A Thinking Reed

Month: March 2013

  • Gary Dorrien’s social gospel

    At the heart of modern capitalist economics is the idea of infinite accumulation. At the heart of Christian social teaching, however, is a strong conception of distributive justice and the related notion that there is such a thing as having enough. The prevailing American preoccupation with piling up money and material possessions is spiritually deadening. The readiness to defend ill-begotten privileges with force is immoral. The prevailing view of nature as a commodity to be conquered and exploited degrades the sacredness of creation. These themes have marked Christian ethics at its best. Figures such as [Walter] Rauschenbusch and [William] Temple were powerful advocates for progressive Christianity, partly because their minds were rooted in the biblical and spiritual wisdom of the past, partly because they were alive to new challenges and horizons for the church, and partly because they believed that Christianity has an important social mission. If liberal Christianity is to regain its public voice, it must recover this spirit.

    That’s the conclusion to Gary Dorrien’s 1995 book Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (pp. 375-6). It traces the history of liberal, mainly Protestant, Christian social ethics in America from the social gospel period, through the rise of Niebuhrian “Christian realism,” to the more recent development of liberation, black, feminist, ecological, and other “pluralizing” theologies.

    According to Dorrien, a signature concern of Christian social ethics–one that runs like a thread through all these movements–is extending democratic principles to the economic sphere. This has taken a variety of forms: Rauschenbusch’s calls for a “cooperative commonwealth,” Niebuhr’s early Marxist-influenced analysis of social power and class conflict and his later evolution toward New Deal-style reformist liberalism, and the aspiration toward democratic forms of socialism among liberationist voices. Contrary to the impression you might get from the current political scene, American Christian social ethics has long had a strongly social-democratic, if not outright socialist, bent.

    Dorrien is far from uncritical of this tradition. He agrees with some–though not all–of Niebuhr’s criticisms of the social gospel tradition. He acknowledges the failures of central-planning approaches to the economy. He also points out that more recent theologians’ calls for “socialism” often have a dreamy, unreal air, and they fail to spell out what they want in concrete terms.

    But Christians can’t give up on the need to press for greater distributive justice. Dorrien reviews some recent experiments with greater economic democracy (a term he generally prefers to “socialism”). These include worker ownership and management of firms and public mutual funds for directing investment. In general, he prefers  pragmatic experiments in making the economic system more just and democratically accountable that don’t rely on overly centralizing power in a bureaucratic state. Dorrien also emphasizes the ecological impact of economic growth and the pressing need to pursue distributive justice and “eco”-justice simultaneously.

    Neoconservative Christian ethicists like Michael Novak have turned their back on this tradition and embraced what they call “democratic capitalism” as the only viable economic system after the fall of Communism. But Dorrien points out that actually existing capitalism not only fails the tests of distributive justice and ecological sustainability–it leads to a cultural coarsening that conservatives themselves deplore, even though they tend to blame it on “liberal elites.”

    Dorrien is realistic about the state of liberal, mainline Protestantism. Too often, it has focused more on making sweeping social statements and lobbying Washington than on nurturing vibrant religious communities. While he disagrees with those, like Stanley Hauerwas, who are critical of Christian attempts to create a more just society, Dorrien argues that a progressive Christianity that isn’t rooted in a genuine “spiritual experience of Christ” has lost its reason for being. It’s because of what Christians believe God has accomplished in Christ that they act to foster signs of the in-breaking Kingdom in the social order:

    The kingdom to which Christians belong and owe their loyalty is partially prefigured in the world; it calls Christians to bring the transforming virtues of love, peace, and justice into the world; it calls Christians to join sides with the poor and oppressed to attain justice; but it does not make political success the criterion of its action or seek power over the social order. The social ethic of the way of Christ is an ethic of faithfulness to the prophetic biblical ideals of freedom, equality, community, and redemptive love. It calls the body of Christ to be a moral community that incarnates these ideals in the world and lives faithfully by them. It seeks to bring sustainable justice and peace to the world but does not live by the world’s tests for worthwhile activity (pp. 374-5).

    This is a responsible social ethic for a post-Christendom world: one that embraces  the duty to work for structural justice without surrendering Christian distinctiveness or assuming the role of “chaplain” to the existing order.

  • Technology, love, and paying attention

    I really enjoyed this post from Michael Sacasas at his blog “The Frailest Thing.” He argues that it’s not smartphones (or any other attention-grabbing gadget) per se that make it hard for us to pay attention to the people we encounter–it’s us.

    It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all.

    This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved.

    Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

    Even though this is a problem endemic to the human condition, technology can exacerbate it:

    But the smartphone is not altogether irrelevant, nor is any other technology to which we might lend our attention. The thing about attention is that we can only direct it toward one thing at a time. So when we are in the presence of another person, the smartphone in the pocket may make it harder to pay attention to that person. But the smartphone isn’t doing a thing. It’s just there. It’s not the smartphone, it’s you and it’s me. It’s about understanding our own proclivities. It’s about understanding how the presence of certain material realities interact with our ability to direct our intention and perception. It’s about remembering the great battle we fight simply to be decent human beings from one moment to the next and doing what we can to make it more likely that we will win rather than lose that battle.

    This made me think of a post I had recently read by Frank Schaeffer as part of his series of “12 commandments of happy parenting”:

    Never give a child your divided attention once you’re playing with them, unless it’s an emergency. That doesn’t mean you should give them your attention all the time. Far from it.

    Playing alone is good. But don’t be rude when you are being a hands-on parent.

    Watching a young mother or father texting friends while his or her child is trying to talk to them is just plain cringe making. It’s teaching a lack of empathy and respect.

    It’s also teaching all the wrong priorities about what is important in life. Don’t be surprised if you tune your child out and later your child tunes you out.

    I see this all the time. I’m also guilty of it. Though I don’t have a smartphone and I generally avoid text messaging, it can be a challenge to give my kids my undivided attention. Not always, mind you–there are times when I’m fully and effortlessly engaged in some game we’re playing, or reading a book with my daughter, or making my son laugh through various facial contortions. But often–too often–my mind and attention are (at least partially) somewhere else. Maybe I’m thinking about work or worrying about something that needs done around the house. Or maybe I’d rather be reading a book or surfing the Internet.

    It may also be, as some have suggested, that our multi-media, information-saturated lives (for some values of “our” anyway) are actually changing the way our minds work, diminishing our ability to maintain focused attention on one thing at a time. If so, that’s an even deeper problem.

    Regardless, it does seem that Sacasas is right that giving someone our attention requires an act of will or a kind of discipline. Maybe this is partly why so many spiritual traditions have cultivated practices that require people to focus their attention. I’m thinking especially of various forms of meditation and contemplative prayer. What these practices seem to have in common is an effort to focus on a reality beyond the self–to the extent that the ego recedes into the background.

    And one of the “fruits” of such practice is–ideally at least–that we become the kind of people who can more easily set aside our own desires and be attentive to others and their needs. We can certainly invoke here the example of Jesus, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to make each person he encountered feel the full force of his loving attention. To love others–including especially our children–as Jesus loves us would seem to require, at a minimum, learning to give them our attention.

  • The Nonviolent God

    One of my worries about J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement was that I didn’t think a determined critic would be persuaded by his case for seeing God as essentially nonviolent. He offers some suggestive interpretations of various New Testament passages, but there’s no developed theology of the divine nature or an overarching argument for how his nonviolent understanding of God fits with the Bible as a whole.

    In light of that, I’m excited to see that Weaver’s next book, The Nonviolent God, looks like it will tackle just this issue:

    This bold new statement on the nonviolence of God challenges long-standing assumptions of divine violence in theology, the violent God pictured in the Old Testament, and the supposed violence of God in Revelation. In The Nonviolent God J. Denny Weaver argues that since God is revealed in Jesus, the nonviolence of Jesus most truly reflects the character of God.

    According to Weaver, the way Christians live — Christian ethics — is an ongoing expression of theology. Consequently, he suggests positive images of the reign of God made visible in the narrative of Jesus — nonviolent practice, forgiveness and restorative justice, issues of racism and sexism, and more — in order that Christians might live more peacefully.

    I’m not a fully convinced pacifist, but I am convinced that the relationship between God, violence, and Christian ethics is hugely important–and that those of us in the mainline traditions have a lot to learn from “peace church” perspectives. So I’m looking forward to reading this book (which, alas, isn’t scheduled to be published till November).

  • “Sexual complementarity”–important but not essential

    The main “philosophical” argument against same-sex marriage/marriage equality seems to be that it denies that “sexual complementarity” is at the core of what marriage is.

    Some versions of this argument take what I think is an implausible view of the metaphysical status of what they call the “conjugal union” of a man and woman, but that aside, I’m prepared to agree that there is a strong connection between marriage, sexual difference, and procreation. That is, a large part of the reason why marriage exists in the first place is because when men and women have sex, they sometimes produce babies. And society has an interest in ensuring that children enter the world and are raised in a relatively stable context. So in that sense, SSM opponents are right that there is a strong link between sexual difference, procreation, and the purpose of marriage.

    So, let’s concede that the coupling of a man and a woman, with offspring to follow, is the “typical” instance of a marriage. I’m even willing to call it the “central” instance if you like. What doesn’t follow from this fact is that marriage can’t be extended “by analogy,” so to speak, to cover other instances that resemble but also differ from this typical one. And of course this is already the case. Couples who can’t or don’t choose to have kids are just as married as couples who do–and no one blinks at this. This doesn’t mean that “man-woman-kid(s)” isn’t still the characteristic form marriage tends to take; it just recognizes that not everyone’s circumstances are the same and that marriage performs functions that are important even without the presence of children. (My wife and I were just as married during the decade prior to having children as we are now.)

    Similarly, then, with SSM. It represents another analogical extension of marriage to cover people who depart in some respects from the typical form. People who want the monogamy, fidelity, and permanence of marriage, but whose chosen partner is a member of the same sex, can comfortably fit under the broad umbrella of marriage. This doesn’t require us to deny that there is an important link between marriage and procreation, but rather to recognize that marriage serves multiple ends–not all of which will necessarily be realized in every relationship.

    Anti-SSM activists, such as those profiled in today’s New York Times, argue that if we stop enforcing the “norm” of sexual complementarity, we will also undermine the norms of fidelity, monogamy, and permanence. Adam Serwer pointed out that this is an odd argument since these are the values that movement for marriage equality is trying to uphold. But it also strikes me as a kind of category mistake. Heterosexuals aren’t going to stop being attracted to members of the opposite sex because gay people can get married. This isn’t a “norm” that needs to be enforced.* It’s a reality that needs to be recognized and accommodated. But then so is homosexuality. The question is whether marriage is big enough to include both straight and gay couples who want to make lives together–lives that will in many, if not most, cases include the raising of children. I think it is.

    ——————————————————————————————

    *I think it’s worth noting that there’s a case to be made that same-sex marriage could actually strengthen “opposite-sex” marriage, though not necessarily in ways that would make traditionalists happy. Consider this from theologian/biblical scholar L. William Countryman: “Spouses in heterosexual marriages will have much to learn . . . from partners in stable, long-term homosexual relationships. They have long experienced the difficulties of maintaining enduring relationships in a society which is even less supportive of them than of heterosexual couples; and they have had to do it without socially prescribed divisions of roles and labor. . . . On a deeper level, the re-understanding of womanliness and manliness in our changed circumstances will make headway only if the conversation leading toward it includes both heterosexuals and homosexuals” (Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex, p. 260).

  • A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?”

  • Cautious optimism about the new pope

    Look, I’m a Protestant, so no pope is ever going to satisfy me. And I totally get that progressive Catholics would be upset by the same-old, same-old on women’s rights, LGBT rights, and other issues about which the Catholic hierarchy remains steadfastly conservative.

    But there are reasons for cautious optimism about Pope Francis (né Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio). He is, by most accounts I’ve seen, a humble man attuned to the condition of the world’s poorest people and less hung up on doctrinal minutiae than his predecessor. He also appears to be more oriented toward ecumenism and interfaith relations and less concerned with asserting the superiority of Catholicism in all things. As a Jesuit, he reflects a tradition of engagement with and openness to the world that can be very appealing. I don’t expect him to revolutionize Catholicism, but these provide hints that he could do some real good.

    One major concern that’s been raised is whether he’s got it in him to undertake certain reforms needed within the Vatican machinery, and given his age (and Benedict’s re-establishment of the precedent of papal retirements), it’s not unthinkable that his papacy may have little impact at all. But as a fellow Christian I’m certainly happy to pray for the new pontiff and pray that he will represent the love of Jesus to a world sorely in need of it (as we’re all called to do!).

  • “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer?”

    In this month’s Christian Century, Anglican theologian Charles Hefling offers a take on the Atonement that’s very close to where I find myself on this nowadays. He rehearses the well-known points that the church has never dogmatically codified a particular theory of the Atonement but has cultivated a variety of models. He also gives a fair hearing to the penal substitution theory, acknowledging that it not only offers a fairly straightforward explanation but also has great emotional and imaginative power. Nonetheless, he thinks it’s fatally flawed, due to its reliance on a retributive understanding of justice:

    Recall the beginning of the argument summarized above: God is just. That sets the context for everything else, and the sequel makes it clear that by justice is meant, more specifically, retributive justice, which consists in attaching rewards to merit and penalties to fault. Now justice, so defined, is an attribute of the God described all through the Bible. There can be no objection on that score. The problem, rather, is that penal substitution cannot be squeezed inside the same definition. To punish the guilty is just. They deserve it. The innocent do not. To punish them is not just; it is just outrageous. But Christ was innocent, tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15). Nobody would deny that Pilate, Caiaphas and the rest acted unjustly; but if by doing what they did they were executing a divine plan—if God intended to punish his Son by their hands—then evidently God is not just after all.

    From this internal contradiction there are two escape routes, one incredible, the other reprehensible. The first introduces the remarkable claim that Jesus was guilty, but only because the guilt of others was transferred from them to him. This expedient so undermines the very idea of moral responsibility that it would be better not to speak of justice at all. Guilt in the relevant sense is not the sort of thing that can be siphoned out of one person and into another. Nor is it any better to argue that punishing the innocent, though admittedly wrong as a rule, can in exceptional cases be just, provided it serves to “send a message” that dramatizes the heinousness of disobedience in order to deter those who might be inclined to disobey. There is a name for that: terrorism.

    Hefling goes on to emphasize is that this is a sub-personal way of understanding atonement–one based on a model of impersonal justice instead of reconciliation between persons. Forgiveness isn’t just letting someone off from a penalty; it consists of mending a personal relationship, which requires “a change in both the forgiver and the forgiven.” And a willingness to accept suffering “is intrinsic to what forgiveness, in the personal sense, is.”

    Why so? Because, in the first place, evil is like the good it undoes in that it is infectious. It propagates itself. Suppose, then, that I have injured you. As a person, you are free to choose your response. If you choose to retaliate, you perpetuate the evil by causing a new injury. The choice may be wholly justifiable, but it is no less injurious for that. If instead you choose to hold a grudge, to brood on your injury and cultivate your dudgeon, you will still perpetuate the evil, internally, by diminishing yourself, souring your character and becoming your own victim as well as mine. On the other hand, if you choose to forgive, you are choosing to absorb the infection, as it were; to contain its self-diffusion, to forgo the gratifications of revenge, resentment, self-vindication and righteous indignation. Furthermore, you are choosing to make your willingness known to me, to offer me your friendship, to accord me a status and value no less than yours, all without denying my offense or ceasing to be my victim. At the same time, conversely, until I have chosen to acknowledge you as such, to own the injury, ask for your benevolence and reciprocate your offer, the forgiveness that we must both choose if it is to occur has yet to be fully chosen.

    In this regard, Hefling calls forgiveness “an instance, perhaps the defining instance, of a more general, more inclusive pattern” exhibited in the teaching of Jesus.

    Also, and most important here, it is enacted in the way he is reported to have met the final surge of hostility to that teaching and to himself. The hostility was probably inevitable; in that sense it was “necessary that the Christ should suffer” (Luke 24:26). But the necessity was not absolute. Things could have gone otherwise, to judge by the Gospels. Jesus could have chosen to flee, to fight arrest, to summon 12 legions of angels. All these he chose to refuse.

    By so doing he chose to bear the cross, and his choice gave the bearing of it a meaning it would not otherwise have. Among thousands of Roman executions, this one is meaningful—not in the way a quantum of suffering might be meaningful, weighed in the scales of retributive justice, but meaningful as a communication, a word, an expression of willingness consistent with what Jesus had until then been expressing in deed and speech.

    Has all this got anything to do with atonement? No. Not in the sense that because Christ accepted his suffering we do not have to suffer. It is the other way around. He accepted it because we do have to. His was a cross that had always been ours, the one way open to us, in a skewed world, for putting a stop to the consequences of our own malice without adding to them. Accepting that way, the way of the cross, was an act of solidarity with us and an offer of solidarity with him—an appeal for us to follow him by willingly taking up whatever crosses the world imposes, by making them occasions for joy, by forgiving.

    Hefling anticipates that this could be seen as a “merely” exemplarist theory–that Jesus’ passion provides nothing more than an example for us to imitate. But this objection overlook the fact that taking up our crosses is not something that comes naturally to us.  We depend on grace to be conformed to the pattern established by Christ. This is why we need to recover the teaching that God effects reconciliation not just through the Son, but through both the Son and the Spirit (the two “hands of God” as Irenaeus put it).

    One of the peculiarities of Western Christianity has been a tendency to speak of God’s initiative in reconciling his human creatures as though it were entirely a matter of sending his Son into the world. But God’s Spirit too has been sent—and continues to be. On the well-founded assumption that this second divine initiative complements the incarnation, there is reason to suppose that part of the indwelling Spirit’s job description is to be the “drawing” that attracts self-sufficient persons to the self-emptying person of Christ. In other words, the motivation for choosing this exemplar is itself a gift, “the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us” (Rom. 5:5). It would follow that reconciliation—atonement, if you like—can be understood as the action of a tri-personal God, rather than a transaction between the Father and the Son.

    The reconciliation effected by the tri-personal God exhibits a form of justice that is more restorative than retributive. God brings good from the evil of the cross not in the sense of exacting punishment but in breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat violence to make reconciliation possible.

    Presumably God has always been able to purge the world of its evils with an apocalyptic blast of power. Instead he has chosen to conform to the same justice he requires of his human creatures, to submit to the conditions of at-one-ment with them, to become all they are and are to be. And that is good news.

    Hefling’s account has some obvious affinities with J. Denny Weaver’s non-violent Christus Victor motif as well as the more nuanced “exemplarist” theories I discussed here. A common thread is the rejection of a retributive understanding of justice on either biblical or more general moral-philosophical grounds. Although one can certainly cite biblical texts on both sides of this issue, I think Weaver, Hefling, and others have a strong case that a non-retributive understanding of atonement is more consistent with the teachings and practice of Jesus himself.

  • Why the ministry of women needs no defense

    British evangelical theologian Steve Holmes explains why he will no longer defend the ministry of women in the church. (Not exactly what you might think.)

    I can’t say that this has ever been a “live” issue for me. At nearly every church I’ve been involved with as an adult, women’s ministry was a given. For a year, I did attend a Episcopal parish on the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum that might’ve blanched at having a woman preside at the altar, but otherwise, all the churches I’ve belonged to were firmly in the “full equality” camp. The head pastor at our current church is a woman, and I’m looking forward to her baptizing our son next month.

    Not once has it occurred to me that the ministries of the women at these churches were “invalid” or otherwise theologically defective. What Holmes writes applies to most of the women pastors I’ve known: “In the face of so evident a work of the Spirit as was seen in her life, who am I to even consider the question of whether God had called her to preach?”

  • Everybody please stop focusing on “drones”

    Whatever you think of Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the C.I.A., one thing it doesn’t seem to have accomplished is to get people to focus on the president’s authority to kill people he designates as threats. This, rather than the use of “drones” per se, is the real issue–the one that needs serious debate and critical examination. Drones are just one means by which the president can order people on the “kill-list” to be dispatched. From a rule-of-law or civil-liberties perspective, it’s irrelevant if he uses a drone–rather than a missile, or a ninja, or whatever–to do this.

    Confusion on this point allows defenders of so-called targeted killing to pose as humanitarians. They point out, not without justification, that unmanned drones can be more precise and kill fewer bystanders than other forms of aerial warfare. But this point–while not unimportant–obscures the issue that clear-headed critics of the program have been harping on. That issue is ordering the killing of people–whether U.S. citizens or not–without anything resembling due process as traditionally understood, and with a great deal of secrecy and with little by way of transparency or accountability. This power, rather than the use of a particular technology, is what should really worry us and is what we need to be debating.

  • Gerald O’Collins on original sin

    I’ve been thinking about original sin a little more, partly because we’re having our son baptized next month, and we met last week with our pastor to discuss the theology of baptism, as well as some of the practical details. (She observed that most of the parents who seem to have a problem with the church’s teaching on original sin are first-time parents.)

    Catholic theologian Gerald O’Collins has a helpful discussion of the issue in his book Jesus Our Redeemer. He says that the story of the fall in the opening chapters of Genesis tells the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience “initiating an avalanche of sin.” “The opening chapters of Genesis present the sinfulness that emerged at humanity’s origins and left an enduring heritage of evil in options against God, oneself, other human beings, and created nature” (p. 51).

    He goes on to ask whether these stories are myths, history, or something in between:

    These stories, as we have just seen, express the perennial human condition. But what kind of stories are they? What is their historical status? Traditionally the Adam story has been understood, as in the classical treatment by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to present an initial period of perfection in creation and an original innocence that ended with a ‘one-point’ event, the fall of Adam and Eve into sin. Yet the Adam story need not be interpreted as necessarily entailing the first human couple (monogenism) spoiling a state of primordial happiness by one spectacular sin. It could also apply to a number of original human beings (polygenism), who, right from the start of their existence, through sin drifted away from what God intended for them and so left to their descendants a world which lacks what God wanted, a world in which manifold evil hampers the proper exercise of freedom. (pp. 51-2)

    O’Collins later connects this with what it means to say that children are “born into sin.”

    Serious reflection on the practice of infant baptism involves us in pondering the nature of original sin itself. First, since as such it is not voluntary, personal sin or sin in the primary sense, we do better to put inverted commas around the term and so indicate that ‘original sin’ is sin by way of analogy. Some Christians speak of ‘original sin’ as involving collective guilt inherited from the sin of the first human beings. To be sure, it is important to recall how the whole human race, right from birth, is afflicted by the presence of evil. Yet here also it is advisable to use inverted commas, since any such ‘collective guilt’ which we inherit simply by being born into the world does not entail the personal responsibility and guilt (or guilt in the primary sense) of newborn children. Second, Christians have often spoken of ‘original sin’ as a taint or stain which is transmitted biologically through human history and from which baptism washes us clean. It could be better to lay the emphasis on what human beings lack at birth and on the context into which they are born. We are born lacking the incorporation into Christ (or life ‘in Christ) and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (e.g. Rom. 6: 11, 23; 5; 1 Cor. 3:16) to which we are called but which we do not yet enjoy. Furthermore, our full freedom and spiritual growth are circumscribed and hampered by the manifold presence of evil in the world into which we come. This lack and the context translate and summarize more convincingly what ‘original sin’ entails. (pp. 74-5)

    This accounts for the experience of original sin as something that precedes and binds us (as I tried to describe here) without the more objectionable features of some popular versions of the doctrine.