A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • The cross as a sign of freedom

    Here is a divine love that cannot be defeated by violence: we do our worst, and we still fail to put God off. We reject, exclude and murder the one who bears the love of God in his words and work, and that love continues to do exactly what it always did. The Jesus who is dying on the cross is completely consistent with the Jesus we have followed through his ministry, and this consistency shows that we can’t deflect the love that comes through in life and death. So when Pilate and the High Priest — acting on behalf of all of us, it seems — push God in Jesus to the edge, God in Jesus gently but firmly pushes back, doing exactly what he always did: loving, forgiving, healing.

    So the cross is a sign of the transcendent freedom of the love of God. This is a God whose actions, and whose reactions to us, cannot be dictated by what we do. You can’t trap, trick or force God into behaving against his character. You can do what you like: but God is God. And if he wants to love and forgive, then he’s going to love and forgive whether you like it or not, because he is free. Our lives, in contrast, are regularly dominated by a kind of emotional economics: ‘I give you that; you give me this.’ ‘I give you friendship; you give me friendship.’ ‘You treat me badly, and I’ll treat you badly.’ We’re caught up in cycles of tit-for-tat behaviour. But God is not caught up in any cycle: God is free to be who he decides to be, and we can’t do anything about it.

    And that’s the good news: the good news of our powerlessness to change God’s mind. Which is just as well, because God’s mind is focused upon us for mercy and for life. God will always survive our sin, our failure. God is never exhausted by what we do. God is always there, capable of remaking the relationships we break again and again. That’s the sign of the cross, the sign of freedom. (Rowan Williams, The Sign and the Sacrifice: The Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection, pp. 8-9)

    In this book, the former archbishop of Canterbury writes meditatively on the central mystery of the Christian faith. The first part looks at the three classic motifs that have been used to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death — sign, sacrifice and victory. Here, in the spirit of Peter Abelard, Williams writes powerfully of the cross as a revelation (or sign) of God’s inexhaustible love. He’s clear, however, that this isn’t all that Christians have wanted to say about the crucifixion of Jesus. An example of love, no matter how powerful and inspiring, doesn’t seem to capture the sense that our objective situation is different because of the death of Jesus. Hence the motifs of “sacrifice” and “victory,” which he considers in subsequent chapters.

    The approach Williams takes in this book is one I’ve long agreed with – the different atonement models are better seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Each of them presents to us a particular aspect of a mystery which is ultimately beyond the grasp of any schematic theory.

  • The populist bait-and-switch gets more obvious every day

    Who could’ve predicted (in fact, a lot of people did) that Donald Trump’s alleged working-class populism would turn into bog-standard right-wingery once he took office? The first two big legislative pushes of this administration involve kicking millions of people off their health insurance and a budget proposal to gut programs that help vulnerable people and invest in the country’s future. What happened to infrastructure? What happened to renegotiating trade deals to bring back good-paying manufacturing jobs?

    I don’t know if this is because Trump is too lazy and uninformed to push for a truly “populist” agenda or because he just doesn’t care, but it’s increasingly clear that he will betray at every turn the voters who helped put him over the top. Maybe things like the Muslim ban and the border wall are meant to be sops to the aggrieved white working class, while attacking PBS and the NEA can be sold as sticking it to the liberal elites. This provides the cover for funneling vast amounts of wealth to the already wealthy (and doing precisely zero to address the supposedly urgent problem of the national debt).

    In practice, rather than some genuinely new ideological configuration, Trumpism is basically just combining the worst impulses of the existing American right: a pseudo-libertarian slash-and-burn approach to government programs meant to help the less well off and a draconian approach to immigration and foreign policy that panders to nativism and xenophobia. Good times.

  • The debate over the Democratic future

    After a shellacking at the hands of someone like Donald Trump, it’s only natural that the Democrats (and liberal or left-leaning people in general) have spent a lot of time since the election wondering What Went Wrong? and What Do We Do Now?

    Broadly speaking, two main approaches have emerged. One, associated with folks who supported Bernie Sanders during the primary, is that Hillary Clinton lost because she was associated with the failed centrist economic policies of “neoliberalism.” Consequently, people who should’ve voted Democratic went for Trump because of his populist-sounding appeals to economic discontent, particularly voters in the fabled Rust Belt. This is pithily summed up in the popular-on-Twitter slogan “Bernie would’ve won.”

    The corresponding prescription is that Dems need to double down on Sanders-style left-wing populism with policies that appeal to the working class across lines of race and ethnicity and blunt the appeal of Trump’s phony populism.

    Another school of thought focuses more on Trump’s racial appeal and argues that Clinton lost because many (most?) of the people who voted for Trump were racist. They liked his screeds against Mexicans and Muslims and supported him because of his promises to crack down on refugees and illegal immigrants. Trump’s nativism and ethno-nationalism were, on this view, a feature, not a bug for many of his voters. To the extent that Trump is a “populist,” it’s a distinctly race- and identity-based populism, similar to movements on the resurgent European far right.

    Prescriptively, this second school of thought tends to emphasize the importance of the Obama coalition to future Democratic success. Because Trump’s populism is centered around white grievance, Democrats can’t hope to win on that ground without compromising their core values. Rather, they need to reaffirm their appeal to young people, socially liberal professionals, racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, and other parts of the coalition which helped propel America’s first black president to the White House. The is essentially a variation on the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis.

    Thus the debate is often reduced to an argument between “economic populism” and “identity politics.” But there are a number of complicating factors. For instance, how important were FBI director James Comey’s comments or Russian hacking (and possible collusion with the Trump campaign) to the election’s outcome? Was Hillary Clinton merely a bad campaigner with some ethical baggage, but whose message was fundamentally sound? Should Democrats take a stance of unbridled opposition to Trump and all his works, or are there areas of potential compromise, like infrastructure spending? To what extent can or should Democrats reach out to moderates and disaffected conservatives to create a popular front of resistance to Trump’s breaches of political norms and constitutional values?

    What is perhaps least surprising is that, despite all the hand-wringing, navel gazing, and chin-stroking, people have largely ended up reaffirming views they already held before the election. People who liked Bernie Sanders think the Dems need to be more of a Bernie Sanders-type party. People who liked Hillary Clinton think that the mainstream liberalism of Clinton (and Obama) remains the best approach. Centrist Democrats (there are still a few) think the Obama era resulted in liberal overreach and that the party needs to move back toward the center.

    It’s worth noting that there are reasons for being suspicious of both the main positions, at least if you take them as silver-bullet solutions to what ails the Democrats. A couple of examples: this article splashes some cold water on the demographic argument for an “emerging Democratic majority,” while this one marshals evidence that left-wing populism isn’t necessarily a straightforward answer to the right-wing version.

    A lot of the debate, however, comes across, to me anyway, as somewhat academic. Almost indisputably, the Democrats are both more ideologically homogeneous and more left-wing across the board than they were the last time they were the opposition party. During the Bush years, Democrats were still a rather diverse mix of centrists and populists, social liberals and social conservatives/moderates, and foreign policy hawks and doves, and it’s not hard to find examples where Dems crossed the aisle to support Bush’s policies.

    By contrast, the Democratic Party of today is more consistently liberal than, arguably, at any point in modern history. For instance, it has embraced not only full equality for gay people, but transgender rights–something that would’ve been virtually unthinkable ten years ago. Similarly, economic centrism–budget cutting, deregulation, etc.–has been, if not exiled from the party, at least rendered much less respectable. Economic ideas once relegated to the lefty fringes–like single-payer health care and a universal basic income–have enjoyed a resurgence of interest. Sanders and fellow populist firebrand Elizabeth Warren are two of the most visible leaders of the Senate Democrats.

    Moreover, resisting the Trumpian GOP’s depredations on the safety net and the constitutional order has, so far, rendered some of this moot. Virtually all Democrats agree on the things they oppose: repealing the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank, a punitive and discriminatory ban on people entering the country, gutting the regulatory state and administrative agencies, “building the wall,” attacks on the press, mollycoddling white nationalists and other “deplorables,” etc. etc.

    This being the case, Ed Kilgore may be right that, at least going into the 2018 midterms, the Dems’ best bet is accentuating the negative. Come 2020, they’ll have to come up with an appealing positive message (and candidate!) that can speak to Americans’ hopes and offer a vision of a better country. But I’m not persuaded that this will require some grand ideological decision for one side or the other of the post-election debate. The Democratic party is probably not going to become a socialist-workers party, but it has become (and will likely to continue to become) more economically populist than it was over the last several decades. The economy isn’t working for large swaths of people, and Democrats need to come up with policies that speak to that. The party is also likely going to continue to be a more socially liberal party–one that champions the inclusive vision of American nationhood that was, in my opinion, one of the most appealing parts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign message. Getting the mix right enough to win elections and make positive change is more a matter of pragmatic politics than high principle. (And that’s all assuming the Republic is still standing four years from now.)

  • (Why) does the debate about divine (im)passibility matter?

    I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading up on the debate over whether God can be said to suffer, and if so in what sense. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions about this, but I think it’s helpful to understand what religious commitments may motivate the debate. In particular, this is not just an intellectual debate about the most accurate and coherent way of talking about God; it’s something that impinges on piety, social and personal ethics, questions of theodicy and other areas central to a living religious faith.

    One reason for thinking this is that the debate hasn’t been carried on only in the rarefied realm of academic books and journals; it’s spilled over to sermons, popular-level books, blogs, social media and other venues where the proverbial person in the pew can (and has) formed a strong opinion. Moreover, the debate has—like so many other things—been projected onto a culture-war grid of “conservatives” vs. “progressives,” with conservatives generally favoring impassibility and progressives arguing for some form of passibilism. (Clearly there are exceptions to this generalization.)

    Given the (ahem) passion that this debate has generated, it’s worth considering what the various participants think is at stake. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that both sides are, at their best, seeking to uphold essential divine attributes that lie at the heart of what the Christian message is or should be about. (I’m generally confining myself to the debate within Christianity here, since it’s what I know best. I don’t have a good sense of the extent to which, if any, this is a live debate in other traditions.)

    For proponents of divine passibility, I think many of their concerns derive from an emphasis on divine compassion. The God of the Bible—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of Moses; of the Prophets; and of Jesus and the apostles—is a God deeply concerned with the plight of his creatures, with their well-being, and with their ultimate fulfillment. God responds to his needy creatures through suffering love. In the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament, God hears the cries of the oppressed Hebrew slaves and accompanies them in their journey from bondage to freedom. He gives laws and teaching aimed at constructing a polity of justice and peace and suffers when his people turn away from them, with the great prophets giving voice to what Abraham Joshua Heschel called the divine pathos. In the life and passion of Jesus, this compassionate God enters, in a profound and mysterious way, into the depths of human suffering and alienation to redeem his wayward creatures.

    Proponents of divine passibility worry that traditional concepts of God cannot do full justice to this divine compassion that is so central to the biblical message. These theologies seem to them to spend a lot of time explaining (away)—through metaphor or allegory—the attribute of divine compassion. The rather austere God of classical theism is not easy to square with the passionate God of the Bible. Is God in himself really unmoved by the suffering of his creatures? Does creation not, strictly speaking, make a difference to God at all?

    For defenders of impassiblity, which has a good claim to being the traditional majority view, at least among theologians, I think a good way of summarizing what’s at stake is the divine transcendence. God is the cause of everything else that exists, which he created from nothing. God is not one being among others—even the wisest, most powerful, best being—but being itself, the metaphysical ultimate which explains why there is anything rather than nothing. Accordingly, God is not subject to alteration or affect at the hands of his creation.

    Moreover, God is the Lord of history—he exercises sovereign power over the created cosmos and providentially guides the world toward its consummation. And because he transcends the created order, God exercises his sovereignty in mighty and miraculous acts, such as the liberation of the Israelites from bondage and the defeat of death and sin in the resurrection of Jesus. God will further bring the history of the entire cosmos to an end in an act that transcends the possibilities immanent in the laws and processes governing the natural world.

    Defenders of impassibility worry that passibilist theologies don’t do justice to God’s transcendence. In some forms, such as process theology, God is described as limited by laws and principles not of his own making. In others, suffering enters into the very heart of the divine life, possibly for eternity. But if this is so, what becomes of God’s ultimate triumph over the forces of sin, decay and death? Impassibilists argue that the passibilist God is rendered as a being among beings, one who is engaged in an agonistic struggle with the forces of evil in which victory is not assured. Does evil’s reach extend even into the heart of Almighty God? And if so, doesn’t it threaten to overwhelm him and his purposes for creation? A God that does not transcend the created order may begin to look like a puny and ineffectual godling.

    Obviously this is a highly simplified and schematized account, and I’ve only scratched the surface of the debate. There’s an indefinite number of replies and counter-replies each side could make, as well as possible tweaks and refinements to both positions. However, I do think this gets at a central set of concerns driving this debate. We can see this in how they relate to questions of everyday faith and piety: Does God care about me? When something bad happens in the world, does God get upset? Can God do anything about the world’s suffering and evil? Will good triumph in the end? Does anything we do ultimately make a difference to God? Will evil be with us forever? How we think about the im/passibility question affects what we might say to these questions too.

    What I think is worth keeping in mind is that both these camps are trying to do justice to attributes of God that are arguably essential to any version of Christian faith worth hanging onto. Divine compassion does seem to be at the heart of the Bible, and the gospel message in particular. In some theologies it seems to die the death of a thousand qualifications. Likewise, the God of the Bible is not just one god among many, but the incomparable creator and redeemer. The profound distinction between creature and creator is essential to a Christian view of the world. Any concept of God claiming to be Christian should be able to fully incorporate both compassion and transcendence.

    This may be overly irenic or Pollyannaish, but I suspect there are suitably nuanced versions of both “impassibilist” and “passibilist” theologies that can accomplish this and which, at the end of the day, may not look all that different from one another. And maybe we need both to complement and balance one another, and to remind us that we see through a glass darkly and can never grasp the fullness of the divine Mystery.

  • Jesus and Rome

    Were Jesus and the early Christian movement foes of the Roman Empire? This common claim is critically examined by biblical scholar Christopher Bryan in his thought-provoking book Render to Caesar. He takes issue with those who regard Jesus as primarily concerned with opposing Rome in the name of “home rule” for Israel. Bryan examines the OT and the inter-testamental background, the gospels, the letters of Paul, and other NT writings (as well as extra-biblical sources) in making his case. There’s scant evidence, he says, that Jesus regarded Rome as illegitimate as such, and significant evidence to suggest that he recognized its authority–within limits. (The same goes for Paul and other NT writers.)

    Bryan contends that Jesus and the early Christian movement stood broadly within the biblical prophetic tradition, which regards earthly powers as permitted by God for the purpose of ensuring peace and justice. The powers are legitimate insofar as they seek to fulfill their God-ordained purpose, but are subject to vigorous critique (and divine judgment) when they don’t. Pagan empires are not bad per se, and the biblical tradition can in fact be quite positive about them (as in the case of Cyrus). Jesus and the early Christians certainly believed the claims of God transcended those of Rome, but that doesn’t mean they rejected the claims of Rome within proper limits.

    I confess I’ve never been persuaded by the “Jesus as dedicated enemy of Rome” interpretation. There just seems to be too little evidence in the gospels to support the idea that this was the primary purpose of his ministry. Obviously Bryan’s book isn’t the last word on these issues, but it makes a persuasive (and highly readable) case.

  • And yet they are not three gods but one God

    I recently re-read Keith Ward’s Christ and the Cosmos, which was published in 2015, but which I didn’t feel like I really digested upon my first reading. (Not that I fully digested it this time either!)

    In this book, Ward offers a multi-part trinitarian theology, fleshing out in more detail arguments he’s made elsewhere (particularly in his Religion and Creation; see here for my discussion). In doing so, he’s trying to accomplish a number of ambitious things: first, to defend a version of theism wherein God is conceived as the personal ground of being who interacts with and changes in response to the created world; second, to critique recent popular “social” accounts of the Trinity that picture God as a “society” comprising three distinct persons or centers of consciousness; and third, to explore the relationship between the “economic” and “immanent” Trinity in light of a modern scientific understanding of the universe.

    Regarding the first point, Ward argues that although God’s nature is necessary and immutable, God nevertheless has certain contingent properties. This is because, since creation itself is contingent, how God relates to that creation must be subject to change. For example, God’s knowledge of the world is contingent upon features of the world that could be otherwise. If the world was different (and most of us assume it could be, at least in some respects), then God’s knowledge of it would be different. Or, as most theists have assumed, since God didn’t have to create a world, God’s knowledge, experience, etc. would be different had God chosen not to. Thus Ward sides with modern “passibilist” or “relational” forms of theism against classical theism, although he does not go as far as, say, process theology. Ward regards God as causally and metaphysically ultimate in ways that most process theologians don’t.

    On the question of the social Trinity, Ward takes on some of its more prominent proponents, both in contemporary theology (e.g., Moltmann, Zizioulas and La Cugna) and analytic philosophy (e.g., Swinburne and Hasker). The argumentative thickets are fairly dense, drawing on the Bible, theology and philosophy, but Ward’s underlying contention is that it’s very difficult to provide a strong version of social trinitarianism that doesn’t end up looking like tri-theism. He argues that it’s better to think of God as a single subject—a single mind and will—that acts in a threefold way, or with three distinct aspects. He envisions God as (1) the creative source of being who (2) self-manifests in the created order as a pattern of rationality and beauty and (3) acts within created beings to unite them to Godself. This is not the ancient heresy of modalism, Ward says, because the three aspects or activities of the divine being are essential and permanent—not successive or transitory—features of the divine being. He thinks this does a better job than the social view of balancing faith in the Trinity with a proper commitment to monotheism.

    Finally, Ward criticizes the tendency to collapse the distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity in recent Christian theology. Theologians are too quick, he says, to identify the Trinity as revealed in the biblical narrative with God’s inner life. He notes that some have gone so far as to say that “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” constitutes the “proper name” of God. He points out that such a name might well be meaningless to other creatures in the universe (supposing there are any), relying as it does on very earth-bound imagery. He recommends more metaphysical reserve; the Trinity as revealed still corresponds to an “inner” threefoldedness in God, but the Trinity as it appears to us cannot be simply projected into the inner divine life. The cosmos is much larger than our forebears realized, and we shouldn’t be too quick to think that the way God appears to us is universally valid.

    Obviously no single book is going to settle all the controversies regarding the Trinity (and I’ve only touched on the arguments Ward deploys). But speaking for myself, I find Ward’s case for a more open-relational theism pretty appealing, as well as his criticism of strongly social doctrines of the Trinity. I also agree that Christian theologians shouldn’t be so eager to describe the “inner” life of God—Ward’s criticism of the views of Moltmann and Von Balthasar, with their suggestion of an almost metaphysical rupture between the Father and the Son, is a case in point. Perhaps it’s my Western bias, but I’m more inclined to begin with the divine unity and seek to understand how it can be threefold than to begin with three distinct “persons” or centers of consciousness.

    That said, Ward himself, as a philosophical theologian, is maybe too quick to abstract from the biblical narrative in trying to describe the immanent Trinity. His triad of creative, expressive, and unitive being (he is indebted to John Macquarrie here) is suggestive, but it also smacks of the kind of speculation that he warns others against. The emphasis on the Trinity in recent theology was motivated in part, I think, by a desire to think about God in a distinctly Christian way, taking its lead from the gospels and not from a priori theorizing. While this might lead in some cases to a mistaken view of the Trinity (as I think it does in the case of Moltmann, et al.), the answer may lie in greater attention to the biblical narrative as a whole. After all, monotheism is a key tenet of Old Testament religion, which ought to inform, if not wholly determine, how Christians think about God.

  • The hope of the kingdom

    Georgia Harkness (1891-1974) was a 20th-century theologian and church teacher who could hold her own with the theological bigwigs of the day (Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr) while writing accessible works of theology aimed at lay people. Her books have an almost C. S. Lewisian ability to convey profound theological ideas in lucid prose. (What she lacks in Lewis’s imaginative richness she arguably makes up for in a more solid grounding in academic theology.)

    Harkness was a feminist, a pacifist, a proponent of the social gospel after it became unfashionable, and a defender of liberal theology (broadly speaking) in the face of challenges from fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy. She called herself a “liberal evangelical”—a phrase that reflected her commitment to open inquiry and social improvement as well as a personalist evangelical piety informed by her life-long Methodism.

    In her book Understanding the Kingdom of God Harkness considers the various ways Jesus’ message of the kingdom has been understood and develops her own approach, which combines many of the best elements of the others. She doesn’t fully align herself with any “school”—apocalyptic, prophetic, “realized” eschatology, Bultmannian existentialism—but finds strengths and weaknesses in each.

    For Harkness, the kingdom as preached by Jesus has three key aspects: the present, kingly rule of God over all creation; our personal entry into the kingdom by accepting its ethical demands; and its future consummation. Harkness acknowledges that there was an apocalyptic element to Jesus’ teaching and preaching, and even that he may have expected an imminent end of the world, but she denies that this made up the entirety of his message. Just as important, if not more so, is the prophetic aspect of his teaching—“good news for the poor”—and the ethics of participating in the kingdom. She finds the heart of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom in the parables, and the chapter discussing them is one of the book’s richest.

    This is not to say that Harkness denies the eschatological. The kingdom is yet to be fully consummated, and this includes life beyond death for individuals, not just a this-worldly utopia. She is (wisely in my view) agnostic about the precise outlines of the eternal kingdom—will it be a “new heaven and earth”? eternal life beyond the spatio-temporal realm?—noting that the language we have in the Bible is highly symbolic and poetic. She grounds this hope in the character of God as revealed by Jesus and the biblical tradition more broadly.

    Harkness laments that mainline churches have neglected the teaching of the kingdom, while the more conservative churches have turned it into apocalyptic escapism. The book was published in 1974, but I’m not sure how much has changed since then. Harkness argues that a better understanding of the kingdom can provide hope and motivate social action without leading to escapism or political utopianism. In a time when hope seems pretty fragile, Harkness’s words provide some: “What one can say in the midst of a complex and changing world is that it is still God’s world, and God is still working for good within it.”

  • New year, new #content

    One of my new year’s quasi-resolutions was to be a bit more intentional about recording and reflecting on the books I read. Looking back on 2016 I was dispirited by the number of books I could barely remember reading, much less had really digested.

    To remedy this, I’m going to try to jot down at least a few thoughts about each book I read this year. (We’ll see how long this lasts!) Here’s what I’ve got so far:

    Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

    Enns argues that we seriously misunderstand the Bible when we expect it to “behave”–that is, to answer the kinds of questions (theological, historical, etc.) we’d like it to in a straightforward, “objective” way. That’s not the kind of book the Bible is! First and foremost it’s a collection of stories that were written not to give sober, disinterested accounts of the past, but to provide meaning and direction for the people who wrote or edited them in their own time and place, and in their own social and cultural idiom.

    Allowing the Bible to speak on its own terms largely sidesteps a lot of the problems raised by more literalistic, flat-footed readings. And, as Enns shows, the New Testament authors were highly creative in their own use of scripture to make sense of the events surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Bible is a place where we encounter God, but it works best when we don’t try to force it to meet our expectations of what a sacred book “should” be.

    Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson

    Matthews argues that Thomas Jefferson represents a road not taken in American history, an alternative to the “liberal-capitalist” ethos of Madison and Hamilton. In Matthews’ account, Jefferson is not a liberal individualist in the Lockean tradition, but a “humanist,” “communitarian anarchist,” and “radical democrat” who dissented from the emerging ethos of the market society, atomistic individualism, and the leviathan state. This isn’t just an effort at historical reconstruction; Matthews thinks this Jeffersonian philosophy still has much to say to 20th (and 21st) century America. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Matthews is engaged in a self-consciously revisionist interpretation, taking issue with both “liberal” and “civic republican” portraits of Jefferson. On Matthews’ account, Jefferson is a veritable proto-socialist and apostle of “permanent revolution” in laws and property relations.

    I’m not really qualified to assess the accuracy of Matthews’ reconstruction of Jefferson’s political philosophy (though aspects of it are corroborated by Joseph Ellis’s Jefferson biography American Sphinx); but it’s a stimulating alternative to what is often assumed to be Jefferson’s quasi-libertarianism or nostalgic agrarianism. One does suspect, however, that in contrasting Jefferson with Madison and Hamilton, Matthews isn’t being quite fair to the other two gentlemen, and his view of Jefferson tends toward the overly sunny (slavery gets fairly short shrift in the discussion, for example).

    I also would’ve liked to see Matthews’ Jeffersonian philosophy brought into conversation with that of John Adams, the other “pole” of the American revolution (to use Benjamin Rush’s expression). In fairness, Matthews’ book came out in the 80s, before the mini-Adams renaissance of recent years, but Adams provides a contrasting example of someone who rejected Jefferson’s optimism (naiveté?) about human nature without embracing the philosophy of “acquisitive individualism” ascribed to the other founders.(David McCullough’s biography of Adams was one of the best books I read in 2016.)

    Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

    This is my third, and favorite, Ishiguro novel so far. The blurb from Newsweek on the back cover of my copy–“quietly devastating”–about sums it up. It’s the story of a man who so perfectly inhabits a role that he never manages to live.

    Michael Walzer, On Toleration

    A short but rich discussion of the meaning of toleration and of the political conditions under which a diversity of race, ethnicity, religion and culture can flourish. Walzer discusses several historical “regime types” that have facilitated tolerance to various degrees, including the multi-national empire, the nation-state with an officially dominant culture, and the immigrant society. The U.S. is an example of the last, and its combination of multiculturalism and liberal individualism presents distinctive challenges in balancing the rights of individuals with respect for cultural, ethnic, and religious difference. Walzer offers insightful discussions of how this should play out over such areas as economic and social class, education, and religion, among others. In general, while he favors multiculturalism and affirmation of difference, he thinks individual rights understood in a broadly liberal sense should generally trump the rights of groups, which will inevitably lead to a certain “thinning” out of distinctive cultural/religious/ethnic ties.

    At times, Walzer comes across as a bit dismissive of objections to liberal tolerance. For example, he assumes that it is straightforwardly good that conservative forms of religion will be forced, in liberal-pluralist societies, to become more accommodating over time. I happen to largely agree, but Walzer says very little that would convince a proponent of such a conservative view. (In fairness, maybe this isn’t ultimately possible.)

    Moreover, Walzer argues that tolerance and multiculturalism go hand-in-hand with a commitment to greater economic equality, cutting across an often acrimonious debate in modern left/liberal political arguments. But one might well wonder whether the broadly egalitarian politics he favors can flourish among individuals with increasingly tenuous social ties. In other words, to what extent does the solidarity required to sustain social democracy rest on shared cultural and other pre-political ties? (He is aware of this latter challenge, but understandably doesn’t try to fully resolve it here.) Walzer also comes across at points as a bit too sanguine about the eventual triumph of liberal tolerance, something that recent events certainly seem to have called into question.

    These quibbles notwithstanding, this book is certainly as timely as when it was published (about 20 years ago), if not more so.

  • Final election thoughts

    It’s election day, and I’m under a self-imposed media blackout. I just can’t spend the whole day on edge, nervously refreshing 538 or the New York Times website. I know I’m not alone in experiencing an unusual amount of election-related anxiety this year.

    The ways in which this has been a crazy year are too well-known and numerous to list. But for me, what it all comes down to is the struggle between a vision of America as a pluralistic liberal democracy versus America as a predominately white, quasi-authoritarian state.

    Donald Trump’s rhetorical assaults on ethnic and religious minorities, his casual misogyny, his disregard for pillars of a free society like the separation of powers and an independent press, his courting of overt racists, and his followers’ flirtation with political violence make him, unquestionably, the most dangerous presidential candidate in my lifetime. This isn’t about liberalism vs. conservatism, as we normally think of our political conflicts; it’s about national identity and the nature of the American regime.

    Hillary Clinton, for all her well-canvassed flaws, is the de facto head of a coalition animated by a pluralistic view of America based on civic equality and a more tolerant, liberal view of national identity. Whether she’ll be in a position to advance her more ambitious social-democratic proposals is, to my mind, secondary to the urgent task of repudiating Trump’s white-nationalist, bargain-basement authoritarian movement. The fact that this movement has been aligned with a toxic, tribalist version of Christianity only adds to the urgency.

    Even assuming the Democrats do well today (as the polls suggest), the fact that a large part of the electorate rejects social pluralism and civic equality is likely to roil our politics for years to come. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

  • Making sense of the Bible with Adam Hamilton

    I really enjoyed Rev. Adam Hamilton’s recent book Making Sense of the Bible. It’s an overview of the nature of the Bible—how and when it was written, how the books were compiled and ultimately canonized—and  a persuasive effort to reconcile its very human character with its “God-breathed” status.

    We mainline Christians usually emphasize that we reject “inerrancy” and other shibboleths of the more conservative churches, but we’re not always as clear about what positive role the Bible plays in our faith. Hamilton–the senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, and a prominent voice in United Methodism–distills a lot of mainstream scholarship to present the Bible as a record of people in specific contexts struggling to make sense of their experience of God and the world. He argues that “inerrancy” doesn’t do justice the nature of the Bible as we have it and as it was written.

    That doesn’t mean that the Bible isn’t “inspired.” But Hamilton suggests that the inspiration at work isn’t different in kind from the way the Spirit works with people in all ages. The Spirit doesn’t override human freedom to ensure infallibility. Rather, because they were open to the Spirit, the Word of God was able to speak through the biblical authors, but not in a way that bypassed their finite human capabilities. The Bible is not “dictated” by God; it’s a record of humans struggling to articulate the revelation they have received.

    For Christians, the Word of God is preeminently Jesus, the incarnate Word. The Bible is authoritative for us not because it was composed in some supernatural fashion that protects it from error (how would we know this in any event?). It’s authoritative because it contains the earliest, most authentic witness to Jesus. Accordingly, Hamilton argues that Jesus—his teachings, his life, and his death and resurrection—provide a prism or sieve for looking at the rest of the Bible.

    This approach allows Hamilton to address some of the “challenging passages” of the Bible, such as those that seem to portray God as endorsing horrific violence, approve of slavery and the subordination or women, or teach things add odds with a scientific understanding of the universe. The Biblical authors (like us) were finite, sinful human beings, and they didn’t necessarily always get it right. Interpreting the Bible in the light of God’s definitive (for Christians) revelation in Jesus may lead us to set aside certain passages as no longer binding or reflecting the true character of God. (This is something Christians have always done, whether they admit it or not, most obviously in the book of Acts.)

    As I said, most of what Hamilton writes is based on mainstream biblical scholarship, and his conclusions would be broadly accepted in mainline churches. It’s essentially the view that I’ve more-or-less held my entire adult Christian life (such as it is). But I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone articulate this understanding of the Bible so clearly, persuasively and accessibly.

    ADDENDUM: I wrote this, on getting by without an infallible Bible, a couple of years ago, and I think it holds up pretty well. As it happens, it was inspired by an interview I read with Rev. Hamilton!