A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • 25 books every Christian should read(?)

    That is, according to a book recently published by Harper under the auspices of Renovare, the evangelical-ish spiritual renewal movement. (Actually, since this book has the list, aren’t there 26 books every Christian should read? Seems like some sort of paradox there…)

    In any event, here’s the list, with titles I’ve read in bold. An asterisk means I’ve read at least selections.

    1. On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius
    2. Confessions, St. Augustine
    3. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Various
    4. The Rule of St. Benedict, St. Benedict
    5. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri*
    6. The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
    7. Revelations of Divine Love (Showings), Julian of Norwich
    8. The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis
    9. The Philokalia, Various
    10. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin*
    11. The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila
    12. Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross
    13. Pensees, Blaise Pascal
    14. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
    15. The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence
    16. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, William Law
    17. The Way of a Pilgrim, Unknown Author
    18. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
    19. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
    20. The Poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins*
    21. The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    22. A Testament of Devotion, Thomas R. Kelly
    23. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
    24. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
    25. The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen

    Of the ones I haven’t read, I most feel like I should read Benedict and Julian. One glaring omission that jumps out at me is Martin Luther. If I were adding something it would probably be his On Christian Liberty.

    Anyone care to suggest other titles they’d add to (or subtract from) the list?

    UPDATE: Tony Jones offers an alternative list he and some friends came up with here. It includes some good additions like Origen, Anselm, Wesley, and Luther, as well as some worthy books from more recent times (Barth, Gutierrez).

  • Resurrection and Docetism

    People sometimes argue against “spiritual” interpretations of the Resurrection of Jesus on the grounds that they are “Docetic”–that is, they deny the full reality of the Incarnation after the fashion of the ancient heresy of Docetism, which said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Specifically, it held that Jesus’ body was an illusion and he was not really crucified.

    Interestingly, however, in a dialogue on the Resurrection between British theologians Geoffrey Lampe and Donald MacKinnon published in the 60s, Lampe makes precisely the reverse argument:

    He shared our human death; and I remain convinced that his entry into life beyond death was not dissimilar in its mode from ours. What may await us on the other side of death must not, if the Incarnation is real and Christ is the second Adam, be a room into which his presence has not preceded us. Unless we take an impossibly ‘spiritualist’ view of our human make-up, we cannot lightly contemplate the dissolution of the body without which we are unable, since we are physical beings, to conceive of a personality. Yet the dissolution of the body is most certainly part of the universal lot of man. I do not find it possible to believe that bodily corruption, that ultimate negation, as it seems, of all human endeavor, aspiration and hope, can be something from which the manhood of Christ was exempt. If God will raise us from death to a new life of fuller communion with himself then this will be sheer miracle: God’s re-creative Word affirming us in the moment of our utter nothingness. And if Christ is the firstfruits of the dead, his Resurrection cannot be of a different order from this. A Resurrection of his physical body, such as is implied by the empty tomb and by some of the stories in the Gospels of his appearances, would point towards a docetic Christ who does not fully share the lot of men; unless, indeed, bodily corruption were to be regarded as being bound up with the sinfulness of man which Christ did not share (but, unless we accept an impossibly literalistic interpretation of Genesis 3 as factual history, it is impossible to hold that physical dissolution is not part of the Creator’s original and constant intention for his creatures in this world). Such a Resurrection, moreover, would offer in itself no promise of risen life beyond death for those who have to face both death and corruption. The miracle which we need would never yet have taken place.

    Lampe’s argument seems to boil down to this:

    1. For Jesus’ Resurrection to be meaningful to us, it must be similar in kind to the resurrection we hope for for ourselves.

    2. But we cannot hope for a “fleshly” resurrection (Lampe writes that “we clearly cannot expect to be raised in our fleshly bodies”).

    3. Therefore, Jesus’ Resurrection must not have been “fleshly.”

    I think Lampe is at least partly right about this. Christians sometimes gloss over what it means to talk about the “resurrection of the body”, but whatever it means it presumably can’t be that we will be raised in the very same bodies we have now. This is because human bodies decay, get eaten, get blown to bits, etc., and the particles they comprise end up in other material objects (including other people’s bodies). So it’s hard, if not impossible, to conceive how we could all be raised in our selfsame physical bodies.

    What we have to suppose instead, I think, is that we will be raised in new bodies–“spiritual” bodies, to use St. Paul’s phrase. These will be bodies that are fitted to whatever environment in which we will exist (“heaven” or the “new heaven and new earth” or whatever one’s preferred symbol is). In short, Christian hope is that we will, after death, enjoy fellowship with God and the blessed company of heaven. This requires, presumably, some medium of self-expression and interaction–which is what the “spiritual body” provides.

    Now, I’m not as convinced that it follows from this that Jesus’ Resurrection didn’t include the raising of his physical body or that his tomb wasn’t empty. Certainly the appearance stories in the gospels suggest that the form taken by the risen Jesus transcended the usual limitations of physicality. But could it be that his physical body was transmuted into the substance of his “spiritual body”? Maybe this indicates–as John Polkinghorne and others have suggested–that the new heavens and new earth will be, in some mysterious way, composed of the “stuff” of this universe, but “transposed” into a spiritual key. On that view, we could still speak of a degree of continuity between this physical world and the world to come, even if there isn’t a direct continuity between our fleshly bodies and our spiritual ones.

    Addendum: This isn’t directly relevant to the main point of the post, but I also like Lampe’s way of describing how judgment and mercy are united on the Cross:

    I cannot set acceptance over against judgement as though there were any incompatibility between them. The Cross is a place of judgement and condemnation. Not of any judgement or condemnation of Jesus by God the Father. The judge is Jesus. Calvary is a place of execution, the execution of the Son of God by sinners, but by becoming this it is made to be Christ’s judgement seat. Man’s sin is disclosed there in its fullest odiousness. It is shown up and condemned by its encounter with steadfast love. Christ’s acceptance of sinners is no easy tolerance. He offers no sanction for that artificial, blindly uncritical, ‘Christian goodwill’ which sometimes does duty for true charity. The Cross itself is the measure of the cost of acceptance. The width of the gulf between heaven and hell is revealed there, where the greatest act of human sin is wrought out in a darkness that covered all the land. Acceptance at the hands of the victim of that sin is itself the judgement and condemnation of sin; for it is only when the sinner is accepted that the judgement of his sin becomes effective, and only divine love is able to condemn sin by accepting the sinner. It makes no compromise with sin, nor does it need to be safeguarded from contamination by sinners, for it has sovereign power to reclaim them in the act of accepting them. Acceptance and judgement do not have to be balanced against each other. At the Cross the divine mercy, justice and truth are united, for they are inseparable aspects of that definitive declaration of the ways of God to man. [Emphasis added–L.M.]

  • The Common English Bible–a new translation

    My dear wife got me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday, which I’ve been enjoying immensely. Poking around in the Kindle store, I decided I should download a version of the Bible. But which one? I usually read either the New Revised Standard Version or the Revised English Bible. But the Kindle version of the NRSV hasn’t been released yet, and I didn’t see one for the REB.

    Then I came across the Common English Bible. I hadn’t previously heard of it, but after a little investigation I discovered that the translation was just completed this year under the auspices of publishers associated with the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church, Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ. The translation was made by scholars from “22 faith traditions,” according to its website, and is intended to be a Bible for “the whole church of Jesus Christ.”

    The intention of the CEB is to preserve the scholarly accuracy comparable to the NRSV while being more readable for the average person in the pew. It seems that it’s intended to fill a niche for mainliners similar to that of the New International Version in the evangelical world. Interestingly, Fuller Theological Seminary, the big evangelical seminary in Southern California, has approved the CEB for official use among faculty and students, replacing the NIV. It seems that the school was not pleased that the 2011 version of the NIV–which will replace the TNIV–is a less-gender-inclusive translation, and it determined that the CEB was a good alternative.

    In any event, I haven’t really dipped into the CEB much yet, but I’m looking forward to experiencing the Bible in a fresh translation. (Also, it was only about $5.00 for the Kindle version!)

  • American “multarchy”

    Philosopher Gary Gutting writes that America doesn’t have a democracy, but a “mutlarchy”–a system that includes elements of the five types of government delineated by Plato in The Republic. These are

    —aristocracy: “rule by the ‘best’, that is, by experts specially trained at governance”
    —timarchy: “rule by those guided by their courage and sense of honor”
    —oligarchy: “rule by a wealthy minority”
    —democracy: “rule by the people as a whole—a ‘mob’ as Plato saw it”
    —tyranny: “rule by a despot answerable to no one but himself”

    We don’t have a single form of government, but “a complex interweaving of many forms of government.” Gutting says that the political task is not to eliminate any of these elements, since they are probably unavoidable, but finding the appropriate balance among them. This means we should avoid superficial slogans like “less government”:

    Much of our current debate over this challenge focuses on the question of whether we have “too much government,” where “government” means the federal bureaucracy. Our “Platonic” analysis suggests that this is at best a gross oversimplificaton. The question, rather, is precisely how should we calibrate the relative strengths of all five elements of our multocracy. Current calls for “less government” actually mean less power for elected leaders and for the bureaucracies that serve them and more power for the “oligarchy” of millionaires and corporations. Such calls also imply less power for the people (the democratic element), since, while elected leaders are directly responsible to those who vote, those whose power is based on wealth are not. In fact, many of us who bristle at any government interference with our freedom and privacy, accept, as an economic necessity, similar interference from the companies we work for or do business with.

    What we need is an integrated debate about all the powers that govern us, along with a recognition that all of them have essential roles but also pose dangers. In particular, “How can we recognize legitimate corporate interests while avoiding plutocracy?” is as essential a question as “Is the federal bureaucracy a threat to personal freedom?” Those worried about the evils of Big Government need to look not only at the executive branch in Washington but also at the executive offices of our major corporations.

    I think this is a helpful analysis. It shows that we define “freedom” too narrowly if we understand it simply as freedom from (federal) government interference. These other “governments” can limit people’s freedom in ways that are just as harmful.

  • Metallica, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

  • Participatory soteriology and the shape of Christian life together

    Christopher offers a semi-defense of Pelagius (a semi-Pelagian defense?) and calls for a movement of “Advent asceticism” that sees a particular form of communal obedience not as an attempt to earn heaven, but as a response to Heaven as it has come to live among us in the Incarnation. He notes that much Protestant theology, with its focus on a once-for-all transactional account of salvation, has a hard time underwriting this kind of response. Instead, he advocates a “participatory soteriology”:

    What this means is not that we save ourselves, or that salvation has not been given once-for-all, but rather in Christ we receive this Life as pure gift and participate in and live out of the Life of this One who is our salvation, our healing, our reharmonization as a leavening society and as a people of and friends of the earth, that is, the whole of creation and every creature.

    Somewhat relatedly, I’m reading Keith Ward’s Religion and Human Nature, which is the third volume in his four-volume “comparative theology.” In it, Ward is trying to develop a Christian theology that is open to the insights of other traditions while still remaining a distinctively Christian theology.

    An important distinction Ward makes in this volume is between “forensic” and “soterial” models of sin and salvation. In short, for a forensic model, the fundamental human problem is guilt and the solution is remittance of guilt (whether through punishment, satisfaction, or forgiveness). For a soterial model, by contrast, the fundamental problem is the the sickness of the human self: its affections and desires are disordered. The self is turned in on itself, to borrow Luther’s phrase, loving itself in a disordered way. The corresponding solution is healing: we need a re-orientation of our deepest selves toward love of God and neighbor.

    Writing about different forms of Hinduism (but in a way that he intends, I think, to apply to Christianity) Ward observes that “a concentration on a forensic notion of desert misses something basic to the religious perception”:

    What is missing is the idea…that the goal of human life lies in a relationship of devotion to the supreme Lord. A mechanical and forensic model, concentrating on individual moral success of failure, misses this element of personal relationship that lies at the heart of devotional faith….[A] soterial model…construes the spiritual state of the human self primarily in terms of analogies to disease and health. The healthy soul is one that is in a state of devoted login service to the Lord, that is transfigured by the beauty of the Lord, and empowered by the Lord’s love. The sick soul is one that withers and atrophies because it is incapable either of giving or receiving the love that alone gives life. (p. 53)

    A lot of traditional theology, particularly Protestant, has favored the forensic account. Jesus dies on the cross so that our sins can be forgiven. The problem, as Christopher notes, is that Protestantism (particularly Lutheranism) hasn’t always had a good account of what we’re supposed to do after that. The result has all too often been a complacent conformity rather than lives conformed to the image of Christ.

    Correspdonding to the forensic and soterial models, Ward distinguishes two understandings of “justification.” The first, which has dominated much Protestant theology, understands it as a kind of declaration of legal innocence. God “imputes” the righteousness of Christ to us, even though in ourselves we remain sinful. Arguing for a different view, Ward suggests understanding it more relationally. Justification is being rightly related to God.

    When ‘justification’ is taken to mean, ‘a declaration of legal innocence’, one faces the difficulty that a guilty person has to be declared innocent by God. But, if God is perfectly just, how is this possible? As I have interpreted it, justification means ‘establishing the possibility of being rightly related to God’. How can a person whose deepest motives and dispositions are to cause great harm be rightly related to God? Only if those motivations and dispositions are wholly changed, by an inward turning of the mind, a metanoia. (p. 190).

    What is accomplished in the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection is that God unites humanity to divinity and makes possible this restored relationship. The cross shows both “the suffering that self-regard causes to self, to others, and to God [and] the life of obedient self-giving that God requires” (p. 191). But it is more than that: it is “the historical vehicle of divine power to forgive and heal” (p. 191).

    Instead of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’, it might be better to speak of ‘healing’ and ‘participation’. What God requires of sinners is a transformation of life in penitence and obedient love. This requirement is met by participation in the power of the Spirit, which is luminously expressed in and mediated through the life and self-sacrificial death of Jesus. Jesus’ sacrifice gives particular form to the Spirit’s activity, and founds the community of the new covenant in which the Spirit can transform human lives into the image of cruciform love. (p. 214)

    That last point strikes me as key in light of Christopher’s observation that Protestant Christianity often lacks forms of disciplined community that give a paritcular shape to the Christian life. Participation in the Spirit is participation in the particular cruciform shape of Jesus’ humanity. This incorporation into Christ restores our relationship to God and makes possible a re-ordering of our desires. We “put on the mind of Christ,” to use Paul’s phrase, and are renewed in our humanity. This is a gradual process, one that may not be complete until after death. But by being “in Christ” we are empowered to receive a new self, one that is rightly related to God, our neighbor, and the rest of creation.

  • Darkest Era, “Heathen Burial”

    From The Last Caress of Light, one of my favorite albums of 2011.

  • Pelagius for the rest of us?

    (I tweeted a bit about this earlier, but I thought I might as well write some thoughts into a proper blog post.)

    As if to confirm our most stereotypical expectations, a proposal is being put before a diocese of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta to “rehabilitate” Pelagius by reversing the Council of Carthage’s (5th century) condemnation of Pelagian teachings.

    Now, I’m willing to believe that Pelagius got a raw deal in being tarred as an arch-heretic. Given the dearth of extant writings, it’s quite possible that he was unfairly targeted by the ecclesiastical powers that be. And certainly modern mainstream Christianity is–for better or worse–more doctrinally latitudinarian than the early church was.

    Nevertheless, I can’t shake the impression that, possibly because of the lack of reliable primary sources, Pelagius has become a kind of cipher–a blank screen upon which modern liberal Christians like to project their idealized version of an optimistic, nature-loving, life-affirming Christianity. In other words, the opposite of everything they dislike about Augustinian Christianity (in what is usually caricatured form).

    This is similar and even related to the vogue for a vaguely mystical, eco-sensitive “Celtic Christianity” that, again, often bears little resemblance to the real historical deal. Pelagius is often upheld (by J. Philip Newell, for example) as the paragon and forefather of Celtic Christian spirituality.

    What ought to tip us off that something fishy is afoot here is that the popular version of Pelagian-Celtic Christianity is strikingly conformable to the concerns of comfortable, middle-class westerners: the affirmation of everyone’s inherent goodness, a rejection of the doctrine of original sin, a generalized eco-spirituality, and a belief in an immanent God that resembles a vague life-force more than the rather demanding God of the Bible.

    A good antidote to this whole line of thinking that still takes some of the underlying concerns seriously is Paul Santmire’s Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology. Santmire, a Lutheran eco-theologian, wants to recover theological themes that can support care for the environment, but he also departs from the Matthew Fox-neo-Pelagian crowd at a couple of key points.

    First, Santmire strongly affirms that eco-justice must go hand-in-hand with social justice. The slums of the globe’s vast mega-cities teem with millions of desperately poor people for whom the reality of injustice and radical evil are palpable everyday realities. From this, Santmire infers a need for a robust theology of sin and atonement:

    [A]lthough Fox talks regularly about “justice-making,” he chiefly seems to be thinking about a revolution of consciousness that is going to transform the world, not unlike the idea of “Consciousness III,” proposed by Charles Reich in The Greening of America during the heyday of the 1960s. In Fox’s major works, we encounter little attention to the often stalemated, anguished struggles of the oppressed, which sometimes can last for decades, even longer, and then, with some regularity, still be lost.

    The Christian masses throughout the ages have likewise lived and died with the bitter reality of struggle. Struggle against overwhelming odds has been their daily bread. This is why they have turned again and again to the figure of the crucified, and have struggled all the more desperately in this instance to make sense out of this apparently senseless but nevertheless redemptive death. (p. 22)

    A neo-Pelagian gospel of personal self-improvement and consciousness-raising may resonate with a certain small strata of the global elite, but what Santmire calls the “Christian masses” are all too aware that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot save ourselves.”

    Further, Santmire commends what he takes to be some of the authentic insights of Celtic Christian spirituality–but these differ rather starkly from the kind of feel-good New Agey themes often associated with that tradition. According to Santmire, the eco-sensitivity of Celtic Christians was rooted in orthodox Trinitarian and Christological affirmations, and these worked themselves out in a fairly severe spirituality that might make some contemporary devotees of “Celtic” Christianity blanch.

    Santmire isn’t blind to the flaws of traditional Augustinian Christianity–but he maintains that it preserves important truths and provides resources for a more cosmic and creation-friendly vision (as evidenced by the mature Augustine’s thought, as well as that of Irenaeus, Luther, Calvin, etc.). Traditional theology’s vision is of a creation (human and non-human) in bondage that can only be freed by God’s overflowing, unmerited grace. In Santmire’s view, this speaks much more profoundly and hopefully to our contemporary situation of mass poverty and ecological devastation.

  • Against the circus

    Mother Jones has published a damning report on Ringling Brothers circus and its cruel and abusive treatment of its elephant “performers”:

    Feld Entertainment [Ringling’s parent company] portrays its population of some 50 endangered Asian elephants as “pampered performers” who “are trained through positive reinforcement, a system of repetition and reward that encourages an animal to show off its innate athletic abilities.” But a yearlong Mother Jones investigation shows that Ringling elephants spend most of their long lives either in chains or on trains, under constant threat of the bullhook, or ankus—the menacing tool used to control elephants. They are lame from balancing their 8,000-pound frames on tiny tubs and from being confined in cramped spaces, sometimes for days at a time. They are afflicted with tuberculosis and herpes, potentially deadly diseases rare in the wild and linked to captivity.

    Just as pressures for greater efficiency and higher rates of profit lead to the deplorable conditions of factory farming, the economic logic of the circus is virtually bound to lead to this kind of treatment. This is because the elephants are not “willing performers” but economic commodities. The solution to this, ultimately, isn’t tighter regulation or better enforcement (welcome as that would be), but rejecting the ntotion that these sentient, intelligent, social creatures should be used for human entertainment.

  • King’s X, “Dogman” (live)

    This is a nice clip from the old Jon Stewart show: