it happened in time and space, within the real material human world. It involved Mary’s body, her real flesh and blood. In this section of Church Dogmatics, Barth’s brilliant critique of Brunner rests on the assumption that the virgin birth really happened. His point is just that it happens as revelation, as an act of God.

    I think it’s safe to assume that Myers has gotten Barth right here (or at least, I’m in no position to judge matters of Barthian exegesis). However, as a piece of theology (or metaphysics), I find it confused. If the Virgin Birth–or any other purportedly miraculous event–“happened in time and space,” then I don’t see how Barth can simultaneously say that “it doesn’t belong to a chain of cause-and-effect.” Even if an event is “an act of God”–that is to say it doesn’t have a “natural” cause, or at least is not fully explicable in terms of natural causes–once it has occurred it presumably becomes part of successive chains of cause-and-effect. Otherwise, it would not have “really happened” in space-and-time but would float docetically and epiphenomenally above the natural chain of cause-and-effect.

    But if this is right, then we can’t say that miracles are per se beyond the reach of historical investigation. Any event that has historical effects is–in principle–open to historical investigation. Now, the Virgin Birth seems to be largely beyond the reach of the tools of history simply as a practical matter. After all, we’re talking about a purported miracle that occurred in a woman’s womb over 2,000 years ago. So the kind of verifiable evidence that a historian would use to corroborate it is notably lacking by the very nature of the case. But something more “public”–the Resurrection of Jesus is the obvious example–would be a different matter. If the Risen Christ appeared in time and space to specific people–as the New Testament seems to unanimously claim–then a historian can in principle investigate such claims, even if she can never–qua historian–conclude that the Resurrection was an act of God. And this suggests that religious doctrines can, in principle, be revised in light of developments in historical (and other “secular”) knowledge. Barth, by contrast, seems to want to have his cake and eat it too: miracles “really happened” but can never be evaluated by secular intellectual tools.

    That said, I’m sympathetic to Ben Myers’ overall position in this sense: living a Christian life isn’t primarily about constantly revisiting individual articles of the creed to determine anew if you “really” believe them. There is a sense in which, once you’ve become a Christian, certain things should be treated as “settled” (at least to some extent) so you can get on with the business of living a Christian life. Here’s an analogy: in our political lives we aren’t constantly questioning the fundamental merits of liberal democracy or constitutionally guaranteed rights, but are trying (ideally) to create a more just and workable society within those parameters. That’s not to say that the fundamentals should never be criticized, but simply that critical reflection isn’t the whole–or even the main–business of life. Clearly new events or evidence can call into question things we had treated as settled–and these present occasions for critical reflection upon and modification of our “framework.” But if we were constantly interrogating our own beliefs (religious or otherwise), we couldn’t use them as a guide for living. I think this makes the life of faith a balancing act: we can never simply rest secure in a “faith once delivered,” but we also have to start in medias res, and therefore take a lot for granted.

  • Tidbits from C.S. Lewis

    As my earlier post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into C.S. Lewis’s letters. Here are a few quotes that struck me:

    “I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room… (to Arthur Greeves, Mar. 7, 1916)

    “I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life–is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?” (to his father, Aug. 14, 1925)

    “What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now–except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’ — ‘sacrifice’ — ‘the blood of the Lamb’)–expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.” (to Arthur Greeves, Oct. 18, 1931)

    “I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia–even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work.” (to his brother, Apr. 8, 1932)

    “My own secret is–let rude ears be absent–that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enourmously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy. But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of “a great man”–you know: his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind–and all that.” (to his brother, June 14, 1932)

    “The Tableland [in The Pilgrim’s Regress] represents all high and dry states of mind, of which High Anglicanism then seemed to me to be one–most of the representatives of it whom I had then met being v. harsh people who called themselves scholastics and appeared to be inspired more by hatred of their fathers’ religion than anything else. I wd modify that view now: but I’m still not what you’d call high. To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism & salvationism on one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other.” (to Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., Nov. 8, 1939)

    “Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate.” (to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., Jan. 17, 1940)

    “The best Dickens always seems to be the one I have read last! But in a cool hour I put Bleak House top for its sheer prodigality of invention.” (to Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., Nov. 5, 1954)

    “One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge wd leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river–and the continent thro’ wh. that river flowed turned out to be itself an island–off the shores of a still greater continent–and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.” (to Dom Bede Griffiths, Feb. 8, 1956)

    “Birth control I won’t give a view on: I’m certainly not prepared to say that it is always wrong.” (to “Mrs. Ashton,” Mar. 13, 1956)

    “That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t.” (to Clyde Kilby, May 7, 1959)

    “No one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” (to Charles Moorman, May 15, 1959)

    “We must have a talk–I wish you’d write an essay on it–about Punishment. The modern view, by excluding the retributive element and concentrating solely on deterrence and cure, is hideously immoral. It is vile tyranny to submit a man to compulsory “cure” or sacrifice him to the deterrence of others, unless he deserves it.” (to T.S. Eliot, May 25, 1962)

  • Political purism and playing the long game

    Garry Wills wrote a good response to the video from Harvard Law professor Roberto Unger calling for the “defeat” of Barack Obama. Unger, who is invariably billed as Obama’s “former professor” (according to Wills he taught Obama in two classes at HLS), maintains that Obama has “failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.” Unger’s video has some good ideas in it–or at least ideas worth considering. But the conclusion that Obama “must be defeated” comes as a complete non-sequitur. It’s unclear why supporting the (admittedly flawed) Obama is incompatible with working to make the Democratic Party and the political system in general more progressive. And it’s even less clear how four or eight years of a Romney administration would advance the cause of progressivism. Why, for example, would it be a boon to “the progressive cause” to allow the social safety net to be further shredded?

    Fortunately for us, we have a pretty clear test case here. Remember back in 2000 when some liberals/progressives said that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush? And liberals had plenty of good reasons to be unhappy with the Clinton-Gore administration, arguably the most conservative Democratic administration since Grover Cleveland. Which is why some of those folks voted for Ralph Nader–helping to hand the election to Bush (with a generous assist from the Supreme Court). And yet, does anyone really think that the world was better off from a progressive point of view after eight years of Bush in the White House? (The institutionalization of the post-9/11 national security state alone is something we’ll be living with the rest of our lives.)

    Wills agrees with Unger that Obama’s progressive credentials are less than stellar, but disdains Unger’s political purism:

    The mistake behind all this is a misguided high-mindedness that boasts, “I vote for the man, not the party.” This momentarily lifts the hot-air balloon of self-esteem by divorcing the speaker from political taintedness and compromise. But the man being voted for, no matter what he says, dances with the party that brought him, dependent on its support, resources, and clientele. That is why one should always vote on the party, instead of the candidate. The party has some continuity of commitment, no matter how compromised. What you are really voting for is the party’s constituency. That will determine priorities when it comes to appointments, legislative pressure, and things like nominating Supreme Court justices.

    To vote for a Democrat means, now, to vote for the party’s influential members—for unions (including public unions of teachers, firemen, and policemen), for black and Latino minorities, for independent women. These will none of them get their way, exactly; but they will get more of a hearing and attention—“pandering,” if you want to call it that—than they would get in a Republican administration.

    To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

    The independents, too ignorant or inexperienced to recognize these basic facts, are the people most susceptible to lying flattery. They are called the good folk too inner-directed to follow a party line or run with the herd. They are like the idealistic imperialists “with clean hands” in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—they should wear leper bells to warn people of their vicinity.

    The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals.

    I don’t know why some progressives come out at election time to bash the more liberal of the two candidates, when the more sensible course of action would be to try to move the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction between elections. Unger’s monologue consists mainly of a wish-list of lefty reforms with barely a nod in the direction of how we’re supposed to bring them about. What is so complicated about the idea of supporting the lesser evil on election day, but also keeping your eye on the long game? Conservatives seem to have become pretty adept at this “walk and chew gum at the same time” approach to politics; they support viable Republican candidates who deviate from conservative orthodoxy all the time, but they’ve also been very successful at building institutional power and gaining influence in the G.O.P. This has been a decades-long effort, but conservatives have essentially established their preferred positions on a host of issues as Republican orthodoxy. Seems like a smarter approach than “destroy the village to save it.”

  • C.S. Lewis on Jesus’ fear of death

    In 1932, C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to his good friend Owen Barfield on the topic of Jesus’ fear of death, particularly as presented in the Garden of Gethsemane scenes in the gospels. Barfield was apparently troubled by the idea that the Son of God should’ve experienced such terror in the face of death when many lesser men had apparently overcome their fear of death.

    In response, Lewis distinguishes three classes of people with respect to the fear of death: the “very bad” who fear death because it represents the defeat of their “false freedom” of egoistic self-determination; the “virtuous,” who are only able to overcome their fear of death with the aid of some other sentiment that depends on a “defect” of some kind (such as pride or weariness); and, finally the “Perfect.”

    Lewis suggest that Jesus–as the Perfect One–in some ways more closely resembles the first class than the second. This is because for him, death also represents a defeat of freedom, but it is “Real Freedom”:

    What is it to an ordinary man to die, if once he can set his teeth to bear the merely animal fear? To give in–he has been doing that nine times out of ten all his life. To see the lower in him conquer the higher, his animal body turning into lower animals and these finally into the mineral–he has been letting this happen since he was born. To relinquish control–easy for him as slipping on a well worn shoe. But in Gethsemane it is essential Freedom that is asked to be bound, unwearied control to throw up the sponge, Life itself to die. Ordinary men have not been so much in love with life as is usually supposed: small as their share of it is they have found it too much to bear without reducing a large portion of it as nearly to non-life as they can: we have drugs, sleep, irresponsibility, amusement, are more than half in love with easeful death–if only we could be sure it wouldn’t hurt! Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death. (Letters of C.S. Lewis, W.H. Lewis, ed., p. 305)

    Note that Lewis is saying that Jesus’ experienced the fear of death more intensely because he “really lived a human life.” Lewis disdains the idea (which he attributes to Barfield) that Christ suffered simply “from the mere fact of being in the body” as “mythological in the bad sense.” Jesus feared death more because he loved life more.

  • Stone Temple Pilots, “Down”

  • Human origins, sin, and “fiduciary” atonement

    This article by theologian George L. Murphy today is a very helpful discussion of how an evolutionary understanding of human origins affects the Christian doctrines of sin and salvation. Murphy begins by arguing that the evolutionary account is more consistent with a broadly “Eastern” view of original sin (Irenaeus) than with a “Western” one (Augustine). That is to say, humanity was not created perfect but rather was made good but immature. The fall into sin consisted of a deviation from the path God intended us to travel toward the new creation:

    We have then a picture of a divinely intended growth of humanity rather than the appearance of fully mature persons. But once sin comes into the world that growth is distorted. […] The picture that we get in the early chapters of Genesis is not so much one of a single abrupt “fall” from perfection in Genesis 3 but of a gradual “falling away” that begins there and worsens in succeeding chapters, which is the point made in Genesis 6:5-7 as it introduces the Flood story.

    The root of this “falling away” is a failure to trust God and that our good consists in following the path God intends for us:

    Humanity could, with difficulty, have followed the path of development that God intended, for we are not hardwired, either through genes or enculturation, to behave in particular ways. Temptations would, however, have been strong. Sin was, in words of Reinhold Niebuhr, not “necessary” but “inevitable.”

    Refusing to trust and obey God, humanity turned from the goal that God intended and chose another path. Soon we had gone astray. Moving away from God, we were lost in the woods and night was falling.

    The longer this goes on, the more deeply successive generations are mired in sin, due to a combination of genetic endowment and social-cultural environment. And our idols proliferate as we put our trust in finite things instead of God.

    In light of this understanding of sin as departure from the divinely willed path of development, Murphy proposes an account of salvation that emphasizes new creation. “Since the basic problem as I’ve sketched it is that sin has gotten human history off course, new creation can be spoken of as reorientation of the trajectory of creation.”

    Drawing on the thought of Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde, Murphy sketches an account of the atonement that focuses on how the death and resurrection of Jesus concretely bring reconciliation (at-one-ment) between humanity and God by creating trust (i.e., faith).

    The fundamental problem that got humanity going on the wrong road, moving away from God, is failure to put our trust in the true God. Instead, as Paul argues in Romans 1, people place their confidence in all kinds of idols. That is why humanity was estranged from God, and that is what God had to correct in order to turn the course of history back to his intended goal—that is, to reconcile humanity with himself. God must destroy our faith in idols and create faith in himself.

    In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God acts to destroy our trust in these idols and create trust in him. The cross shows us that those things we put our trust in (e.g., governments, religion, morality) can become the instruments by which God-in-the-flesh is killed! But the resurrection shows that God returns as the crucified one who brings not condemnation, but peace.

    Murphy calls this a “fiducial influence” theory of the atonement. Like the more familiar “moral influence” theories associated with Peter Abelard, this account emphasizes that it’s humans who need to be reconciled to God, not vice versa, and that the cross of Christ is what makes possible that needed transformation. It differs, however, in emphasizing that it’s faith, not morality, that saves us.

    The “Christ-event” creates this trust/faith, which makes possible our re-orientation onto the path God intended for us:

    God’s initial work of bringing sinners from spiritual death is followed by continual renewal of faith and sanctification throughout life. The lives of people are turned back toward God, part of the process in which God reorients the course of creation toward accomplishment of his plan spoken of in Ephesians 1:10, to unite all things in Christ.

    This re-orientation has social and even cosmic implications, as “a renewed humanity taking seriously God’s call to care for the earth as God’s garden and to exercise responsible stewardship for creation.” Being rightly related to God allows us to be rightly related to each other and to the rest of creation.

    I’ve long found Forde’s discussion of the atonement to be helpful because of its focus on how the concrete actuality of the cross effects reconciliation (rather than on some metaphysical “transaction” happening behind the scenes). And I agree with Murphy that his “fiduciary” theory is more consistent with an evolutionary understanding of human origins than certain traditional atonement theories–for example those which presuppose that physical death is a result of human sin.

  • Torche, “Snakes Are Charmed”

    More from their new (and great) album “Harmonicraft”:

  • The fog of (just) war: more on just war and the “kill list”

    To follow up a bit on the last post, here’s a good piece published in Boston Review by Georgetown law professor David Luban, looking at the “drone war” more broadly in the context of just war theory.

    Luban homes in on some of the thornier issues surrounding the targeted killing program: distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants, the question of proportionality, and whether “the decision-making process is based on a genuinely skeptical, probing structure, with a heavy burden of proof on those proposing a killing and an institutionalized ‘devil’s advocate’ to argue against each and every deadly ‘nomination.’” Despite recent reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, “the process still remains essentially shrouded in fog.”

    Assuming that it’s permissible to use force in self-defense, Luban says, “targeted killings” aren’t necessarily immoral per se. “If anything, targeted killing is better than untargeted killing, which the laws of war call ‘indiscriminate’ and a war crime.”

    Among this welter of arguments about targeted killing, the genuine issues of principle are whether self-defense requires it and proportionality permits it. The question of where the zone of combat ends and civilian rules begin is important, but it is a question of line-drawing, not of moral principle. If self-defense is a just cause of war, and if killing is necessary for self-defense (a big if), then targeted killing is permissible–provided that it targets only enemy fighters, keeps civilian casualties low, and actually does more good than harm in defending ourselves.

    But this last one is a “far from a settled question,” Luban says, because the drone war may be creating more terrorists than it kills due to, for example, the radicalizing of Yemenis angered by the drone attacks. Add to this worries about the “opacity and unaccountability” of the program, and it’s far from clear that it is, on balance, a good idea.