A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Better copyediting needed

    Oxford University Press is publishing a pocket version of Phyllis Tickle’s popular Divine Hours series (an adaptation of the Daily Office/Liturgy of the Hours), which sounds like a worthwhile project.

    I couldn’t help, though, but snicker at this line on the book’s website page: “Tickle draws her texts primarily from the Book of Common Prayer and the writings of the Church Fathers, and includes memorable devotional and meditative poems by Cleland McAfee, Charles Wesley, Phos Hilaron, and others.”

    Ah yes, Phos Hilaron, one of the great hymnodists of the church…

    (Cheap shot, I know)

  • As the Anglican Communion turns (and turns, and turns…)

    I’m sure others better informed than I am will have plenty to say about this NT Wright interview, but I have a couple of questions for Anglican/Episcopalian readers: Has the Episcopal Church violated its own canon laws in proceeding with the election of Gene Robinson? And in what sense does the structure of the Anglican Communion forbid a national church from proceeding with something like this? My impression was that the various provinces were more or less autonomous. But +Wright’s comments make this all sound like a foregone conclusion.

    Also, I can’t help but bristle a bit at +Wright’s tone here: it brings out my patriotism. We’re not gonna let some snooty Brits tell us what to do! Spirit of ’76, baby! Just sayin’. Actually, I’m sort of in an ambiguous position here: I’m a non-Episcopalian attending an Episcopal parish that has gone out of its way not to align itself formally with either “side” in the current unpleasantness. So, if the “schismatics” are to be “pruned” I really have no idea which branch I’d be sitting on.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 12: The Incarnation and the Holy Spirit

    In chapter 12 Augustine considers the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation. Though we say that Christ was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, we don’t call him the son of the Spirit. Should we say that his divine nature is the Son of the Father but that his human nature was the Son of the Spirit? No, because that would divide his person.

    He goes on to discuss the various senses in which we might say something is born of something else and the different respects in which someone might be called a son (by birth, by adoption). His point is that not everything which is born of something else is called that thing’s son, nor are all sons sons by birth. One wonders whether part of Augustine’s intent here is to counteract attempts to portray Christianity as another pagan myth where the god impregnates a human woman with his offspring.

    So, we don’t want to call Jesus the Son of the Spirit, and yet the Spirit plays a special role in his conception and birth. Augustine’s explanation is to connect this to grace:

    Wherefore, since a thing may be “born” of something else, yet not in the fashion of a “son,” and conversely, since not everyone who is called son is born of him whose son he is called–this is the very mode in which Christ was “born” of the Holy Spirit (yet not as a son), and of the Virgin Mary as a son–this suggests to us the grace of God by which a certain human person, no merit whatever preceding, at the very outset of his existence, was joined to the Word of God in such a unity of person that the selfsame one who is Son of Man should be Son of God, and the one who is Son of God should be Son of Man. Thus, in his assumption of human nature, grace came to be natural to that nature, allowing no power to sin. This is why grace is signified by the Holy Spirit, because he himself is so perfectly God that he is also called God’s Gift. Still, to speak adequately of this–even if one could–would call for a very long discussion.

    Being born of the Holy Spirit indicates, then, that the unity effected between the human and divine natures is from first to last an act of God’s grace. This forecloses both adoptionism and safeguards the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus. Speaking of him as the Son of the Holy Spirit and Mary might indicate some kind of human-divine hybrid. Instead, the orthodox teaching is the human nature was fully united to the divine life, by grace alone, without ceasing to be human.

  • Christian peace bloggers

    I’ve joined a “Christian Peace Bloggers” webring started by Michael Westmoreland-White of the Levellers blog. I think I properly fit into the catergory of “someone who believes war is a very last resort” and “that Christians are commanded to be working for peace so that such a resort doesn’t come.” In other words, I’m not a pacifist, but I definitely hold to a strict version of just war theory and think that war should emphatically not be regarded as a routine policy tool.

    The idea behind the blog ring is for members to post something on war & peace about once a week, so hopefully some useful reflections will come out of that commitment.

  • Faith seeking understanding

    Deconstructionist theologian Don Cupitt urges the church to trade in its traditional reliance on western metaphysics, the view that “behind the flux of experience there had to be something Real, one, intelligible to us, and perfect” with a radical rethinking of Christian faith based on a kind of post-Derridean anti-realism:

    We used to assume that we were presented with a ready-made world, with a built-in order that we were predesigned to be able to grasp. But since Kant, and especially through the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, the old western metaphysics has now been radically destabilised, deconstructed. The old west has gone.

    It’s not at all clear what this post-metaphysical Christianity would look like but Cupitt alludes to a faith that “cannot now be more than a practical orientation of our attention, our affections, our life towards One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known.”

    I have three questions for Cupitt here. First, is he essentially attacking a straw man? The classical western theological tradition has never simply held to “a belief in one ready-made truth of things out there, waiting to be copied into our language.” There has always been a kind of dialectic between “negative” and “positive” theology and an awareness of the limits of our thinking to grasp the divine, balanced with the firm conviction that knowledge of God is possible.

    Second, he assumes the cogency of Derridean deconstruction with a kind of “everybody knows this” tone without anything by way of argument or evidence. What reason do we have to accept this? Not only is such a move far from universally accepted among theologians and philosophers (to put it mildly), it’s not clear what a cogent argument for anti-realism would even look like since, according to anti-realism, there’s no one way the world is, including, presumably, the way of being such that there’s no one way it is! (Or, more modestly, we know that the world is such that it’s impossible to know what the world is like.)

    Finally, what would be the point of a Christianity stripped of any reference to an extra-mental reality? And how would we go about practically orienting our lives toward a god about whom we know nothing? For all we know, selfishness and cruelty might be just as fitting a response as benevolence to a reality that is utterly denuded of knowable qualities.

    This isn’t to say that Cupitt hasn’t pointed out a real problem, namely the question of religious authority in a pluralistic “post-modern” world. But the proposed cure here seems worse than the disease.

    Of course, if Cupitt is simply exhorting us to a kind of epistemic humility (“One who is hoped for and believed in, but is not actually known”) then I don’t find that particularly objectionable. But, again, I think those resources are already there in the tradition. Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” implies that we don’t know but believe, and that belief can lead to greater understanding (though only in the next life will faith become sight). But neither does this preclude having true beliefs about God or making a fitting response to the divine reality. There is a wide middle ground between Cartesian certainty and postmodern nihilism.

    (Link via Thinking Anglicans.)

  • War, intervention, and risk

    Okay, here’s something that I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I’m not sure if this is right, but I thought I’d throw it out there. The question is: when are we justified in imposing the risk of death on others without their consent?

    One occassionally runs into arguments about whether “the Iraqis” are “better off” now than before the war. Usually this is in the context of an attempt to justify the war retrospectively. This strikes me as an essentially unanswerable question, though. It seems clear that some Iraqis are better off and others are worse off. Obviously the dead who would otherwise have lived are worse off, but so also, arguably are those who’ve been injured, lost family members, now live in fear of sectarian enemies, etc. It’s not clear that it would be possible, even in principle, to tally up all Iraqis’ sense of whether by their own lights they’re better or worse off now than under Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to arrive at a sense of whether the Iraqis as a whole are better or worse off. How would you even go about weighing the goods and evils that all the Iraqi people have individually experienced. (How many dead relatives is a sense of political freedom worth? Does the question even make sense? The problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility also seems relevant here.)

    But this seems to me to have prospective as well as retrospective importance. Suppose that you’re living under a brutal dictatorial regime. Would you regard the deaths of your family as an acceptable trade-off for the removal of that regime? Opinions would perhaps differ, but that’s the point: how would you weign one person’s choice against another’s in order to arrive at the correct answer? It’s at the very least not surprising that someone who’s lost his entire family might be less than grateful about his “liberation.”

    This seems to imply that there’s something questionable about an outsider making these kinds of choices for you. By what right would a prospective intervener decide for you whether the loss of your family was an acceptable risk to run for, say, the prospect of political freedom? How can they make the kinds of evaluations that would be necessary to determine what risks, all things considered, were allowable? The imposition of unchosen risks seems, other things being equal, to be wrong. It just doesn’t seem to be my place to put your family at mortal risk without their (or your) consent even if it’s “for their own good.”

    The question then becomes how one nation justifies intervening militarily in another, allegedly on behalf of the subject population, without their explicit consent to the risks involved. Given the realities of modern war it’s a virtual certainty that innocents will be killed in the course of the intervention, and yet no one asked them if they were willing to undertake those risks for the sake of improving their situation relative to the status quo.

    Note that the issue here isn’t whether we actually have reason to believe that most people will in fact be better off after a proposed war. (Though given the limitations of our knowledge and recent history such considerations certainly ought to weigh heavily.) The issue is whether we have the right to impose mortal risks on those who haven’t given their informed consent. It seems at least prima facie that we don’t have that right. What might give us the right is if someone was already in mortal danger and the only way to save them was to undertake a mortally risky course of action and securing their consent was, for all practical purposes, impossible. But in the case of war, at least some of those upon whom we impose the risk of death wouldn’t have died otherwise, so it’s far from clear that the burden is met.

    Obviously this only applies in cases of so-called humanitarian intervention. In a legitimate case of self-defense it might well be justifiable to impose the risk of death on innocents if that is the only way to forestall one’s own death. One would be in a sort of lifeboat or state of nature situation (at least in terms of what we might call “natural” justice; I’m leaving aside whether a “higher” morality might call for self-sacrifice here). Of course, in modern war, “self-defense” often takes on an inflated meaning that includes maintaining our “perimeter of defense” or “our way of life,” cases where imposing the risk of death on innocents seems much harder to justify.

    Really all this is a long-winded way of making the point that in war one is proposing to kill (and injure and maim) other human beings. Any morality worth its salt would have a strong presumption against that. To impose the risk of death on someone, whether for their own good or for one’s own, requires that the good in question be sufficiently weighty that it would seem to rule out most wars. The exceptions would seem to be wars in which either oneself or the proposed beneficiaries were as likely (or more likely) to meet death if there was no intervention.

  • War and peace: some notes and links

    I haven’t blogged directly on politics much over here, but this article by Andrew Bacevich in The American Conservative caught my eye. Bacevich takes on both the neoconservative proponents of the “surge” as well as the establishmentarian “wise men” of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group:

    Almost without fail, media references to the Baker-Hamilton commission emphasize its bipartisan composition as if that alone were enough to win a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Yet to imagine that bipartisanship signifies wisdom or reflects a concern for the common good is to misunderstand the reality of present-day politics. The true purpose of bipartisanship is to protect the interests of the Washington Party, the conglomeration of politicians, hustlers, and bureaucrats who benefit from the concentration of wealth and power in the federal city. A “bipartisan” solution to any problem is one that produces marginal change while preserving or restoring the underlying status quo.

    The status quo, shared by both groups, who pretty much dominate foreign policy discussions in the US is the assumption that America must continue to manage events in the Middle East:

    When it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, neither the cavalier urgings of Frederick Kagan nor the confident reassurances of James Baker will provide the basis for defining a “way forward.” Despite superficial differences, their prescriptions point in the same direction: they will simply exacerbate our predicament. Further militarizing U.S. policy, always the first choice of neoconservatives, will only compound our dilemma; yet so too will deference to self-appointed Wise Men, who created that dilemma in the first place.

    Neoconservatives like Kagan believe that the United States is called upon to remake the Middle East, bringing the light of freedom to a dark quarter of the world. Pseudo-realists like Baker believe that the United States can manipulate events in the Middle East, persuading others to do our bidding. Both views, rooted in the conviction that Providence has endowed America with a unique capacity to manage history, are pernicious.

    And, as paleocon uber-blogger Daniel Larison points out, even Chuck Hagel, who’s been heralded by pundits left and right as a potential GOP “peace candidate” doesn’t repudiate interventionism as such. He’s more of an old-fashioned realist/internationalist (which, admittedly, would be preferable to what we’ve currently got). Plus, while I don’t share the paleocon antipathy to immigration, I agree that Hagel’s position there could hurt him with grass roots GOP voters, even ones disaffected with the Bush administration. He also isn’t much of a red-meat culture warrior, despite his fairly orthodox conservatism, and that would no doubt hurt him with the Religious Right types.

    It remains to be seen what kinds of positions the (seemingly inumerable) Democratic candidates will take on the war issue. Michael Westmoreland-White of the Anabaptist blog Levellers notes a spectrum of proposals ranging from “capping” the number of troops in Iraq to withdrawal at various rates. But no one except the real fringe candidates (Kucinich on the left, Paul on the right) is talking about any kind of large-scale paradigm shift in US foreign policy. Most of the Democratic criticisms at this point simply hark back to the good ol’ days of multilateral hegemony and UN-approved bombings.

    UPDATE: Ross Douthat at The American Scene makes a similar point, quoting David Brooks to the effect that the DC policy elite remains firmly entrenched in an interventionist outlook (he also cites this crazed Max Boot column to the same effect). However, Douthat also suggests that younger pundits and policy wonk-types (the elite of tomorrow) may be less sympathetic to bipartisan interventionism:

    The Iraq War has, I think, made questioning the neoconservative/neoliberal consensus far more common among young, wet-behind-the-ears wannabe pundits than anyone would have expected four years ago. Maybe this is a temporary thing, maybe it’s just the narrow circles I move in. But when I look around the world of D.C. journalism, and the wider blogosphere, at the under-30 writers I respect, there seems to be a lot more sympathy for either libertarianism or paleoconservatism (or both together) among young conservatives, and McGovernish sentiments among young liberals, than there is for foreign-policy centrism of the kind that everyone from Boot to Ignatius subscribes to.

    You’d like to think so. But then maybe our up-and-coming elites will “mautre” in office and “grow in stature” ultimately adopting the worldview of the elders. I mean, that’s what the New Left essentially did when it finally acheived instutional power isn’t it? The 60s radicals of yesteryear became, well … the Clintons.

  • Eat food

    That’s the takeaway point from this NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Pollan details how an unholy trifecta of scientific experts, sloppy journalism and the food industry have distorted the American diet by pushing the idea of “nutritionism” – the notion that nutrients, rather than actual foods, are the building blocks of a sound diet. This makes us beholden to “experts” who tell us what to eat instead of relying on tradition and common sense. Ironically this has had the effect of making our diet worse because nutritionism tends to focus on individual components of food and whether they’re deemed good or bad rather than how foods as a whole affect us. Consequently we end up eating a lot of processed food with the “right” nutrients as determined by current nutritionist orthodoxy rather than foods that human beings have been eating for ages (a.k.a. real food).

    Pollan makes the telling point that what we might call a “technological” approach to eating has consequences which in turn call for a new technological fix:

    The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

    It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

    The solution, he argues, is to return to a food culture as an alternative to food science. This includes things like: eating real food (“Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”), avoid “food products,” even those bearing health claims, buy food directly from the producers by, e.g. patronizing farmers’ markets whenever possible, pay more for better quality of food while at the same time eating less, eat mostly plants, borrow ideas from traditional food cultures (e.g. the Frence, Greeks, Italians), take pleasure in eating, cook and grow some of your own food if possible, and diversify your diet, including not only new dishes, but new species whenever possible.

    It’s hard not to be reminded of Christopher Lasch’s point (made in his book The True and Only Heaven and elsewhere) that an obsession with expertise has cultivated the sense that ordinary people are essentially helpless to confront routine tasks like choosing what to eat, rearing children, making educational choices, etc. and must rely on a class of benevolent experts to tell them how to live. Lasch and Pollan see traditional as embodied in communal practices and memories as a more reliable guide to living and are, in that respect, profoundly conservative.

    A similar point is made by this article in the Christian Century lauding a return to more traditional forms of animal husbandry. The author contrasts the practices of industrial farming which “relies on monocultural crop production, extensive use of fossil fuels and chemicals, massive injections of growth hormones and antibiotics, expensive capital investment, the confinement of animals, standardized production, farming practices that erode soil and deplete groundwater, and a deceptive way of calculating gains and losses” and Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in central Virginia. Salatin, a Christian whose faith informs his farming practices, “sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love.” He does this by allowing the creatures on his farm to follow something closer to their natural patterns of life and interaction:

    This system honors the creatures by enabling them to live the way God intended them to live. The cattle, ruminants created to eat grass, are not fed corn, nor are they stacked up and confined to standing in their own waste. As a result, they do not need the hormones and antibiotics that have become indispensable in industrial beef production. Nor do they produce the deadly strains of E. coli that now regularly surface in our food supply. The chickens, meanwhile, do not peck at each other like their confined and stressed industrial counterparts. They are free to roam.

    The fields, in turn, do not require the synthetic fertilizers and the toxic pesticides that other farmers routinely use. They are fertilized and kept relatively pest-free by the activity of the animals feeding upon them. Conventional farmers who visit Polyface Farm are routinely baffled by the fact that Salatin has no need of costly and toxic inputs.

    […]

    Working with creation rather than against it has made Polyface Farm amazingly productive. It produces annually 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broiler chickens, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits and nearly a half million eggs.

    Chefs throughout Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area cannot get enough of Salatin’s eggs and meat because they simply taste better. With this food you don’t have to worry about poisoning or periodic recalls. As a bonus, the grass-fed beef (because of the protein structure of the grass) is much healthier than the corn-fed variety.

    The author, Norman Wirzba, a philosophy professor, makes a point similar to Pollans, that the techno-fix approach to raising animals creates unforseen problems which in turn cry out for another techno-fix, and so on. This comes from ignoring the natural patterns of creation and seeking to impose a anthropocentric model of efficiency.

    This is all to the good as far as I’m concerned, and I hate to nitpick, but I do want to demur at Wirzba’s suggestion that concern for the fact that animals are killed (in addition to how they live) is a matter of “sentimentality” in the pejorative sense. He writes:

    Salatin is explicit about saying his Christian faith informs the way he raises and slaughters the animals on his 500-acre farm. He sees it as his responsibility to honor the animals as creatures that reflect God’s creative and abiding love.

    Not that there is anything sentimental about his approach. Salatin knows that the animals are not pets. They are raised to be food. But Salatin’s method of food production is designed to honor God’s work.

    There seems to be an emerging orthodoxy of sorts that industrial/factory farming is indeed bad and it’s wrong to subject animals to those kinds of conditions, but killing them for food is, considered in itself, perfectly ok. As much as I think efforts like Polyface Farm are a vast, vast improvement over the status quo, I wouldn’t want to leave that assumption unchallenged. I’m not going to rehash the argument here, but one gets the impression of an attempt to distance oneself from those kooky, extremist, sentimentalist animal rights types, while still being concerned about the treatment of animals (never mind that it was mostly kooky extremist animal rights types who made it an issue in the first place…). But that’s a minor quibble. A world of responsible stewardship instead of rapacious exploitation is obviously far superior. I’d be happy to get to the nearly utopian-seeming point at which all animals we raised for food were being raised in conditions like those of Polyface Farm. Then it might be time to hash out the question of abolition.

    But the noteworthy thing here is that scientism – the view that all of reality can be exhaustively described in the categories offered by natural science and that the world is best understood in strictly material terms – turns out to be not only theoretically inadequate, but to have deleterious practical consequences. And that tradition may in some cases be a more reliable guide to living.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion: 10 & 11

    We’ve seen that for Augustine the human condition is pretty dire. Humans, due to the sin of our first parents, find ourselves spiritually crippled and condemned to death, our wills utterly impotent on their own to change our situation. A rather grim situation.

    But of course, the Christian story is the story of God’s mighty acts to save his people. In chapter 10 Augustine considers the work of Christ. He notes that “the human race was bound in a just doom and all men were children of wrath.” Interestingly, “wrath” here seems to mean more than just the prospect of punishment at some future time. He quotes John’s Jesus to the effect that “he that believes not does not have life. Instead, the wrath of God abides in him.” Wrath is a state men are in, indeed born into. We might say that our sinful nature is what makes us liable to God’s verdict, or “wrath.”

    To turn away wrath, then, there was need for a Mediator. Augustine doesn’t go into detail about how Christ saves us, he simply says that “a Reconciler who by offering a unique sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the Law and Prophets were shadows, should allay that wrath.”

    There’s a longstanding debate between Catholics and Protestants over whether justification is a verdict whereby God declares us innocent on account of Christ’s sacrifice, or on account of an actual change in us worked by grace. At least here Augustine can seem to take both views. He says that Christ’s sacrifice allays wrath, but also says that “we are reconciled to God through the Mediator and receive the Holy Spirit so that we may be changed from enemeis into sons….” This would seem to suggest that we become sons by the Holy Spirit working some actual change in us. We’ll come back to justification in a later chapter, so things may be cleared up a bit there.

    Augustine spends the rest of chapter 10 discussing the two natures of Christ. He is careful to assert that it is a complete human nature which is united to the divine Word, not simply a body which has the Word as its soul. He also denies what would come to be called “subordinationism,” the view that there is inequality between the persons of the Trinity:

    Accordingly, in so far as he is God, he and the Father are one. Yet in so far as he is man, the Father is greater than he. Since he was God’s only Son — not by grace but by nature — to the end that he might indeed be the fullness of all grace, he was also made Son of Man — and yet he was in the one nature as well as in the other, one Christ.

    In Chapter 11 Augustine goes on to discuss the Incarnation as “the Prime Example of the Action of God’s Grace.” Human nature didn’t merit to be united to Godhead, it was an act of sheer grace on God’s part. And Jeus was God’s Son from the very beginning of his existence – there is no hint of Adoptionism here. “Indeed it was Truth himself, God’s only begotten Son — and, again, this not by grace but by nature — who, by grace, assumed human nature into such a personal unity that he himself became the Son of Man as well.” Note here the reversal of the Son of Man/Son of God distinction characteristic of the Fathers; in the Bible the “Son of Man” can be a semi-divine eschatological figure, whereas many humans (such as David) can be referred to as a “son of God.” The Fathers, however, tend to reverse this usage and use “Son of Man” to Jesus considered in his human nature, and “Son of God” according to his divine nature. The point, though, is that the Son of God is the Son by nature, but he takes human nature to himself by grace.

    And this graceful uniting of the human and divine natures is the work of the Spirit: “This same Jesus Christ, God’s only Son our Lord, was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. Now obviously the Holy Spirit is God’s gift, a gift that is itself equal to the Giver; wherefore the Holy Spirit is God also, not inferior to the Father and the Son.” The same Spirit which overshadowed Mary also calls us out of our sin and changes us from enemies to sons of God.

  • Pluralism and the work of Christ: 2

    In this post I suggested that there is a connection between one’s view of the work of Christ and one’s view of religious pluralism. My hypothesis was that holding a strongly “objectivist” view of Christ’s work tends to go with either an exclusivist or inclusivist position on other religions, while a more “subjectivist” account fit better with pluralist views.

    Thinking about it a little more, though, I think that might’ve been a bit simplistic. This is partly because it’s hard to cleanly categorize Atonement theories as either “objective” or “subjective.” Every account of the work of Christ has a “dipolar” character so to speak. There is the act on God’s part to effect Atonement and there is the response or appropriation of that work by human beings. It’s hard to see how an Atonement to which no one responded would in fact be atonement, or reconciliation at all. But no one denies that the initiative in reconciliation comes from God’s side. As Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes put it in the title of his book on the Atonement, it involves both a past event and a present salvation.

    Moreover, so-called subjectivist theories do create a “new situation” at least insofar as they understand the cross as the definitive revelation of God’s love and also of the horrors of human sin. This revelation makes possible reconciliation between God and humanity because the revelation of God’s love and its outpouring are taken to be two aspects of the same event. Part of the difference between objectivist and subjectivist theories is that they differ over who needs to be reconciled to whom. Is the problem that God needs to be reconciled to us, or needs to reconcile his justice with his mercy? Or is the problem that we have made ourselves God’s enemies and need to be reconciled to him? If the former, then Atonement will focus on payment, reparation, substitution and other related concepts. If the latter, then the focus will be on how God wins us back through the pouring out of his love and the revelation of our own self-centeredness. But “subjectivist” theories don’t deny the need for a new situation to be established in order to make reconciliation possible.

    However one comes down on this issue, I think both share equally in the view that reconciliation comes from God’s side. It’s not about the human ascent to divine truth by means of our own religious and/or ethical striving. Rather, God descends to us in order to restore the relationship broken by sin.

    Certain “hard pluralist” views, by contrast, which see all religions as the fruit of human spiritual experience, have a hard time coming to terms with a special action coming from the divine side in order to set the world to rights. Often the divine is viewed as almost inert, as a kind of ineffable sea of transcendence, which is more or less adequately limmed by the various beliefs and rituals of the world’s religions. Whatever can be said for this view, it seems to be at considerable variance from the living, dynamic God of the Bible, the “hound of heaven” who relentlessly seeks to win his faithless people back. The more important distinction, then, may be between a view which holds that the divine reveals itself to us, versus the view that we acquire saving knowledge of the divine by our own efforts.

    Even this distinction probably isn’t as hard and fast as it seems, though. For even our own best efforts to seek enlightenment can be seen as the fruits of prevenient grace. And a pluralist could accomodate the notion that the divine is active in seeking fellowship with us and still hold to a plurality of revelations. God may have many avenues by which he is seeking to reconcile the world to himself.

    So, I’m not sure how much ground we’ve really gained here. I’ve reconsidered the idea that a particular account of the Atonement will necessarily push one in a particular direction on the question of other religions. I then proposed a distinction between the idea that salvation is something initiated by God and one that holds salvation to be the fruit of human striving, but it seems that both views can be accomodated by exclusivists, inclusivists, and pluralists alike.

    Another thought, maybe to be taken up in another post: maybe it’s not so much differences over accounts of Christ’s work that are important, but over his person.