CPA at Three Hierarchies applies the wisdom of Mao (really!) to our current situation.
Related: Jim Henley argues that Pakistan is a plausible test case of an Islamist-influenced dictatorship with nukes which hasn’t passed them off to terrorists, giving us some reason to think that Iran wouldn’t either.
Last week I read C.W. McPherson’s short book Grace at this Time, which is an explanation and commendation of the Daily Office as a form of daily prayer for Christians. The practice of the daily office – a structured form of daily prayer consisting of a prescribed order of psalms and readings with responses and prayers – can be traced back to early Christian practice and even arguably has roots in Judaism. McPherson gives a brief historical overview of the development of the office, tracing the evolution of “cathedral” and “monastic” forms of the office culminating with Thomas Cranmer’s reform of the monastic offices into the simplified morning and evening prayer services found in the Book of Common Prayer.
McPherson provides a walk-through of morning prayer (which is, in his view, the paradigmatic office) as well as a brief theology and spirituality of the office. Though the office is designed as a form of corporate prayer, McPherson emphasizes its usefulness as a form of personal devotion. The office, he argues, provides a certain stability in our prayer life as well as keeping us from getting bogged down in subjectivity. It does this be mandating a disciplined encounter with the Bible (through the praying of the Psalms and the lectionary readings) and by connecting us to the rich theological and liturgical tradition of the church.
One interesting point McPherson makes is that the office is compatible with a variety of spiritualities. For instance, he says, the psalms and lessons can be approached in the spirit of the monasitc practice of lectio divina. And he recommends introducing periods of silence for meditation and free prayer, especially when praying alone.
If the publishing industry is any indication, lots of people from various traditons have found a new interest in praying some form of the office. There has been a proliferation of books about this form of prayer as well as various specialty versions (Celtic versions, versions for times of grieving, etc.). McPherson’s book is helpful in laying bare the structure that unites various forms of the office and why it takes the form that it does. In essence, it’s a conversation with God wherin we alternate between hearing God’s word and responding (often using the words of the Bible to do so, as in the canticles).
The form of the office that McPherson recommends is that found in the current version of the US Book of Common Prayer, but most of what he says would apply to other versions just as well, at least as far as I can tell. I for one still find the BCP office a bit daunting in its rubrics and page-flipping, much less some of the more elaborate versions like the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, or the Anglican Breviary. However, it’s hard to take exception to the prescription of a daily dose of psalmody and scripture readings framed by some of the classic prayers of the Christian church.
There are a variety of simplified office books available, though most of them don’t seem to provide the range of scripture that one would get in using the BCP version. If one wanted to do a stripped-down version of the office one could simply follow the lectionary readings with appointed psalms and supplement them with the Lukan canticles, Lord’s Prayer, and perhaps the creed, though that wouldn’t get you the variety that the full version provides.
In comments to this post, *Christopher commended the work of Catholic theologian James Alison. A quick Google search reveals that many of his writings are available online here. I’m somewhat wary of people who rely too much on Rene Girard’s work, only because they often give off a vibe of “Girard has figured out everything!”, but Alison seems like he’s up to some interesting stuff. I’ve printed out this article on the Atonement and hope to read it over the weekend.
Derek the beer-snob has a link to an interesting piece from the rector of St. Mary the Virgin church in NYC on traditional and revisionist language about God.
I think I basically come down in the middle here. I’m for traditional language to name the Trinity, especially in the context of worship, but am open to exploring feminine imagery in our language about God and can see the merit of avoiding gender-specific terms when it doesn’t distort theological truth. The key, it seems to me, is that our language should be a response to God’s self-revelation, not something we make up to feel better about ourselves.
At Faith and Theology Kim Fabricius has ten provocative propositions on peace and war. I might quibble with the notion that the church simply became hopelessly compromised when it sold out to “Constantinianism”; I think this division of church history into pristine “pre-Constantinian” and corrupt “post-Constantinian” eras often fails to take seriously church tradition (not to mention one wonders what it says about our doctrine of Providence). Just war theory, after all, has as long a pedigree in the church as many other post-biblical developments that few would want to throw out.
Previously we saw Keith Ward offer an account of original sin that he thinks consistent with a broad evolutionary picture. As a result of a primal choice for evil and turning away from God, the human race finds itself estranged from God and unable to repair the breach.
Ward distinguishes between what he calls “forensic” and “soterial” accounts of sin. Forensic accounts are chiefly concerned with guilt and punishment, while soterial accounts focus on the way in which the self’s dispositions and inclinations are warped and in need of healing. A purely forensic understanding of sin sees spiritual death as punishment which we have incurred on account of our first parents’ sin. A soterial view, on the other hand, sees our alienation from God and the distortion of our desires as the inevitable consequence of sin rather than a punishment imposed according to a retributive understanding of justice.
The Christian tradition has both forensic and soterial elements, but certain strands emphasize one or the other more heavily. Ward sides with the Christian East (as I understand it) in rejecting the idea of original guilt (as distinct from original sin) and sees the problem for humans more in terms of repairing or healing the self and its relation to God. Original sin is “more like a disease or an incapacity than a crime” (p. 176). And he’s on solid Reformational ground, it seems to me, in holding sin to be not so much a series of discrete acts, but a fundamental orientation of the self – “curved inward” as Luther might put it. This self-centeredness is a result of the evil choices made by our ancestors and the fact that each of us is born into a world where it’s difficult to resist out selfish desires and in which our relationship with God has been shattered.
Consequently, Ward’s account of the Atonement avoids penal or debt-payment metaphors and emphasizes images of participation and healing. As the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus mediates God’s saving grace and forgiveness, making a new relationship possible. Jesus is both the perfect human response to God and a revelation of God’s compassion. Jesus’ life of perfect obedience, which culminates on the cross, results in his Resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit. This makes possible our participation in new life with God. Salvation must involve a change in the subject and not just a remittance of punishment. The purpose of God’s act of Atonement, in Ward’s telling, is to restore humans to a proper relationship with God and to heal their disordered desires.
In Jesus, according to Christian belief, God acts in a uniquely clear, unhampered way, to evoke repentance by revealing the divine nature as suffering, redemptive, unitive love. God acts to show the life that is required of us, to establish a community in which such a life can be begun, to show that the human goal of divine-human fellowship is possible, and to draw people into such fellowship. Thus there will be particular, historical acts that establish this community, founded on a primal revelatory event in which divine-human fellowship is archetypally established. The Spirit is the power which made that event possible, as the icon, and formative pattern of the Spirit’s continued co-operative action throughout the world.
On this view, atonement, the liberation of human lives by God from selfish desire and their uniting in fellowship with the life of God, is necessary if human nature is to attain its intended fulfillment. Such atonement must involve the disclosure of God’s patient bearing of the sufferings of the world (a sacrifice or giving-up of unmixed bliss for the sake of the possible goods of human life). It must involve God’s revealing the pattern of perfected human life in God (a life of healing and forgiveness). It must also involve God’s effective transformation of humans from self-regard to the love of supreme beauty, in accordance with that pattern (the gift of the Spirit). This revelation must come in a particular history and context that is able to manifest God’s particular actions in the world, actions which begin and define the particular process of forgiveness and fulfillment that constitutes the Christian life. (p. 223)
This, in a nutshell, appears to be Ward’s answer to Anselm’s question “why did God become man?” He eschews penal or satisfaction motifs and appeals to what in some ways seems a more patristic understanding: God became human so that humans might become divine. The problem – that from which we need to be saved – is our estrangement from God. In Jesus God restores the possibility of fellowship. But, unlike certain patristic accounts which seem to rely on a reified Platonic notion of human nature, Ward’s appeal to the Spirit as the means by which we are healed and united with God and conformed to the image of Christ may be a more biblical way to think about it.
To connect it back to evolution, we can say that God created a world intended to give rise, through a long process of historical evolution, to finite personal beings capable of enjoying fellowship with God. However, due to a pre-historic choice of self over God, humanity’s progress toward that goal was derailed and we became alienated from God. But God comes to us in the person of Jesus to re-establish that relationship and get the human project back on track and to guide it toward its goal.
Clearly some aspects of Ward’s account deviate from the tradition. The rejection of hereditary guilt may bother those who understand sin and atonement in primarily forensic terms. However, it’s worth pointing out that, evolution aside, there’s never really been a compelling account of how someone can be guilty (and even deserving of damnation) because of a choice their distant ancestors made. Ward’s view manages to retain the insight that we are suffering the consequences of our ancestor’s choices and in need of deliverance from them, without embracing the notion of original guilt. His view also resonates with the Christus Victor motif in seeing humanity in need of rescue from “powers” that hold us in thrall and prevent us from establishing fellowship with God.
With Iraq as Exhibit A, U of Chicago law prof Eric Posner (son of Richard, I think) argues for a presumption against “humanitarian” war in the Washington Post.
Many well-meaning people – often, but not exclusively liberals – who otherwise tend to be “anti-war” find themselves with an itchy trigger finger when it comes to humanitarian disasters. But here, as elsewhere, policies have to be judged not by their proponents’ good intentions, but by those policies’ likely consequences.
Link via Matthew Yglesias.
Nice article at Reason on the flourishing American beer market. Despite the sneering connotations often given to the phrase “American beer,” the article notes that “More styles of suds are now brewed in America than in any other place. Along with the light-tasting lagers that still dominate the market, the new offerings include porters, stouts, barley wines, bocks, hefeweizens, pale ales, bitters, and Belgian-style farmhouse ales. American beers consistently win the highest proportion of awards in international competitions. Local and regional beer has re-emerged: There are more than 1,400 breweries in the United States, up from only a few dozen at the start of the 1980s.”
I will also come clean and say that I actually enjoy some mass-market American lagers. Just the other evening, in fact, I was partaking of the Champagne of Beers, Miller High Life, or what I like to call the thinking man’s PBR. Which is not to say that I don’t also enjoy stouts, ales, IPAs and all that good stuff, but sometimes a bottle of the High Life or a cold Bud slakes the thirst in a way that an overly complex microbrew just can’t.
I enjoyed Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire so much (despite disagreement in places) that when I saw his Religion and Human Nature at a used bookseller for five bucks I snatched it up. RHN is part of Ward’s four-part “comparative theology” which also includes volumes on revelation, creation, and community. His methodology is to compare the treatment of these topics in various world religions as well as modern secular naturalism, and then to provide a Christian response, both where it can affirm and must deny aspects of the other views.
RHN contains really interesting and illuminating discussions of competing schools of thought in Hinduism and Buddhism in the earlier chapters, but for the purposes of this post I’m interested in Ward’s re-interpretation of the doctrine of Original Sin in light of modern evolutionary thought.
The basic picture offered us by evolutionary theory conflicts with the traditional Christian view of the fall and original sin at a number of points. Traditional Christian teaching has been that human beings lived in a state of blessedness and innocence until Adam’s sin, and that death and suffering entered the world as a result of sin. Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendents both a propensity or inclination toward sin and the guilt of the first sin (whence one argument for infant baptism).
Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, tells us that suffering and death long predated the existence of human beings, that our tendencies toward lust and aggression are part of our genetic baggage and probably helped our ancestors to survive long enough to propagate the species, and that there was likely no period when humans lived in harmony with each other and their world as depicted in the Garden of Eden story.
One popular way to reconcile these two accounts has been to see the story of Creation and Fall as a “myth,” not in the sense of a fairy tale or falsehood, but in the sense of a story that gives us a profound truth about the human condition. The way life is depicted prior to the Fall in the early chapters of Genesis represents creation not as it was some time in the distant past, but creation as it should be and will be when God’s purposes for it are finally realized. “Fallen” humanity is humanity as it is in this world.
While there is value in such an account, Ward says, it tends to sidestep the question of why a good God would create such inherently flawed creatures, and it even risks locating the source of evil in finite existence as such, rather than in a distortion of what is essentially a good creation. Instead he tries to develop a position that mediates between more literalistic and purely “mythic” ones.
Ward accepts that “Destruction and death are built into the universe as necessary conditions of its progress to new forms of life” (p. 160), but he suggests that it nevertheless is the case that moral evil entered the world at some point. Proto-humans (or whatever we want to call them) may have tendencies toward lust, aggression and greed as part of their constitutive make-up, but at some point it became possible for them to choose to indulge those tendencies at the expense of another:
Thus when humans first came into being, they were already locked into a world in which competition and death were fundamental to their very existence. In this long process of the emergence of consciousness, there was a first moment at which a sentient animal became aware of moral obligation. At some point, animal life emerged from a stage of what Hegel called “dreaming innocence,” at which moral considerations were irrelevant, since animals simply acted in ways natural to their species. At that point, a sentient consciousness discerned, or thought it discerned, an obligation to act in one way rather than another, an obligation which it was free to respond to or ignore. It seems to me plausible to say that it was at that point that truly personal consciousness first began to exist.
Two elements seem to be axiomatic about moral obligation. One is that, if a moral obligation truly exists, then it must be possible to meet it; otherwise it is not an obligation. The other is that it must also be possible to ignore it; otherwise it is not a matter of morality. It therefore seems to me beyond dispute that there must have been a first sin in the history of the planet. There must have been a moment when a conscious being decided to ignore an obligation, when it need not have done so. It is not an antique fable, it is an indisputable fact, that sin entered into the world through the free action of a conscious being which chose to do what it should not and need not have done. (p. 161)
Furthermore, this choosing of evil ruptures what may have been a “tacit” or “thematic” knowledge and awareness of God. “The Fall consisted in the loss of the sense of a felt unity with the sacred root of being, in the inability to co-operate with its gracious guidance, and so in the growth of that sense of solitude and estrangement which becomes the lot of humanity in a state of sin” (p. 162). Once this unity is ruptured, “spiritual death” is the natural outcome.
The ultimate human choice, from a theistic viewpoint, is not so much a choice between good and evil, abstractly conceived, as a choice between relationship with God, as the source of love and power, and a form of self-determination which inevitably leads on to self-regard. (pp. 163-4)
The effects of this choosing of evil reinforce human being’s already existing drives toward dominating and exploiting others, making it difficult, if not impossible, to not choose sin. And this condition is spread, Ward thinks, because future generations are born among those who’ve already turned away from God, making it even harder for them to choose the good, much less restore the lost unity with the divine. He therefore adopts a view that Original Sin is propagated by social and environmental conditions rather than being passed in some quasi-physical fashion.
The import of the Genesis story is that our world is one in which at a very early stage all humans rejected God. It is that original and massive embracing of desire that has drastically altered the moral situation of all subsequent human descendents. (p. 167)
For anyone born into such a world, the choice of good and evil is no delicately balanced, dispassionately contemplated decision. In a world of greed, hatred, and delusion, one must either be an oppressor, a victim, or a resister. One will be born as a child within one of these groups, and one’s historical responses and learned activities will be shaped accordingly. (pp. 168-9)
Even if someone managed to always make the correct moral decision, she would still not experience the unity in relationship with God that is the real purpose of human life. Instead of experiencing morality as the natural expression of a life lived in friendship with God, we usually experience it as a burdensome obligation and an obstacle to fulfilling our desires, at lest where it “pinches.” In our fallen condition our inclinations and our obligations are frequently at variance. To be delivered from our condition requires overcoming our estrangement from God, and the consequent transformation of our desires and inclinations. But this isn’t something we’re capable of pulling off.
To be continued (but not until next week probably, since I’m going camping this weekend!)…
It’s not everyday that we get a bill that constitutes a massive executive power grab and effectively authorizes torture (or “torture-lite” if you insist). What a great day to be an American!
Republicans like Denny Hastert and their media echo chamber keep accusing people who oppose this sort of thing as wanting to “give rights to terrorists.” Two things: first, we’re talking about people accused or suspected of being terrorists (or supporting terrorists). Big difference, one would think. Second, yes, even terrorists have certain rights that can’t simply be cast aside. They are human beings, after all.
Balkinization continues to be the best one-stop-shopping spot for analysis of all this that I’ve found.
A friend of mine sent me this article from the New Yorker on the life and death of Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a radical Islamic cleric in Sudan who was executed for opposition to the government. The twist is that Taha was a radical progressive, an exponent of a liberal reinterpretation of Islam.
Taha’s direct influence seems small, but the article suggests that the Sudanese are wearying of Islamism and that a vision like Taha’s may have a futre in the Islamic world. It’s a long, but fascinating, read.
Marvin has a three part series on the Emergent Church, offers some critical questions, and wonders how a congregation like his, which is not located in a hip, urban enclave might make use of some “emergent” ideas.
Brandon writes that Richard Dawkins’ reading of scripture makes fundamentalism look sophisticated and he also questions whether it’s correct to say that Islamists are motivated by an unwavering faith, as “anti-religionists” like Dawkins and Sam Harris assume in making their case.
There’s a lively discussion of Andrew Bacevich’s New American Militarism at Connexions (which your scribe participated in briefly).
At Sinning Boldly, Andy considers Christian views of immanence and transcendence.
Thomas at Without Authority continues his series on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love.
You may have seen this article at Christianity Today on the resurgence of a conservative brand of Calvinism within evangelical – Baptist in particular it seems – churches. Jenell Paris and Hugo Schwyzer look at it from the angle of gender roles.
A Thinking Reed 