I don’t care if it’s going to be 95 frickin’ degrees out today – it’s fall, which means melancholy music.
Author: Lee M.
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Jews, Christians, and a “two-poled” eschatology
I’ve read more than one work of theology that attempted to explain the rejection of Jesus’ messiah-hood by the majority of Jews like this: Jews expectated the messiah to be a nationalist–even military–leader who would liberate them from Roman oppression, but Jesus was a different kind of messiah, a “spiritual” one who came to liberate us from our guilt and sin.* One problem with this account is that it reinforces stereotypes about “carnal” Jews and “spiritual” Christians. In the chapter on eschatology in his Way of Blessing, Way of Life, Clark Williamson proposes that it’s more illumaniting to see Jewish rejection of Jesus in a different light: it was because Jesus’ ministry clearly didn’t usher in the “days of the messiah,” the age where oppression, injustice, war, and hunger (for everyone, not just Jews) would be things of the past. By this reckoning, Jews were well-justified in not accepting the claims made on Jesus’ behalf!
Williamson says that the early Christians maintained the same kind of messianic expectation, at least for a while, with the teaching that Jesus would return soon to usher in the messianic age. But as that hope of an imminent return faded, the church pushed its eschatological hope off into the afterlife and/or identified the “kingdom of God” that Jesus proclaimed with the spread of the church. Thus it became possible for Christians to see Jews as stubbornly refusing to accept what should’ve been obvious to them–that the Messiah had come. Along the way, Christians lost their sense of the eschatological tension between what had already been accomplished in Jesus and what was yet to be accomplished.
As Christian eschatology has become increasingly otherworldly and privatized, we need, Williamson argues, to recover a more “Jewish” emphasis on this-worldly liberation as one pole of our eschatological hope. God wants the world to display relations of justice and peace. On the other hand, even the most just society would contain suffering, disease, sin, oppression, and death. These are constituent elements of our present condition that can’t be done away with by any program of this-worldly liberation. Moreover, if we restrict our hope to establishing a just society in this world, what about all the people who have died, many of them under conditions of terrible oppression and injustice? That’s why the other pole of our eschatology must remain our ultimate hope in God’s promise to save us, even beyond the horizon of death.
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*I recognize that it’s far from certain that Jesus, in fact, claimed to be the Jewish messiah in any straightforward way. -
Small government for thee, not for me
Smart take from Matt Yglesias on the GOP’s “Pledge to America”:
Perhaps the most telling thing about where the modern conservative movement is now, however, is their pledge on spending which says that “with common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels.” Of course once you except Social Security, Medicare, and defense from cuts you’re talking about not touching the government’s three largest programs. So notwithstanding all the rhetorical flourishes throughout the document about small government, liberty, etc. that try to paint a portrait of broadly conflicting philosophical visions about the size and scope of the federal government you actually see a rather narrower difference of priorities. Are they pledging to cut spending while leaving intact programs that support the poorest Americans? No. Are they pledging to cut spending while leaving intact the most effective programs? No.
Instead it’s a plan that says we’ll cut spending on children, the poor, and the next generation’s infrastructure in order to ensure that taxes can be cut on the rich while protecting our own base constituencies—old people, defense contractors, veterans—from the scythe.
It’s been clear for a long time that the difference between conservatism and liberalism, in practice, is not a preference for “small” versus “big” government.
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A God of life
The God of the Bible creates, re-creates, and ultimately redeems life. This God, whatever the other so-called “gods” might be like, loves life, rejoices in it, is concerned about it, not only creates it for the purpose of blessing it, but saves it, and in between discloses to God’s covenanted people the way of life that they are to follow as an alternative to the death-dealing ways so prevalent in the world. (Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life, p. 99)
For Williamson, too much traditional theology has painted a picture of God that is at odds with this central biblical affirmation. He criticizes the view that God is “impassible”–unaffected by anything that happens in the world. While he affirms God’s “necessity” in two senses–God exists necessarily, and God necessarily has a particular character–he also predicates “contingency” of God. That is, God is affected by what happens in the world, by how the life that God has created fares. God is genuinely related to us.
Following process thought, Williamson proposes that in place of a static, substance-attribute metaphysics, we’re better off using our experience as living selves to model the nature of God. For example, we shouldn’t think of God as fundamentally a-temporal (unrelated to time and change) but as eternally faithful through time. “If we develop a model of God from this basic awareness of the self, then God would be genuinely social and temporal, affected by others as well as effecting (creating) them…” (p. 105). Just as human selves are relational and social through and through, God is intimately related to all existing things.
Williamson departs from some versions of process theology by affirming creation ex nihilo. “God’s creativity is not simply a once-upon-a-time creation, but an ongoing creativity that calls every moment of the life of the world into being” (p. 107). Further, God “created the world in order to share with it the blessing of God’s fullness of all possible good and beauty, to bring the world to well-being that the world might thereby glorify God” (p. 110). God wants to be in relation to creatures, a desire that manifests itself in God’s history of covenant-making.
However, it’s precisely because of the relational nature of all existence that God cannot be said to be omnipotent, if by that we mean that God unilaterally determines the outcome of events. If reality is relational through and through, then power is essentially shared power. “What guarantees that evil will not finally triumph is God’s covenantal faithfulness and the faithfulness of God’s covenant partners in the task of actualizing God’s purposes in the world” (p. 128). We cannot, Williamson argues, divorce God’s power from God’s love; God’s power is at work in the world is through love. God’s will opposes the evil that exists in the world, but that doesn’t mean God can simply destroy evil through coercive power. The cross of Jesus is the clearest picture of how God’s love is manifested in the world. God’s love is the power whereby God blesses, redeems, and reconciles all life.
This view has two main implications for ethics: (1) what we do matters to God (because God is affected by everything that happens) and (2) since God is not one finite agent among others, we are responsible for doing the sorts of things that it is appropriate for finite agents to do (things like concretely meeting the needs of our neighbors). A life-centered ethic is the proper response to the blessing of life we receive from God.
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A story of blessing
Clark Williamson’s systematic theology Way of Blessing, Way of Life is less focused on Jewish-Christian relations than his earlier work A Guest in the House of Israel (which I blogged about previously), but the project of re-connecting Christianity to its Jewish roots is still a major concern. One point Williamson makes is that the way Christians frequently tell their story tends to leave out the history of Israel. The arc of “creation-fall-redemption” that forms the backbone of much Christian theology, preaching, liturgy, and spirituality all too readily allows us to jump from the first three chapters of Genesis to the New Testament.
By contrast, Williamson argues, we need to attend more to the “Old” Testament (he recommends we just refer to “the Scriptures”) to discern the identity of God and God’s purpose for humanity and the rest of creation:
No story is more pivotal to Judaism than that of Exodus and Sinai. Nor should any book be more crucial to how Christians understand themselves. Exodus, says David Tracy, “provides a proper context for understanding the great Christian paradigm of the life-ministry-death-and-resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Christianity misunderstands itself whenever it wallows in a privatized, depoliticized, and de-historicized faith. Exodus requires “a resolutely this-worldly spirituality as it demands a historical and political, not a private or individualist, understanding of Christian salvation-as-total-liberation.” (p. 74)
Williamson thinks that the Exodus story can help correct the Christian tendency to think of salvation in a narrowly individualistic way that emphasizes an otherworldly heaven. Following Methodist theologian R. Kendall Soulen, Williamson suggests that, more basic and inclusive than the creation-fall-redemption story is one of “an economy of consummation based on the Lord’s blessing”:
God promises well-being that includes all of life (peace, economic sufficiency, health, safety, fertility, God’s loving presence) and makes for the fullness of human life. The fullness of human life is a gift from the fullness of God’s life. (p. 84)
Becuase God’s blessings are freely shared with us, we should freely share those blessings with the other, those who are different. This “blessing-in-difference” characterizes God’s blessing of creation, human beings’ mutual self-giving, and Israel’s mission to be a blessing to “the nations.” Clearly, God’s purpose of blessing all creation has not yet been realized in its fullness, but awaits God’s eschatological consummation. And part of that ultimate consummation is our learning to share more widely the blessings we have received with each other and the rest of God’s creation.
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Clark Williamson on revelation
God is the proper subject of revelation, God’s self in God’s being and works. In revelation, God reveals God’s self and we are dependent on God’s revelation of God’s self for our knowledge of God. All human efforts to gain knowledge of God by independent inquiry are fruitless (1 Cor. 1:21: “The world did not know God through wisdom”); such pretend knowledge of God is to God’s own self-disclosure as chaff to the wheat (Jer. 23:28). God is not an object accessible to our observation in the world. God is not an in-the-world being, who exists alongside other beings and is perceptibly distinguishable from them as they are from one another. God is the One in whom the world has its being, the One from whom all things come and to whom all things return, the Alpha and the Omega. The knowledge of God must be granted us by God.
– Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life: A Christian Theology, pp. 46-47
Revelation, according to Williamson, is always particular, not revelation “in general”; it occurs by means of particular media (e.g., historical events) through which God’s identity is disclosed. The content of revelation is primarily personal–God’s nature, will, and purpose–rather than a set of propositions or doctrines to be believed. Thus, the proper faith-response is primarily trust–trust in God’s promise and God’s command–rather than assent to a set of statements. Revelation is better thought of on the model of personal disclosure than the revelation of propositional truths. Revelation has both an “objective” and a “subjective” pole–the revelatory event and the human reception (and interpretation) of it. There is no revelation without interpretation. For an event to be a purported case of revelation is for it already to have undergone interpretation. (This also opens the door to an ongoing revisiting and refinement of our understanding of revleation.)
Further, Williamson doesn’t deny that revelation occurs outside the boundaries of Christianity. “God reveals God’s self freely and to whom God pleases” (p. 46), and other religions can be media of revelation. But that doesn’t mean that Christians can never criticize other traditions (even as they should enter into conversation with and learn from them). Ultimately, the criteria of revelation, for Christians, is “the love of God freely offered to God’s people and the command of God that they in turn love God and one another” (p. 60). This provides a guide for interacting with people of other faiths (or no faith): because revelation is fundamentally about love, it does not impose itself on others. “Definitive revelation does not impose itself in an authoritarian, oppressive way on anyone” (p. 67).
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CotC on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood
Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator seems poised to return to at least semi-regular blogging (or so we can hope!). The other day he had a good post on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the second book in what I believe is supposed to be a projected trilogy about a world of bioengineering and environmental degradation have run amok. I recently read both YOTF and its predecessor Oryx and Crake and enjoyed them both immensely. As Elliot points out, Atwood deals with some very interesting religious and philoosphical issues in these books, including putting the story of a sect of radical eco-Christians at the center of the second book.
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An example of the wrong approach to other religions
I don’t mean to pick on this blog in particular, but this post exemplifies an all-too-common tendency of Christians to put an apologetic slant on their approach to non-Christian religions. The post purports to offer five reasons why “a thoughtful person would start their religious quest with Christianity,” and in a relatively short space it manages to pack in quite a few straw men, mischaracterizations, and omissions with regard to other traditions:
– “There might be glimmers of grace in Hinduism and Buddhism, but every other major world religion is about doing stuff that is going to please some deity.”
– “Most eastern religions portray evil, pain and suffering as ‘illusion’ that you need to overcome and transcend. Christianity takes evil, pain and suffering seriously.”
– “In Christianity, we get to use our minds in our worship … In eastern traditions (those religions that most often make the claim of being holistic), your reason might actually be an impediment in your religious progress.”
– “Jesus is the universal religious figure that every major religion wants to co-opt.”
The overarching approach here is to put the best possible spin on Christianity (because, hey, Christianity has never been legalistic or anti-intellectual, right?) and to offer little more than caricatures of other traditions. By contrast, I think that before we even get to the point of critiquing non-Christian religions, we need to do our very best to understand them on their own terms and see how and why they make sense to their own adherents.
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Priorities
So, making it impossible to challenge secret government kidnappings (and possible torture) seems like it might be a way bigger deal than whether some nutjobs in Florida want to burn a Koran. Naturally, it’s gotten about 1/1000th the media coverage. Do check out this post at Lawyers, Guns & Money for some good analysis, though.
A Thinking Reed 