Author: Lee M.

MSNBC has a version of the test administered to people seeking to become American citizens (via Bill Keezer). I got a 95% – stupid seventh amendment! But apparently I still “know more about this great land than most Americans.”

Here’s a transcript from a recent episode of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” – a good discussion with Rabbi Elliot Dorff and NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson about marriage and sexuality. Johnson emphasizes the conflicted evaluation the NT gives to marriage and family and how that doesn’t exactly mesh with some of the “family values” rhetoric we often hear.

(via LutherPunk)

Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, which I have touted repeatedly in these august pages, reviews Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Beinart, an erstwhile New Republic editor, argues for the resuscitation of muscular Cold War liberalism as the only kind of fighting faith that can effectively combat the new totalitarian menace of Islamic jihadism. Bacevich severely criticizes Beinart’s reading of history, and in particular his attempt to co-opt Reinhold Neibuhr as a patron saint of a new “national greatness” liberalism. Neibuhr, Bacevich points out, was deeply aware of the complexities of history and the perverse consequences that attended even the best-intentioned actions on the world stage. In Bacevich’s view, “[w]ere [Neibuhr] in our midst today, he would likely align himself with those dissidents on the left and the right who reject the conceits of the American Century and who view as profoundly dangerous the claims of both neoliberals and neoconservatives to understand history’s purpose and destination.”

Another conceit of both liberal hawks like Beinart and neoconservatives that I think needs to be critically examined is that Islamic terrorism does in fact represent a new totalitarianism which poses an existential threat to the USA, and the West more generally, on a par with Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism. This article, for instance, points out that many of the high profile al-Qaeda figures have turned out to be bumblers and losers and that we may have in fact blown the menace of al-Qaeda out of proportion. If anything, the author argues, our response to 9/11, especially the war in Iraq may have actually strenghtened what was essentially a fringe movement who managed to pull off one spectacularly horrifying attack. Another facet of this possible exaggeration of the threat we face are the perfervid fantasies about Islamic radicals actually taking over America and imposing sharia law on the populace. How exactly this is supposed to come about is never made terribly clear. (The number of firearms in America alone would seem to provide a pretty serious obstacle to such an outcome.)

For some reason, there are intellectuals who seem to want there to be some kind of grand existential conflict. In a recent interview, for instance, Christopher Hitchens, (former?) leftist and current Iraq war apologist out and out admitted that 9/11 was “exhilirating” for him because it pits everything he loves versus everything he hates and the conflict is so “interesting.” And even before 9/11, and kicking into high gear afterwards, there have been pundits on the right and left who longed for a project of “National Greatness,” an epoch-spanning mission that would allow us to display our virtue in bringing the blessings our Our Way of Life to the world (Recall Bill Clinton’s comment that he was actually kind of sorry the Cold War was over because there was no world crisis that really gave him a chance to shine. He had to settle for bombing backwaters like Sudan and Serbia. In other words: peace and prosperity is so boring!)

I’ve experessed myself on the whole “national greatness” idea before – here and here – and pretty much stand by everything I wrote then. I think what galls me the most about these projects of greatness that get cooked up by what passes for our public intellecutals is that they aren’t the ones who will shoulder the burden of their schemes. Christopher Hitchens may find it all exhilirating and interesting, but what about the Marine in Iraq who sees his buddy get blown up by an IED, or the young Pakistani who’s tortured at Gitmo and then later let go because he has no ties to terrorism, or the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for the war in Iraq? Is the idea that the architects of our greatness will bask in the reflected glory of America while the costs are imposed on other people who don’t have much of a say?

Granted that, as Camassia recently pointed out, the line between legitimate self-defense and imperial expansion can appear fuzzy, it would help, I think, if we didn’t cloud things with vague abstractions like national greatness and dreams of a divinely sanctioned mission to save the world and instead tried to understand what would be a reasonable and prudent way of managing the threat of terrorism. In the terms of both classical Christian and classical liberal political theory, the political authorities are called to secure the conditions of earthly well-being so that society can function and the church can go about spreading her message. When this important, but limited, function is replaced by dreams of “greatness” the state can easily become a kind of ersatz savior instead of “God’s servant for your good.”

Today’s the Western feast day of St. Irenaeus (c. 125-202 A.D.), bishop of Lyons, church father, and scourge of gnosticism. Irenaeus, according to tradition, was merely two degrees removed from the apostles themselves, having heard the preaching of St. Polycarp who himself had sat at the feet of St. John.

[I]t was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that might receive the adoption of sons? – Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter XIX

Prayer: Almighty God, who upheld your servant Irenaeus with strength to Maintain the truth against every blast of vain doctrine: Keep us, we pray, steadfast in your true religion, that in constancy and peace we may walk in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A good piece by Cato Institute scholars Justin Logan and Chritopher Preble criticizing a recent Jonah Goldberg commendation of nation building as the way to win the war on terrorism at National Review Online of all places. Kudos to them for publishing a piece that basically contradicts their editorial line on the war.

We even get a paragraph of defeatist liberal blame-America first-ism:

Much as it hurts to say it, our enemies by and large don’t hate us because they’re poor, or because they’re hopeless; they hate us because they believe that we are hostile to them. As a recent report from the Government Accountability Office put things, “U.S. foreign policy is the major root cause behind anti-American sentiments among Muslim populations and…this point needs to be better researched, absorbed, and acted upon by government officials.” Mucking about in Chad isn’t going to help our position in the war on terror, and could well serve to make it worse by strengthening Muslims’ beliefs about American foreign policy.

And this is a point that always bears repeating:

Conservative skepticism about government action should not be limited to domestic policy. If the American government is smart enough to figure out how to make a coherent state out of Chad, what is it not smart enough to do?

Many conservatives seem to have abandoned, or at least sharply curtailed, their skepticism about government not only when it comes to things like nation-building, but in trusting the government (and the executive branch in particular) to wield largely unaccountable power in the areas of war, detention and interrogation practices, surveillance, etc. The traditional conservative and classical liberal objection to this was always that fallible human beings are neither wise enough nor good enough to be trusted with this kind of power. And that this skepticism should prevail even when your own party is in power.

This column is a near-perfect example of what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”

That’s the title of a forthcoming book which compiles evidence of the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel in the kinds of “interrogation techniques” being used at Guantanamo Bay and detention centers in Afghanistan (and elsewhere for all we know) such as:

Beating; punching with fists; use of truncheons; kicking; slamming against walls; stretching or suspension (to tear ligaments or muscles to cause asphyxia); external electric shocks; forcing prisoners to abase and to urinate on themselves; forced masturbation; forced renunciation of religion; false confessions or accusations; applying urine and feces to prisoners; making verbal threats to a prisoner and his family; denigration of a prisoner’s religion; force-feeding; induced hypothermia and exposure to extreme heat; dietary manipulation; use of sedatives; extreme sleep deprivation; mock executions; water immersion; “water-boarding”; obstruction of the prisoner’s airway; chest compression; thermal burning; rape; dog bites; sexual abuse; forcing a prisoner to watch the abuse or torture of a loved one.

(from Andrew Sullivan via Unqualified Offerings)

Recently Camassia posted on how children’s stories can inculcate a sentimental view of animals and the natural world that is neither realistic nor truly compassionate. This led to a discussion about in what sense death and predation in the natural world are an essential part of the created order and what our attitude toward them should be.

As it happens, a book I just picked up from our local library – Animals on the Agenda: Questions About Animals for Theology and Ethics, edited by Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto – has a couple of essays that address this very question. In “Is Nature God’s Will?” philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark criticizes a fairly common form of nature mysticism or pantheism that equates what’s good with what’s “natural.” Well-meaning environmentalists may embrace this kind of worldview because of the damage they think, rightly or wrongly, has been done to the natural world because of the Judeo-Christian understanding of reality.

But, as Clark argues, if whatever is natural is good, then we really have no grounds for condemning anything:

If Nature’s Way is to be our guide, it is pointless to complain of mass extinctions, or pollution. In a mechanistic universe terms like ‘pollution’ (which implies that there are preferred states, or real goals) are out of place: there is only biochemical change. But ‘pollution’ is also out of place in a pantheistic world: there are only openings up of new ecological niches, the testing of old-established kinds against new challenges. It is the office of each kind, each ‘separate’ organism to maintain its own as best it may, so that the glory of the whole be made richer through the war of its parts. So the worship of Nature which has been so popular a response to environmental catastrophe bids fair to explain such things away. Think of it – and of genocide – as evolution in action, to no human end. Environmentally-minded theologians often suggest that it is ‘natural’ (and so commendable) that gangs of dogs, for example, should pull down, kill, and disembowel their prey. Human predators are just as ‘natural’, and it is quite unclear what limits they should put upon themselves, or what would count as ‘unnatural’ greed. If nature is unambiguously God’s will, God apparently wants us to be predatory nepotists. (p. 130)

Even granting that there is cooperation as well as competition in nature, it’s clear that nature is a mixed bag morally and certainly does not unambiguously reflect the character of the God revealed in Jesus. And, far from being the necessary source of a deprecation of nature, a distinction between the natural and the divine is necessary to properly value the created world. Nature is good, but fallen: “We are, as it were, in receipt of a divine revelation in the natural universe, but that revelation is obscured and twisted by the effects of some primaeval sin” (p. 135).

The point is echoed by Michael Lloyd in his essay “Are Animals Fallen?” The existence of predation and animal suffering, Lloyd argues, is strong prima facie evidence against the existence of a benevolent creator. Much more so is it evidence against a specifically Christian theology which depicts God as self-giving love. Lloyd rejects any view that attempts to depict violent predation as a positive good or even a necessary evil. Surely an omnipotent God could, if he wished, create a world without such features.*

Lloyd considers the process theology view that God isn’t omnipotent, but must work with the built-in limitations and unpredictable freedom of creatures to try to realize positive values. But he rejects this view on the grounds that it compromises the biblical understanding of God, who is Lord of all creation, and that it seems to make any kind of eschatological hope difficult to sustain.

Instead, Lloyd settles on the fairly traditional idea that the fallenness of nature is attributable to the agency of intelligent beings who sinned. Since modern evolutionary theory makes it impossible to suppose that human sin was the cause of nature’s fall (since predation, violence, and suffering long predate human existence), he argues for the view that “death, disease, division, and predation are … consequences of the angelic Fall rather than part of the good order of creation” (p. 159). Lloyd concedes that there’s not much, if any, direct evidence to support this view, but contends that the overall plausibility of the Christian “package of beliefs” allows this relatively unsupported assertion to be carried.

Whatever we may think of the idea of a “primeval sin” or “angelic fall” as explanations for the state of nature, I think Clark and Lloyd are right that Christians can’t simply affirm the natural order as it stands as unqualifiedly good. Certainly, being qua being is good, but not everything created beings do is good. If we think that all of creation is going to be redeemed (rather than that human beings will merely escape creation into a disembodied heaven), then it seems we have to say that creation will be radically transformed in some way (even if we can’t say how this is going to happen, or exactly what it entails). Whatever else we may say about God’s kingdom, violent predation hardly seems like it should have a place there.

This doesn’t mean, though, that we should try to “fix” nature by, say, making our pets into vegetarians or that predation might not be the lesser evil in many cases. It’s God who will redeem creation, not us. However, neither should we appeal to “nature” to justify human practices which clearly inflict unnecessary suffering or exacerbate nature’s fallen state. This would seem to have implications for farming, breeding practices, and other ways we interact with the natural, and especially animal, creation. St. Francis even reputedly convinced a wolf not to attack people!

Christians, it seems, need to tread a path between the denigration of nature that has characterized some traditional theology and an uncritical embrace of whatever seems “natural.”

As G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. (from Orthodoxy, p. 112)

——————————————-
*One caveat here: I’m not sure we can so confidently say that it was possible for God to create a radically different world such that, to use Lloyd’s example, there would be a vegetarian analogue of a tiger. Not that I deny God’s omnipotence, I’m just not as confident as some that we have a firm grasp on what would or would not be possible under radically different conditions. The laws of nature may be interconnected in ways that we have at best a partial grasp of, so that certain states of affairs that we seem to be able to imagine obtaining are not, in fact, possible states of affairs.

(See here and here for previous posts.)

Next to Anselm’s, Peter Abelard’s atonement theory may be the most criticized in Christian history, though usually by different people. Beginning with his contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux and continuing to evangelicals in our own day who uphold the indispensibility of satisfaction or penal substitution atonement models, Abelard’s theory has been characterized as “exemlarist,” “subjective,” and even “Pelagian.” In chapter seven of his Past Event and Present Salvation, Paul Fiddes sets out to rehabilitate Abelard, realizing though that there are shortcomings in his account that need to be corrected.

In Fiddes’ view, a more “subjective” account of the atonement is what we need. Not because God wasn’t acting in Jesus to redeem us, but because sin is a power that grips us from which we need to be freed. In Fiddes’ (and Abelard’s) view, we are the obstacles to reconciliation, not God. Abelard points out that it’s hard to see how the death of Jesus could have satisfied God’s justice and made him better disposed toward us since the murder of the Son of God is surely a far worse sin than Adam’s disobedience! For Abelard, we should think of atonement as first and foremost an act of God’s love, not an act constrained by some external factor like the demands of justice or the supposed rights of the Devil.

The most persistent criticism of Abelard has been that he sees Jesus as simply providing an edifying example of love which we are then called to imitate. If this is right, then he would seem to fall into the trap of Pelagianism, since such a theory would presuppose that we’re able to imitate Christ’s example. But Fiddes is at pains to show that Abelard’s theory is more “objective” than he’s been given credit for. The life and death of Jesus doesn’t just provide an example; it empowers us to repent and turn away from sin because God’s love is poured out through Jesus.

Abelard’s perception is that the showing forth of the love of God in the life of Christ is at the same time the pouring forth of love into the one who beholds it. Christ ‘illuminates’ us by his teaching, and by such aspects of his life as patience in suffering, discernment into evil, persistence in prayer, perfect obedience to God, humility in the face of malice and finally his selfless sacrifice for others in death: ‘Dispelling our shadows with light, he showed us, both by his words and example, the fullness of all virtues, and repaired our nature.’ As Abelard moves from the word ‘showed’ to ‘repaired’ he is trying to express his insight that the love disclosed is at the same time the love which recreates. … Abelard is not simply saying that the revelation of love saves us; he is saying that love as it is revealed saves us. (p. 145)

The crucifixion of Jesus reveals to us both the consequences of human sin, inciting repentance, and the depths of God’s love, thus enkindling love in response. In Fiddes’ view this is a more adequate view than some of the other traditional views because it recognizes that sin isn’t an impersonal debt that needs to be paid off, but a broken relationship that needs to be healed. God enters into our condition to bestow his love upon us and to incite a response of love in us.

Abelard is surely right that sin is a matter of the rebellion of our hearts against God, not some impersonal debt to paid off outside us, but rather a broken relationship to be healed within us. Salvation must be a healing of our wills which are resisting God here and now in the present. (p 152)

[…]

We have seen Abelard’s great insight to be that the revelation in Christ, when received by the human mind, is at the same time an actual infusion of love. The exhibition is a restoration. The manifestation is a transformation. (p. 154)

Fiddes recognizes some problems with Abelard’s account. One is that it seems too individualistic. Where is the sense that the Incarnation and Atonement have implications for the human condition as such, not to mention the broader social and even cosmic implications? Another is the role of the Holy Spirit in Abelard’s account. What role does the Spirit play in bringing us to repentance and new life in light of God’s act of reconciliation? Abelard seems to say, Fiddes says, that the Spirit prepares us for the reception of God’s revelation of love, but how does this relate to Abelard’s insight the love of God is poured out into us from the event of Christ’s life and death itself?

Finally, there is the question “why was love shown in a death?” We may be able to see how God’s love is revealed in Jesus’ teaching, healing, forgiving, and other acts, but how does his death display God’s love? It would seem that it only could if the death accomplishes something for us and, therefore, Abelard’s account would have to piggyback on some more objective account like Anselm’s.

Fiddes’ response is that the Incarnation and the crucifixion are God’s entering into our condition and predicament and undergoing the suffering that is part of human life. “God, we may say, shows his love by enduring to the uttermost the estrangement of his own creation. This is the depth of God’s identification with us” (p. 157). Fiddes recognizes that this response was not available to Abelard since, like the majority of the Christian theological tradtion, he viewed God as impassible and unable to suffer. But Fiddes says we should follow recent theologians in seeing this as a Greek imposition on the Biblical concept of God.

Quite apart from the philosophical questions this rasies (I’m less happy than Fiddes about jumping on the passibility bandwagon of recent theology; David B. Hart has some very trenchant criticisms of Robert Jenson on this score in his Beauty of the Infinite), one might ask why suffering as such is an expression of love. Surely suffering is only valuable if it’s necessary to some greater good. There’s something a little disconcerting about the desire in recent theology to make sure God suffers too! Is it true that we can only love God if we see him suffering?

It might be more accurate to say that suffering is (as Anselm said) simply the natural result of God entering into our fallen world rather than something that has intrinsic value. Death on the cross is the inevitable (in some sense) outcome of the life of perfect obedience to the Father that Jesus lived. Following this path to the bitter end “even to death on a cross” is the way that Jesus united humanity to divinity in his own life, or “God’s identification with us,” as Fiddes puts it. And the Resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit are both the Father’s response of this gift of the Son and the way in which we are incorporated into the life of the Trinity.

Further Thoughts (6/25):There may be a Luthean twist that can be added here. Luther is usually taken to adhere to either a Christus Victor or satisfaction model of atonement, but I think there’s a case to be made that, for Luther, our problem with God is that we don’t trust him. This is our original sin – that we refuse to trust God and his purposes for creation. The unrevealed God is always a God of wrath for us, because we don’t know what he’s up to. In order to create faith and trust, then, God comes to us in the form of the suffering servant, forgiving our sins and healing us. The “love” of the unrevealed God is always an abstract and unknown quantity. So God comes to us concretely in Jesus and (as Gerhard Forde put it) does God to us. He pours out his love on us in the messy, concrete details of our lives. This may have been, Forde says, the only way for God to get through to us.

Fiddes is right, then, to defend the Abelardian from the charges of exemplarism for, as he points out,

The humble love of God, in which he opens himself to pain and joy in the world, is not just revealed like a fact in a scientific textbook. The revealing of his love is at the same time God’s opening of himself, for revelation can be nothing less than the self-unveiling of the being of God. … Only God can link the revelation of love and the outpouring of love, because revelation is always an encounter with the ‘person of God speaking’. (pp. 160-1)

God’s coming among us and identifying with us in our human condition is at the same time God’s pouring out of his forgiving love upon us. And it’s that love which empowers the human response, which creates faith and trust. So, I think the charge of Pelagianism is also avoided.

Hey, we found WMD in Iraq! Oh wait, not really.

This may put me on the fringe (if I wasn’t there already), but I always thought the WMD business was a red herring in the first place. I recall reading an article Gregg Easterbrook wrote back in 2002 – in The New Republic of all places – arguing that “WMD” conflates biological and chemical weapons, which are very difficult to weaponize and use effectively to kill large numbers of people, with nuclear weapons, and that only the latter really deserve to be called weapons of mass descruction. And even before the war, the evidence that Saddam had an advanced nuclear program was scanty at best. So I was never prepared to concede that the mere possession of “WMD” was sufficient grounds for war.

In focusing so much on the WMD issue, anti-war people may have actually made a tactical error since they’ve effectively conceded that possession of WMD would justify war if there had actually been any.