“On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.” — James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 78
Month: September 2012
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Literalism vs. inerrancy
I’ve been reading The Scope and Authority of the Bible by biblical scholar James Barr, and in it he clarifies something I’ve been thinking for a while. Barr wrote a well-known book on fundamentalism, and one of the essays in Scope… deals with fundamentalism.
The point Barr makes is that, contrary to what is often said, fundamentalism doesn’t mean reading the Bible “literally.” Rather, its distinguishing mark is a doctrine of inerrancy that is frequently at odds with a literal reading:
It is often said that fundamentalists are ‘people who take the Bible literally’. This however is a mistake. Fundamentalist interpretation concentrates not on taking the Bible literally, but on taking it so that it will appear to have been inerrant, without error in point of fact. Far from insisting that interpretation should be literal, it veers back and forward between the literal sense and a non-literal sense, in order to preserve the impression that the Bible is, especially in historical regards, always ‘right’. . . . It is the inerrancy of the Bible, especially its truth in historical regards, that is the fundamentalist position, and not the notion that it must always be interpreted literally. (pp. 77-8)
We might think, for instance, of the strained attempts to “harmonize” the four gospels or to assemble the eschatological passages of the Bible into a coherent “end times” narrative.
By contrast, Barr says,
It is the critical interpretation of the Bible that has noticed, and given full value to, the literal sense. In this sense, as Ebeling and others have noticed, the critical movement is the true heir of the Reformation with its emphasis on the plain sense of scripture. It is precisely because of its respect for the literal sense that critical scholarship has concluded that different sources in (say) the Pentateuch, or the gospels, must be identified. . . . Characteristic conservative treatments, as I have shown, depart from the natural meaning of the texts in order to force upon them an apologetically-motivated harmonization which will evade the fact of the contradiction. (p. 78)
In short, fundamentalism, Barr says, refuses to take the Bible as it is, but instead presents a homogenized version that fits safely into a preexisting theological scheme. (The appeal to the “original autographs” is another example of rejecting the Bible we have for an idealized one.) It’s noteworthy that the doctrine of inerrancy doesn’t arise directly from anything the Bible claims for itself, but has usually been imposed on the it as a conclusion from a theological argument about the kind of Bible God must have produced.
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Schleiermacher’s twist on predestination
At Experimental Theology, Richard Beck argues that all forms of predestination, no matter how their proponents try to nuance them, ultimately boil down to double predestination. “You’re either an Arminian or you believe in double predestination,” he concludes.
But Beck has missed an important possibility here, it seems to me. What if God predestines everyone to salvation?
This is, in fact, the position that Schleiermacher more-or-less comes to in The Christian Faith. According to Schleiermacher, God does not make specific determinations about each individual’s salvation, rather all humanity is elected in Christ. The “toal efficacy” of Christ’s work can only be demonstrated by the inclusion of all in “the divine fore-ordination to blessedness.” God “regards all men in Christ.” God may temporarily “pass over” some, leaving them in unbelief, but ultimately everyone will be restored. So Schleiermacher at least didn’t think you had to choose between double predestination and Arminianism.
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Romney vs. the 47%
The big political news of the day, of course, is the video released by Mother Jones of Mitt Romney speaking to a room of wealthy donors in which he essentially wrote off half the American public as moochers who will never be convinced to take responsibility for their lives.
Romney’s remarks are a version of an increasingly popular conservative narrative according to which 47 percent of the American public allegedly pay no taxes and are living off the largesse of the welfare state at the expense of the hard-working “makers.”
There have been a number of debunkings of Romney’s comments today, not all of them from liberals. Ezra Klein wrote about it with his usual wonky detail, but National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru and First Things‘ Matthew Schmitz also pushed back. The New York Times’ David Brooks pointed out that these “freeloaders” include war veterans, students getting loans to go to college, and senior citizens (who disproportionately vote Republican!). The reality is that there’s no clear sense in which the political coalitions of Right and Left can be divided into “makers” and “takers.”
I’m not trying to make a tu quoque argument that Republicans benefit from government spending too. The point I’d rather make is that the self-made man who inherits nothing and doesn’t owe anybody anything is a myth. Luck is as large a determinant of where you end up as individual initiative is. And liberals believe that government is the only entity in society with the ability to level the playing field a bit and make sure as many people as possible have a shot at a decent life. It does this through redistribution, regulation, and provision of public services, among other functions. As I’ve written before, one of the reasons I became disenchanted with libertarianism was that I realized my life wouldn’t be possible without “big government.”
We all probably have a tendency to exaggerate our own contributions to our successes and to minimize what we owe to others, to circumstances, or to dumb luck. But is that something to base a governing philosophy on?
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Wesley on religious experience
Theodore Runyon is a theologian, now retired, from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Among other things, he’s published a book on John Wesley’s theology (which I blogged about a bit a while back) as well as several articles on Wesley.
In his book Exploring the Range of Theology, which collects articles he’s written over several decades, Runyon uses Wesley to retrieve the idea of “religious experience.” For much 20th-century theology, particularly that which was influenced by Barth, religious experience was disdained. This was largely because of the fear that it would lead to spiritual flights of fancy and subjectivism. After all, since everyone’s experience is different, how do you evaluate its validity?
Runyon argues that, while Barth et al. may have been justified in their distrust of experience, particularly in light of the “German Christians” who supported the Nazi regime in Hitler’s Germany, they may have gone overboard in disparaging it. Following Wesley, he maintains that a religion without an experiential aspect will eventually dry up–neither right doctrine (orthodoxy) nor right practice (orthopraxy) are enough to sustain it. We also need “right feeling”–or what he calls “orthopathy.”
Wesley, he points out, strongly affirmed the importance of actually experiencing the assurance of God’s love and of being empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works and grow in love for one’s neighbor. Neither a rote orthodoxy nor a determined adherence to the moral law, he believed, could generate a such a living faith. And it was the birthright of every Christian to tangibly experience the Holy Spirit in her life.
However, Wesley was no subjectivist and at many points had to defend the early Methodist movement against charges of “enthusiasm.” Religious truth isn’t produced by the feelings or experiences of the self. Rather, those feelings are the testimony of the Holy Spirit acting in response to the proclaimed Word, which, in good Lutheran fashion, Wesley insisted comes from outside the self. Wesley was an empiricist in the Lockean tradition, and he believed that everything we know comes from without. But he was also a bit of a Platonist in that he thought that human beings had “spiritual senses” that allowed them to perceive spiritual realities. But because of the Fall, these senses were dormant and had to be “activated” by God’s gracious activity. When we respond to the preaching of God’s love in Christ, the Spirit is that power within us that allows us to assent to it and which sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts. It is a personal, experiential response to a reality outside the self. “Genuine experience of God is therefore not my experience alone, it is the experience of the Other into whose life I am taken by grace” (Runyon, “Orthopathy: Wesleyan Criteria for Religious Experience”).
Runyon also discusses other criteria that Wesley used to test religious experience. These experiences should transform us–Wesley believed, with Luther, that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, but he also believed with the Catholic and Eastern traditions that it is to be imparted to us. They should have a social effect–the goal of Christianity is not to create holy solitaries; the Gospel should propel us to share the God’s love and minister to the needs of others. They should be reasonable, measured by the norms of the Bible and the experience of the believing community. They should be sacramental in that the feelings associated with religious experience convey, or point to, a reality beyond themselves rather than being made into ends-in-themselves.And finally, they should be teleological–that is, they put us on a path toward the goal of the Christian life, or what Wesley called “Christian perfection.”
These criteria, Runyon concludes, “assist in evaluating the legitimacy of claims to religious experience, while at the same time recognizing the importance of the experiential dimension for genuine faith and discipleship.” Borrowing from Kant, we might say that faith and discipleship without experience is empty, but experience without faith and discipleship is blind.
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Schleiermacher on the dispensability of the cross and resurrectoin
In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argues that, contrary to appearances, the cross and resurrection of Jesus aren’t actually essential to Christianity. His reasoning for this surprising conclusion is consistent with his overall method, but for that reason highlights some of the concerns that Christians of a more orthodox bent might have with it.
For Schleiermacher, redemption means being brought into “living fellowship” with the Redeemer. This is because, according to him, Jesus had a perfect “God-consciousness”–that is, he was fully aware of his absolute dependence on God, and this gave shape to his life in the world. The rest of us, by contrast, have a more partial or fragmented experience of God-consciousness, and so we fall into sin. However, by entering into the church–the community that was founded by Jesus and takes its bearings from the portrait of Jesus contained in the New Testament, we can come to share that perfect God-consciousness. When we enter into this “living fellowship,” the God-consciousness of Jesus becomes the core of our selves and, gradually, it comes to predominate–overcoming our sinful tendencies.
In Schleiermacher’s account, the cross is not necessary because salvation doesn’t require some act of atonement, either on our part or on God’s. Instead, our guilt is removed when we come to have the Redeemer’s perfect God-consciousness. In effect, our identity “in Christ” becomes our primary identity, so we are no longer defined by the “old Adam” and its sins. No guilt-atonement is necessary.
The resurrection isn’t necessary, he argues, because our situation has to be essentially the same as that of the first disciples who knew Jesus when he walked the earth. But they were able to be saved by entering into fellowship with Christ before his death. While we enter into that fellowship by means of the image of Jesus presented in the New Testament and mediated by the church, it is the same kind of relationship that the first disciples had. Otherwise, ours would be a wholly different faith. But this implies that the resurrection can’t be essential to our redemption. l think Schleiermacher is a bit ambiguous at this point (or possibly I’m misreading him), because I don’t see how we can enter into a “living fellowship” with Christ now, unless he’s alive in some sense. And that would seem to make the resurrection essential at least as a means by which fellowship with the Redeemer is made possible for succeeding generations.
More fundamentally, though, Schleiermacher’s account shows how focused his overall theology is on the interior life of the individual. For him, redemption is not a public, historical event, but one that takes place in the subjective consciousness of each person. By contrast, the New Testament seems to portray the cross and resurrection of Jesus as epochal events that objectively changed not only our situation before God, but also constitute a turning-point in the cosmic story. Not just human beings’ self-consciousnesses, but their bodies, and indeed the entire cosmos, are to be redeemed from bondage to sin and decay.
You could argue that Schleiermacher’s account is a defensible “demythologization” of the language and imagery of the Bible and that it provides a more “existential” understanding of the Christian faith by dispensing with supernatural and/or metaphysical beliefs that many people no longer find plausible. But many Christians would protest that the public, embodied nature of our salvation is an essential aspect of the Christian message.
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Francis Spufford’s speech to religion’s cultured despisers
This essay from Francis Spufford has been getting flagged quite a bit in my little corner of the Internet. Spufford is an English author who writes mostly non-fiction (his recent book Red Plenty was the subject of a book event at Crooked Timber this summer). Spufford’s essay seems to be a summary of his new book Unapologetic, a defense of Christian faith that carries ths subtitle “Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.”
Since I’ve been deep in Schleiermacher recently, this set off some bells for me, and indeed Spufford’s argument, at least based on the article, does seem like a sort of updating of Schleiermacher’s argument for thinking of religion as an essential aspect of human nature which is rooted in a particular kind of feeling.
Spufford writes:
The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.
As Scheleirmacher said in his Speeches, religion is a “taste for the infinite,” and in The Christian Faith he defined it as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Doctrine, for Schleiermacher, is an elaboration of this feeling, but the feeling–piety–comes first and is more basic. Theology takes this as its starting point–it doesn’t try to “prove” God’s existence. (Schleiermacher does allow that philosophy may construct arguments for God’s existence on its own terms, but this has little to do with the life of living faith.) Like Spufford, Schleiermacher didn’t deny that religion makes truth-claims, but its living heart is feeling.
A Thinking Reed 