A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • The Bonhoeffer temptation

    In his book A Public Faith, Miroslav Volf writes about various approaches to Christian engagement with the wider culture in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of the typology developed by H. Richard Niebuhr in Christ and Culture. Volf identifies “liberal,” “postliberal,” and “separatist” tendencies, along with his preferred approach, which he calls “internal difference.”

    Liberal accommodation is concerned to make the Christian message intelligible to nonbelievers, but often at the risk of sacrificing its distinctiveness. Postliberalism reverses this approach and tries to interpret everything outside the church within the terms of the Christian narrative. The problem with this approach is that Christian communities risk “clos[ing] themselves off from a meaningful conversation with the larger culture” (p. 86).

    The separatist tendency is a radical intensification of the postliberal approach; it “imagine[s] Christian communities as islands in the sea of worldliness” (p. 87). Volf says that this approach is often inspired by a stance of Bonhoeffer-like resistance, in which churches are seen as being “In the midst of the world” but “taken out of the world” and whose surrounding cultures are viewed as “a foreign land.” Volf quotes Bonhoeffer:

    At any moment [the Christian community] may receive the signal to move on. Then it will break camp, leaving behind all worldly friends and relatives, and following only the voice of the one who has called it. It leaves the foreign country and moves onward toward its heavenly home. (p. 87)

    The problem with this approach, according to Volf, is that it universalizes what was a response to a very specific situation. Or to put it more bluntly: most places aren’t Nazi Germany! “If one isolates such an account of the relation between church and the world from its specific situation and elevates it to a general program for Christian presence in the world, serious problems arise” (p. 88).

    If Christian communities only wander on earth but live in heaven, they will have their own truth and their own moral norms, their own practices, all of which would not only be determined exclusively by God’s revelation in Jesus Christ but would have little to do with what is considered true, good, and beautiful outside the sealed train in which they live. Christians would then be present in a given culture but would remain completely external to it. (p. 88)

    It’s debatable whether it’s even possible to consistently take such a stance. But Volf thinks that it’s a real tendency, and one that denies that there is goodness outside the Christian community. But if the world is God’s good creation, then how can Christians deny that truth, beauty, and goodness exist outside the walls of the church?

    As the Word came “to what was his own” (John 1:1) when it dwelled in Jesus Christ, so also Christians live in each culture as in their own proper space. Cultures are not foreign countries for the followers of Christ but rather their own homelands, the creation of the one God. If Christians are estranged from the world, it can only be because and insofar as the world is (and maybe they themselves are as well) estranged from God. Christian communities should not seek to leave their home cultures and establish settlements outside or live as islands within them. Instead, they should remain in them and change them–subvert the power of the foreign force and seek to bring the culture into closer alignment with God and God’s purposes. (p. 89)

    You can see separatist tendencies among certain Christians on both the “Right” and the “Left” in America today. For different reasons, both see the United States as an utterly hostile culture and the proper Christian response as creating distinctive Christian cultures with their own norms, practices, etc. (Interestingly, Bonhoeffer is often cited on both sides.) From Volf’s perspective, however, these Christians have misjudged their situation; there is plenty wrong with contemporary U.S. culture and politics, but it’s not so far gone that the only option is withdrawal.

  • The “medium chill” and keeping Sabbath

    Grist’s David Roberts has written a follow-up to his “medium chill” post of about two years ago that expands on the idea and its social and political implications. In the original post, Roberts argued, based in part on “happiness research” and in part on personal experience, that it’s more fulfilling to work less to allow more time for enjoying life’s intangible goods–even if that means making less money.

    In the follow-up post, he concedes that research he cited in the previous post that seemed to show that happiness levels off after a certain income level (about $75,000) may have been wrong; nevertheless, the relationship between wealth and happiness does seem to be “logarithmic”–that is the increase in happiness you get from each additional dollar is less than the previous one, even if it isn’t zero. The basic point seems to stand: after you’ve reached a certain level, adding more income isn’t going to increase your happiness or life-satisfaction much, if at all.

    But if you have reached that level–if you even have the option of “chilling”– you are likely among the richest 0.1 percent of the world’s population. Which means that access to a life with possibilities for fulfillment beyond the struggle for material security is severely maldistributed, to put it mildly.

    And if you are so fortunately situated, it’s due to luck far more than hard work, pluck, or anything else that you could plausibly claim to have merited. Where you were born, who your parents are, and your genetic make-up have a lot more to do with your success in life than anything you contribute (assuming there’s some irreducible element that can’t be chalked up to any of these other factors).

    Because those of us with more have it not mainly by dint of the sweat of our brow, but because of circumstances well beyond our control, there is no justification for hoarding all that good fortune. (“You didn’t build that,” as President Obama might say.) We need policies–liberal policies essentially–that distribute access to the world’s goods more equitably in order to allow everyone a shot at a flourishing human life.

    He goes on to speculate a bit about the possibilities for human life freed from the necessity of working more to earn more. Life should not be about being a fitter, more productive worker bee; it should be about cultivating our innate capabilities for creativity and self-expression in community with others. The seemingly laid-back medium chill turns out to have a rather radical, utopian streak.

    All, or nearly all, of this resonates with the Christian view of life as I understand it. In his recent book A Public Faith, theologian Miroslav Volf argues that Christianity’s contribution to the common good is a more substantive and appealing vision of human flourishing than the one that has gained much ground in the modern West. According to Volf, this is the view that the good life consists primarily in the satisfaction of individual desire or preference.

    Not surprisingly, he considers this to be a deeply impoverished view of human life. Not only has it lost sight of the love of God, but by focusing on individual satisfaction it is opposed to any robust idea of human solidarity. By contrast, for Christians,

    [w]e lead our lives well when we love God with our whole being and when we love our neighbors as we (properly) love ourselves. Life goes well for us when our basic needs are met and when we experience that we are loved by God and by our neighbors–when we are loved as who we are, with our own specific character and history, notwithstanding our fragility and failures. (p. 72)

    This account is clearly incompatible with a society in which everyone has to scramble endlessly to “get ahead” in material terms–e.g., Thomas Friedman’s horrifying “401(k) world.” Christians should want a world in which people are free from the pressure to constantly “invest in themselves” to please some boss or keep up with the Joneses.

    In the Christian view, we aren’t made for working ourselves to death or for endless accumulation, but for lives “rich with relationships and experiences,” as Roberts puts it. In Biblical terms, we might think of the “medium chill” as a way of keeping Sabbath, as described by Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann:

    Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being. (Journey to the Common Good, p. 26)

    This restful withdrawal from over-work and over-consumption is a precondition for genuine community and human flourishing. A good society would be one that made this a possibility for everyone.

  • George Jones, R.I.P.

    The country legend has passed away at the age of 81.

  • “Negative” theology is not enough

    Experience with seminary students over several decades indicates that they turn surprisingly agnostic when the time comes to think about God, declaring that “the finite cannot comprehend the infinite,” so any ideas one might have about God are just as good as any others. Such agnosticism has its roots either in intellectual laziness or in a theological despair at ever getting things right. In either case, it is sorely mistaken. Our task is not to overcome what Bernard Meland called the “fallibility” of all our forms and symbols for God. It is to come up with ways of talking about God that are appropriate to the revelation of God attested to in the biblical witness. All ways of talking about God are arguably inadequate. Yet, some are more clearly inadequate than others. There are ways of talking about God that are more appropriate to the norms of the Christian faith than others and that are also more helpful in the face of the challenges that confront us in the death-dealing times in which we live. (Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life: A Christian Theology, p. 103).

    I can understand why people emerging from religious traditions that suffer from an excess of certainty might be tempted to retreat into a purely “negative” (or “apophatic”) theology. But Williamson is right here that some “ways of talking about God . . . are more appropriate to the norms of the Christian faith than others.” For Christianity, it is more appropriate to speak of God as loving than as hateful, wise rather than ignorant, personal rather than impersonal, etc. The central belief of Christianity– that Jesus is God expressed in a human life–entails that God has a particular nature and character. In other words, the cure for bad theology isn’t no theology, it’s better theology.

    Sure, there have been great saints and mystics throughout the history of the church who have stressed the unknowability of God virtually to the point of recommending utter silence. And their writings provide an indispensable reminder of the limitations of all our language about the divine.

    But this apophatic reticence has always been balanced by the “kataphatic” tradition of affirming the appropriateness of at least some language about God. This tradition is particularly important in prayer and liturgy, not to mention the Bible itself. And as Williamson suggests, only if we can speak intelligibly about God can we say that certain “death-dealing” ways are contrary to God’s will or nature.

  • Von Balthasar’s hopeful almost-universalism

    In Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?, Hans Urs Von Balthasar takes as his starting point that the Bible contains “irreconcilable” statements on the ultimate destiny of humanity. There are passages that hold out the threat of everlasting punishment, but there are others that speak hopefully about the ultimate reconciliation or restoration of all things. Von Balthasar says that there are a variety of responses that have been made to this, but what we can’t do is simply write off either set of statements.

    And all of [these responses], indeed, must come to terms with the notion of a primarily cyclical apokatastasis, without, arrogant or unconcerned, simply dismissing the horrifying thought that brothers and sisters of Christ, created by the Father for Christ, who died for them in atonement, may fail to reach their final destination in God and may instead suffer eternal damnation with its everlasting pain–which, in fact, would frustrate God’s universal plan of salvation. If we take our faith seriously and respect the words of Scripture, we must resign ourselves to admitting such an ultimate possibility, our feelings of revulsion notwithstanding. We may not simply ignore such a threat; we may not easily dismiss it, neither for ourselves nor for any of our brothers and sisters in Christ. (p. 237)

    In general, Von Balthasar sees damnation as something self-inflicted. God’s will to save is universal, and he rejects any doctrine of double predestination. But the possibility remains that some will reject God’s love. This possibility–enunciated in many places in the Bible–must be taken seriously. At one point, Von Balthasar refers approvingly to C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which imaginatively portrays the self-damnation of those who won’t (can’t?) accept God’s love.

    Yet Von Baltahasar believes that hope can have still have the last word. Not as a theoretical or speculative matter: we don’t know that everyone will be saved. Nor, for that matter, do we know that anyone will be damned. He is a staunch foe of presumptuous certainty on either side of this question.

    But given God’s desire that all will be saved, we can hope that, somehow, the divine love will ultimately win over even the most recalcitrant heart. This doesn’t mean there will be no punishment–there may be a penultimate “purifying fire” necessary to purge those parts of us which are incompatible with God’s Kingdom. But we can–and should–hope that God’s mercy will prevail. For Von Balthasar, this is an existential not a theoretical or dogmatic stance: we should treat each person we encounter as someone who is destined for eternal life.

    I was already largely convinced of something like Von Balthasar’s position before I read this. Though I’m definitely sympathetic to universalism, on balance I think it’s better to let the scriptural warnings stand and avoid dogmatism on this. As Von Balthasar likes to put it, we are under judgment, but our judge is Christ, who is the merciful Savior.

  • Hans Urs Von Balthasar: the Rob Bell of his day

    I started reading the great Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s “Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?”, and right off the bat what struck me is how similar the public controversy over Von Balthasar’s views was to the brouhaha over Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.”

    Obviously there are vast differences here. Von Balthasar was a brilliant (and at times obscure) theologian; Bell is an evangelical preacher whose talents lie more in communicating his message than theological originality. But the controversy, at least based on Von Balthasar’s account here, was drawn along remarkably similar lines.

    Here’s Von Balthasar on the criticisms leveled at him by some of his contemporaries (this all took place in the mid-80s). The question at hand is “whether one who is under judgment, as a Christian, can have hope for all men”:

    I have ventured to answer this affirmatively and was, as a result, called to order rather brusquely by the editor of Fels (G. Hermes); in Theologisches, Heribert Schauf and Johannes Bokmann added their voices to this reprimand. . . . At a press conference in Rome, besieged about the question of hell, I had made known my views, which had led to gross distortions in newspapers (“L’inferno e vuoto“), whereupon I published, in Il Sabato, that Kleine Katechese über die Hölle (Short Discourse on Hell), which was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano without my knowledge and aroused the ire of the right-wing papers.

    Bokmann is perfectly correct: “If one were certain of attaining the ultimate goal no matter what, a quite essential motivation to conversion and absolute Christian resolve would be lost.” However, I never spoke of certainty but rather of hope. The three critics, by contrast, possess a certainty, and G. Hermes expresses it with matchless force: “Such a hope does not exist, because we cannot hope in opposition to certain knowledge and the avowed will of God.” It is impossible that “we can hope for something about which we know that it will certainly not come about.” Therefore, the closing sentence of the essay declares tersely: “There is no hope for the salvation of all.” If I speak “no less than five times” of the fully real possibility, which confronts every person, of forfeiting salvation, the retort I get is that the matter is “not” treated “seriously by putting on a stern face but by stating the entire and full truth. And the full truth about hell is not stated if one only speaks of its possibility . . . and not its reality.” At this point, a first paradoxical statement occurs: “If we once admit that it is really and seriously possible, even considering all the opposing arguments, that men are damned, then there is also no convincing argument against men’s really being damned.” This is not comprehensible to me: if God sets the “two ways” before Israel, does it necessarily follow that Israel will choose the way of ruin? There was certainly no lack of seriousness behind the presentation of the two ways. But G. Hermes, of course, knows that the possibility is reality; he is not the only one, as we will see, who knows this. Just how will become evident from what follows here.

    But first one other regrettable thing: as a consequence of not sharing in this secure knowledge–and R. Schnackenberg, for instance, does not share it when he says of Judas Iscariot that it “is not certain that he is damned for all eternity”–one is then numbered among those “average Catholics” who veil the hereafter in a “rose-red fog” and “wishful fancies”, participate “irresponsibly and cruelly” in “operation mollification” through their “salvation-optimism”, adopt the “dull and colorless garrulousness of present-day Church discourse”, practice “modernistic theology” and call for “presumptuous trust in God’s mercifulness.” So be it; if I have been cast aside as a hopeless conservative by the tribe of the left, then I now know what sort of dung-heap I have been dumped upon by the Right. (pp. 16-20, footnotes omitted).

    Change a few names, and lower the general level of erudition all around, and you’ve essentially got the debate between Bell and many of his evangelical critics.

  • Boston

    The “what” and the “how” are awful, and no one seems to know much about the “who” and “why” at this point. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from speculating. I recommend this post from Jesse Walker at Reason as an antidote to some of that.

    I lived in the Boston area (Somerville to be exact) for about a year, and both my work and my church home were in the city. It will always have a special place in my heart. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected, and my hope is that, whatever the origin of this event turns out to be, we’ll respond in a sane way.

  • Atonement as the restoration of human nature in Athanasius (and Anselm)

    Fr. Aidan Kimel (who theo-blog veterans may remember as Al Kimel, an Epsicopal priest who used to run the blog Pontifications before converting to Catholicism–and now apparently to Eastern Orthodoxy) has been doing a series on St. Athanasius’s “On the Incarnation.” The latest installment looks at Athanasius’s understanding of the Atonement as the healing of human nature and the defeat of death:

    Athanasius’s soteriological reflections are not motivated by a concern for the satisfaction of justice. The penalty prescribed by God in the garden is not assigned for the purpose of retributive punishment. It symbolizes, rather, the natural consequence of human disobedience: to break fellowship with God, and to thus separate oneself from the only source of life, is to fall into natural mortality. Eternal life is not something that we possess naturally; it is something that we can only enjoy by grace in communion with our Creator.

    […]

    The plight of man is ontological and thus only an ontological solution will suffice. Athanasius, following Scripture, employs commercial, juridical, and sacrificial language by which to speak of the saving work of Christ; but the significance of this language, I suggest, is determined by the ontology of death and resurrection. What is needed for salvation is not the legal rescindment of the law of death, much less the propitiation of divine wrath (as suggested in some Protestant versions of the atonement). What is needed is the re-creation of human nature, and this re-creation can only occur if the Word dies in the flesh.

    I came to a similar conclusion when I blogged some thoughts on Athanasius several years back: The Incarnation effects an “ontological change in human nature,” and by “becoming united to our human nature, the Word of God heals the corruption and proneness-to-death that followed as a result of sin.”

    I’d also add that, despite his reputation as the progenitor of the Western, “juridical” theory of the Atonement, St. Anselm can be read in a very similar way. For Anselm, the damage that sin causes to God’s “honor” does not consist in any damage to God in Godself. This is because God is immutable and impassible, so nothing creatures can do can harm God (at least according to the Anselmian tradition). Rather, the “dishonor” consists in the damage it causes to God’s creatures and their ability to properly honor God–damage that threatens to frustrate God’s purposes for creation.

    The role of the God-man, then, is to restore human nature, making it once again capable of honoring God properly. As has been pointed out a number of times, for Anselm, this restoration–and not some kind of vicarious punishment–is what constitutes “satisfaction.”

    It’s true that for Anselm (and arguably for Athanasius too), the death of Christ still constitutes a kind of “payment,” but it’s one that is necessary for the restoration of human nature, not to assuage the divine anger.

  • Rob Bell’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About God”

    I think the book suffered a bit from not being as tightly focused as “Love Wins.” The earlier book could assume a fair bit of common ground, as it was tackling what is mainly an intra-Christian debate, but here Bell’s target audience seems to more explicitly be the skeptic, the seeker, and the “spiritual but not religious,” as well as the disaffected evangelical.

    The results are mixed. We get an overstuffed yet not-fully-persuasive chapter on science and faith. At the same time, the chapter on religious language does little more than make the point that language about God is symbolic. (This is a bit ironic given the book’s title.)

    On the other hand, the three central chapters on God “with,” “for,” and “ahead” of us were golden. Chapter 5 (“For”) in particular is pure gospel. Bell doesn’t wear his influences on his sleeve (or in his (largely nonexistent) footnotes), but it’s not hard to detect a little Tillich here, a dash of Moltmann there, and a dollop of process theology. But he’s really at his best in expounding the story of Jesus and his love–once again giving the lie to critics who’d like to brand him as some kind of heretic or post-Christian.

    Throughout, Bell amply justifies his reputation as a first-class communicator. Reading this book brought home to me how much even the most “accessible” religious books tend to be steeped in theological jargon. It wasn’t a life-changing book for me by any means, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the first book I’d recommend on the topic. Many mainliners in particular, I imagine, would regard a lot of what Bell writes as old hat to some extent.

    But Bell is doing something that hardly anyone else is doing: delivering (more-or-less) solid, progressive-leaning Christian theology in a way that (apparently) communicates far beyond the frontiers of the church. That seems like something mainline Protestants in particular could learn from these days.

  • Idealism in twenty minutes

    Keith Ward gives a concise overview and defense of metaphysical idealism:

    This lecture is essentially a summary of the argument from his 2010 book More Than Matter. The basic claim is that mind or consciousness is a fundamental component or aspect of reality, and it can’t be reduced to or explained exhaustively in material terms. Ward points out that we’re immediately aware of consciousness, while the material world–at least as it appears to us–is something that is in part constructed by our minds. This doesn’t mean that the physical world isn’t real; but it does suggest that there’s something problematic about arguing for the reduction of mind to an aspect of reality that is itself partly mind-constituted. Minds are the only “things-in-themselves” we know first hand. On that basis, Ward says

    What idealists maintain is that the ultimate nature of reality itself is mind-like, and that human and other finite minds are the best clues we have to what objective reality is like. The cosmos is not a mindless, unconscious, valueless, purposeless, yet somehow strangely intelligible, mechanism. Such a view is the result of extrapolating a machine-model, very useful in many scientific contexts, to provide the most comprehensive and adequate picture of the real cosmos.

    Idealists propose that the human mind provides a better model from which to extrapolate to the cosmos as a whole. That is not because the cosmos looks like a very large human person or because there is some large person hovering just beyond the cosmos. It is because human minds play a creative and constructive role in producing the phenomenal world. They seem to point to a level of reality that is not merely phenomenal or an appearance to consciousness. Human minds generate an idea of reality as mind-like in a way that far transcends human mentality, yet that does include something like consciousness, value, and purpose as essential parts of its nature. (More Than Matter, p. 58)

    Ward doesn’t claim to offer a knock-down argument for idealism, but he thinks it’s at least as reasonable as competing views, if not more so. He also points out that some form of idealism is arguably the majority view in the history of philosophy.

    Even when I was an atheist, I never found materialism particularly compelling. And studying philosophy–particularly early modern philosophy–only reinforced that. It’s hard to come to grips with the arguments of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant and still think that materialism is a straightforward, much less obviously true, understanding of reality.