A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Ecclesiology

    The blog Inhabitatio Dei has a post describing a typology of ecclesiology, laid out along a “high-low” axis and a “strong-weak” axis:

    High Church Ecclesiology: High view of church history and tradition. Emphasizes the liturgy and above all the Eucharist. Churches are generally structured episcopally (i.e. through a hierarchy of bishops who stand in communion with each other). Emphasizes salvation as membership in the church through participation in the sacraments. Generally holds to infant baptism. Close connection between baptism and initiation into the broad community of faith.

    Low Church Ecclesiology: Generally suspicious of history and tradition. Emphasizes the Bible as the church’s ultimate authority and preaching is more central then the Eucharist or the liturgy. Churches tend to be structured congregationally (i.e. governed by the local congregation itself or through one or more elders appointed by congregations). Emphasizes salvation as the subjective appropriation and confession of faith in Christ. Generally holds to believers’ baptism. Close connection between salvation, baptism, and committed discipleship in community.

    Strong Ecclesiology: Holds a high view of the role of the church in the economy of salvation. Understands that the church is the means by which God is at work in the world. A strong view of the church as the ongoing embodied presence of Christ in the world. The church participates in the mission of God to redeem the world. Membership in the visible church community is indispensable to Christian life and the shape of Christian salvation.

    Weak Ecclesiology: Holds a humble and limited view of God’s role for the church in his plan of salvation. The church exists to strengthen and instruct the believer and to witness to God’s work of salvation that takes place solely through God’s action. The church does not participate in God’s action, but points away from itself to God’s action outside of human effort. The emphasis is on the invisible church, the universal body of all people who believe in Christ throughout the world. All Christians are members of this church and that is what is primary. Membership in a local congregation is for edification and growth, but is not central to salvation.

    I’m definitely high-church, but I’m not happy with the characterization of either strong or weak ecclessiology put forth here. For instance, I would definitely agree that the church is a means by which God is at work in the world, maybe even the primary means, but not that it’s the only means. Same goes for the church as the presence of Christ: I wouldn’t say the church is the embodied presence of Christ, but I definitely think the church is a sign of that presence.

    In other words, I tend to see the church in quasi-sacramental terms: it’s the visible sign of God’s presence and activity in the world, but not in such a way that it can lay exclusive claim to them. Or, to put a Lutheran spin on it, the church is the place where the proclamation of God’s grace takes place, even though that grace is, in itself, an omni-present reality. The proclamation is necessary because it’s how faith is created in us, but it’s not constitutive of God’s love for us. What I want to avoid is, on the one hand, a purely contractual model of the church where it’s entirely a human creation, and on the other a “transactional” model where what counts is getting hooked in to the metaphysical mojo that only the church can dispense. Yet another metaphor: the church is an outcropping of the age to come, a sign of the invisible made visible.

  • Niebuhr on the Ascension (sort of)

    I found this essay by H. Richard Niebuhr and it has some good stuff to say about the Ascension and the whole idea of Jesus being elevated to authority above all the powers of the world:

    What has happened is that this forsaken and rejected Servant of God has been given a name above every name among us. What has happened is that he has entered into the life of the human world as the most persistent of rulers, the most inescapable of companions. His eyes are still upon us when we deny him; he is forever warning us about our ambitions to be great; he is always there teaching us to pray. He is built into the structure of our conscience, not so that we cannot offend against him, but so that it is he who is offended in our offenses. He is present with his wound and in his rejection in all the companions whom in our great disloyalty we make the victims of our distrust of God and our diseased loyalties.

    The ocassion for finding it is that I’m finally getting around to reading Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and was looking for a little background. I hope to have some thoughts on the book up sometime soonish.

  • Unnecessary roughness

    John Schwenkler, who blogs here, wrote, in a comment to this post:

    [It’s] hard to see [given what I characterized as the “traditional” view of our place in the cosmic scheme of things — ed.] why we, unlike other animals, should be under an absolute (or even less than absolute) obligation not to consume members of other species. Put differently, there seems to me to be a slippery slope between a vegetarian ethic and the desire to “‘manage’ the natural world in order to make it over into an edenic pleasure garden where all creatures are protected” that is not present when one’s position on the rights of other animals is centered on the demand that they be raised in ways that promote their own flourishing, slaughtered humanely, and more generally thought of and treated with reverence and respect. Humanist “exceptionalism”, in other words, lends itself toward “well-meant benevolence” in much the same way as it can be used to excuse the mistreatment of other species, while what you’re (rightly) calling the “traditional view” at once permits us to feed on other animals in ways similar to those in which they are nourished by each other, demands that we do so in a restrained and respectful way that befits our natures and theirs, and prohibits us from trying to manage their environments and make them into something they aren’t.

    I think Clark’s response to this objection would be that refraining from killing and eating animals is not “well-meant benevolence” in the presumptuous sense of aiming to manage the biosphere. Earlier in the book he says that, whatever else may be true about the metaphysical status of us or our animal kin, it surely must be wrong to be the cause of avoidable harm.

    Clark writes (from an excerpt here):

    Consider then: it is not necessary to imprison, torture or kill animals if we are to eat. The laborious transformation of plant proteins into animal protein, indeed, is notoriously inefficient, and wastes a great deal of food that would greatly assist human beings in less carnivorous places. It is not necessary for us to do this: I say nothing of what may be necessary for the Eskimos, for whom the orthodox display a sudden, strange affection when confronted by zoophiles (though the health of Eskimos might be better served by supplying plant-food). It is not necessary for us, and our affection for other human beings would perhaps be better shown by ceasing to steal their plant protein in order to process it into a form that pleases our palates.

    In other words, refusing to eat meat is not an arrogant attempt at managing the natural order, but a refusal to be the cause of other creatures’ suffering when it isn’t necessary. Fundamentally, it’s about leaving them alone.

    This isn’t to say that Clark wouldn’t regard traditional animal husbandry as an improvement over our current practices. But even here he would question whether even “humane farming” really does respect the animals’ natures. Just to mention one point, even humanely raised animals are painfully slaughtered well before the end of their natural lifespan.

    Utilitarians like Peter Singer say that killing an animal (“humanely”) and replacing it with an animal that is, at least from our point of view, pretty much identical, can result in a net gain in utility. So the animal is not wronged if we kill her. But Clark wouldn’t go along with the idea that killing an animal doesn’t count as a harm. At least from the animal’s point of view it would seem to make a difference whether she lives or dies. So, I think there’s still a case to be made that unnecessary (even if “humane”) killing is, at least prima facie, unjustified.

    It’s sometimes said that, if we didn’t raise them for food, domesticated farm animals wouldn’t exist. Whether or not that’s true, it surely doesn’t follow that we can do whatever we like with them, anymore than you can torture or murder your child just because he wouldn’t exist if not for you. Though, if it is true, it may speak to John’s original point: if farm animals are, in a sense, artifacts of human intervention, then it can’t be interference in a natural process if we stop killing them for food. Besides, if we’re really concerned that our domestic cattle, pigs, and chickens might become extinct, we could always set up animal preserves to make sure that their kind will be perpetuated.

    Of course, it would be foolish to expect an act of human forbearance on that kind of scale anytime soon, which is why I personally would be happy just to see a large-scale shift to more traditional methods of farming. And there are plenty of self-interested reasons for human beings to start treating farm animals better (the environmental and health costs of industrial meat chief among them).

  • Thoughts about the Ascension and other faiths

    Today at church we observed the feast of the Ascension and our pastor preached what I thought was a fine sermon. His message, in essence, was that the Ascension is important because it shows that the love that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is affirmed to be the sovereign force over all of creation. Because Jesus, as Paul says in the reading from Ephesians is now seated “above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come,” we know that the self-giving love that characterized his life and ministry also characterizes reality at its deepest level.

    Though it didn’t come up in the sermon, this got me to thinking that the Ascension (and the related feast of Christ the King) presents a stumbling block to any thoroughgoing religious pluralism. It’s one thing to affirm that Jesus is our way to the divine, a way that we have found helpful. It’s another to affirm that Jesus – the crucified and risen one – is the sovereign lord of all creation. This implies that those who don’t affirm this are wrong about a fundamental fact of reality.

    This doesn’t mean, though, that adherents of other faiths can’t perceive the power of the kind of love that Jesus embodied and, seeing it, give their allegiance to it. In fact, if they do that, they’re acting in alignment with what Christians believe to be the deepest truth about reality. Just as many theologians, including early church fathers like Justin Martyr, believed that non-Christians could have access to the logos that Christians believe was incarnate in Jesus, we can say that those who follow this path of love are in touch with the same reality that we believe was manifested in Jesus’ life and which reigns supreme over all lesser powers.

  • The humanist half-way house

    God save us even from well-meant benevolence. It is possible to be sure, in individual cases, what is or is not to an entity’s profit or harm. It seems entirely obvious that we should not wantonly do harm, but only (at the most) for our necessities. That we should do good is a much more dangerous thesis: it is not one I could conscientiously deny, but equally I cannot wholly affirm it, whether for beasts or birds or men. Very often, when we think to do good we are only enlarging our self-esteem. I have not doubt at all that that would be the chief motive in any attempt on our part to turn the wilderness to paradise, and we would therefore fail. It is better to do small works within the wilderness than one large work to change the whole. (Stephen R.L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals, p. 167)

    Clark is talking here about an imagined attempt to “manage” the natural world in order to make it over into an edenic pleasure garden where all creatures are protected. Earlier he had considered the oft-repeated objection against animal rights that it would entail an obligation for us to protect the rights of animals in the wild:

    To respect the interests and ways of our fellows is incumbent upon us: to respect, not necessarily to enforce them. Much of nature may often seem to be inextricably involved in a sort of reciprocated injustice, where prey and predator are at once individually at odds and racially symbiotic. There may be little we can, or should, do about this: it is not the world we think we would have chosen, but interference will usually make things worse–tares and wheat must grow together till the Day (Matthew 13:29f.). Let us abandon our own iniquities before troubling overmuch about what is done under necessity by our undomesticated kin. [D.G] Ritchie (p. 109) sneered at [H.S.] Salt that if animals had rights we must set about defending them against other animals, and organize proper juries of their peers to try the case: a symptom of Ritchie’s imperialistic outlook, that he could seriously suppose that we, the criminals par excellence, were worthy as police. (p. 35)

    This laissez-faire attitude is at odds with more conventional liberal-humanitarian thinking, which tends to be deeply consequentialist. But Clark is suggesting that, when we come up against the natural world, we run into something that is beyond our powers to manage. The conditions are too complex, and the consequences too unpredictable, to yield to the utilitarian calculus. An analogy with our attempts to manage other societies – often at the point of a gun – is obvious.

    But Clark’s reasoning doesn’t give comfort to traditional conservatives either, since what he is essentially urging us to recognize is that we are one species among many. And that we should take our place in the whole rather than try to master or overwhelm it. To recognize that we are part of something, and that the other parts are owed consideration, would require us to limit our own drives to reduce the natural world to so much material for our projects. Even a lot of mainstream environmentalism is characterized by a kind of technophilia and puts its hopes in the invention of some new technology that will let us keep on pretty much as before.

    Clark’s point is that humanism – the idea that humans are special and therefore entitled to exploit nature pretty much as we see fit – is licensed neither by traditional philosophy and religion, or by modern science. For the traditional view we are a link in the Great Chain of Being, special, maybe, in occupying a kind of “amphibious” position between the material and spiritual realms (though, even this is debatable), but still just a part of the cosmic whole, with entire hierarchies of beings above us. Meanwhile, the worldview of scientific naturalism gives no comfort to humanism: we are just as much an accident of matter as anything else and, from an objective point of view, no more or less important than anything else.

    Humanism, then, is a kind of half-way house between the old Christian metaphysic and the new scientistic one. Except, having lopped off Christianity’s spiritual supports, its valuation of human beings is rationally unsupported. And Clark sees humanism as more pernicious than either traditional metaphysics or a thoroughgoing naturalism. The latter might at least prod us to see our projects in a more proportionate light rather than of ridiculously inflated importance. Instead, humanism, the sheer assertion of our own superiority, ends up licensing all manners of depradation.

    This argument is somewhat similar to John Gray’s in Straw Dogs, except Clark is far more comfortable with traditional Christian metaphysics. As a kind of Christian neo-Platonist he sees all parts of creation as participating in God, and, therefore, as worthy of consideration. I find this deep-green variety of Christian Platonism rather appealing.

  • The literature of peace

    Here’s a review of an interesting-sounding book on pacifism and English literature (though, given the subject, the review spends a surprising amount of time talking about Tolstoy).

  • Friday metal – Tony Stark edition

    This afternoon I went to see Iron Man with my pal Andrew. Big fun – exactly what a superhero movie should be. Definitely a cut above some recent superhero mediocrities; the A-list cast certainly didn’t hurt. Robert Downy Jr. has become one of my favorite actors in recent years.

    So, naturally:

    Oh, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away by mentioning that this classic Suicidal Tendencies song is playing during one scene where Stark is working in his lab:

    p.s. Dan McCarthy has a good take on the movie (with spoilers) from a suitably comic geeky p.o.v. I liked how it tipped its hat to the fanboys (SHIELD, Jarvis, etc.) without being inaccessible to normal people – er, I mean, non-comic fans.

  • The death knell of factory farming?

    Matt Halteman has a good round up of coverage on the Pew factory farming report. Could be that things are coming to a head as the confluence of a lot of factors (climate change, the price of oil, Pollan-inspired foodieism) seems to be convincing more and more people that our industrial food system is unsustainable.

  • Gravel the libertarian?

    According to several of those political quizzes circulating on the Internet, Alaska-Senator-turned-bitter-curmudgeon/longshot-Democratic-presidential-candidate Mike Gravel was one of my top matches for president.

    I guess should be heartened, then, to see that Gravel is apparently now pursuing the Libertarian nomination.

    Gravel’s platform is actually an odd grab-bag of proposals, including replacing the income tax with a “progressive fair tax” and a universal health care proposal. But given his views on the Iraq war, immigration, civil liberties, the drug war, and same-sex marriage, t wouldn’t be completely inaccurate to describe his views as left-libertarianish.

    The campaign’s centerpiece is something Gravel calls The National Initiative for Democracy, which is a kind of national referendum mechanism and an interesting proposal for a more direct form of democracy.

    Of course, Gravel’s fringe ideas and his cranky and sardonic manner don’t exactly scream viable candidacy. Personally, I like cranky and sardonic people, but I suspect I’m in the minority here.

  • The church and social justice

    Derek and Christopher have both been pondering the issue. Also relevant is this post on Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society from Fr. Chris.

    I’ve wondered from time to time if part of the problem isn’t that the church has lost the idea of vocation. Instead of equipping lay people for ministry in the world (including, for those who are called to it, politics), we seem to have shifted to a model where the institutional church is seen as the primary locus of Christian political activity, as a kind of social service agency/political advocacy organization. By contrast, a more vocational model might focus more on spiritual and moral formation in the context of classic Christian practices like worship, prayer, Bible study, and works of mercy.

    This isn’t to say that churches shouldn’t speak and act corporately on issues of social concern, but maybe they should be more selective about it. It’s too easy for the church to become identified with a partisan political agenda when it insists on speaking about every issue under the sun, especially ones where sorting out the right position depends on a lot of contentious judgments about matters of empirical fact. The church speaks most powerfully, it seems to me, when it can speak with moral clarity rooted in fundamental Christian principles.