A Thinking Reed

Category: Bible

  • The strangeness of the Bible

    I really liked this review article in Books & Culture of a new book about the Bible and sex. So often we treat the Bible as little more than window-dressing for our preconceived moral or political agendas that we often lose sight at the sheer weirdness of the text. The Bible rarely provides ready-made moral exemplars and tidy solutions. And maybe that’s the way it should be. After all: the Bible’s not about us, at least not directly. It’s about God. So it’s not surprising that we should find some of it rather bewildering. (And this isn’t confined to the Old Testament either as far as I’m concerned; there are plenty of parts of the Gospels that just leave me baffled.)

  • Only a suffering God can help(?)

    In an earlier post I mentioned that Keith Ward, unlike many contemporary theologians, has a generally positive view of the influence of Greek philosophy and thought-forms on the development of Christian theology. In his view Hellenistic thought allowed the early Christian theologians to deepen their understanding of Jesus as not only the Son of God but the cosmic Word who holds all things together.

    However, in agreement with many contemporary theologians, Ward thinks that the influence of certain forms of Platonism resulted in a mistaken affirmation of the impassibility of God:

    One of the chief influences of Platonism was that God, the Supreme Good, was generally conceived as immutable and impassible. Being perfect, God could not change, and divine perfection could not be affected by the sufferings and imperfections of the world. This creates major difficulties for any doctrine of incarnation, and especially for a doctrine that holds the eternal Word to be the only true subject of Jesus’ acts and experiences. (Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 69)

    How, Ward asks, can we conceive of a genuine union between a being that is unchangeable and a changeable and changing human being? Moreover, is this view of divine impassibility and immutability “adequate to belief in an incarnate and suffering God”?

    Nicea and Chalcedon produced statements about the person of Christ that most (not all) subsequent Christians have found ot define the limits of an adequate idea of the incarnation of God in Jesus. But many more recent theologians have thought that the Platonic idea of a totally changeless God is not really adequate to the Christian perception of a God who becomes incarnate and who suffers for the sake of humanity. A process of further re-thinking about God is positively mandated by the puzzles the ecumenical councils leave unresolved. (p. 70)

    Ward seems here to be taking sides in the debate over divine impassibility. Many recent theologians of a variety of perspectives and confessions have been willing to throw divine impassibility overboard, to the point where in an article from back in 1986 Ronald Goetz writing in the Christian Century was able to call the idea of a suffering God “the new orthodoxy.”

    Apart from the question of making sense of the union of the divine and human natures in Jesus, much of the value of the idea of a God who suffers has been taken to reside in its effects on the problem of evil and the doctrine of the Atonement. It’s been suggested that theodicy requires God to be the “fellow-sufferer who understands” (in A.N. Whitehead’s phrase), a perspective frequently emphasized by process theologians.

    Regarding the cross, instead of being the place where satisfaction is made, or Jesus is punished in our stead, it’s taken to reveal the solidarity of God with all who suffer. The atonement becomes more of a response to human pain than to human sin, and God is revealed supremely as a God of compassion (“suffering-with”).

    Now, I think this may be good as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it goes far enough. Leaving aside whether or not we can meaningfully speak of God suffering in the divine nature (and I’m not sure we can), it’s not clear to me that the value of a suffering God, morally and religiously, is as great as some have claimed.

    There’s no doubt that sharing in someone else’s suffering can have value, but I think one should be careful about ascribing too much value to suffering as such. Ironically, this is what critics of more traditional atonement theories often argue: that they valorize suffering and are complicit in oppression. But whatever else we might say about those traditional models, suffering is usually seen as instrumentally, not intrinsically, valuable. The sufferings of Christ are praiseworthy because they make possible forgiveness and liberation from sin.

    I worry that to focus too much on the suffering of God can actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem of evil. Is it really better if God is trapped in the web of suffering too? Doesn’t that actually just make things worse? Some process theologians compound the problem by denying the actuality of personal immortality, thus rendering God impotent to redeem suffering, except insofar as it is somehow incorporated into the divine being as a necessary part of realizing certain values.

    In other words, even if we want to affirm that God shares our suffering, the Christian hope has traditionally been one of victory over and liberation from suffering. Again, just as traditional atonement theories are criticized for focusing on the death of Christ to the exclusion of his earthly ministry on the one hand and his resurrection and ascension on the other, the “suffering God” motif can become excessively cross-centered while downplaying the victory over death and suffering that Jesus won and has promised to share with us.

    To his credit Ward doesn’t really do this. He sees the suffering of God as the price that had to be paid to unite humanity to divinity, to take the life of a human being irrevocably into the Godhead, which in turn makes possible our participation in the life of God.

    Recent theology has, probably rightly, been wary of “triumphalism,” but Jesus’ triumph over sin and death is the cornerstone of Christian faith. Certainly God identifies with the victims of injustice, violence, and sin, but he does so in order to lift them to new life.

    Christianity, it seems to me, is ambiguous about power: Jesus relinquishes all earthly power to the point where he becomes a passive object, beaten, tortured, spat upon and finally crucified. But the power of the divine life is such that the bonds of death are unable to contain it. God triumphs over the powers of evil, and ultimately this victory will be consummated when the entire creation is freed from bondage and reconciled with God. So suffering and victimization are just one part of the story, however important. The ultimate promise isn’t simply that God shares our tears but that he will wipe them away:

    Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
    “See, the home of God is among mortals.
    He will dwell with them;
    they will be his peoples,
    and God himself will be with them
    he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
    Death will be no more;
    mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
    for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4)

    Connecting this back to the work of Christ, it seems to me that suffering with us is at best part of the story. Christ comes to be God with us (Emmanuel) in order to share our condition, but also to transform it. He comes to be in the place of sin and suffering with us, but in doing so he changes the character of that “place.” Not in the sense that we no longer have to suffer or die, but that the character of that suffering, and of our own deaths, is changed. This might be expressed in the Eastern idea of theosis – that God became human so that humans could participate in the divine life.

    In his book Jesus Our Redeemer, the Australian Jesuit Gerald O’Collins writes:

    Simply by itself the suffering which Jesus endured out of love did not bring about redemption. To be sure, many people have found comfort through seeing the crucified Jesus as their fellow-sufferer. He did not suffer on the cross alone but between two others who underwent the same death by slow torture (all four Gospels) and with his mother standing near to him (the Gospel of John). That scene has been applied and appreciated down through the centuries. Like many other soldiers who fought in France and Belgium during the First World War, my own father found himself in a terrain of wayside shrines, representations of Christ on the cross with the Virgin Mary keeping lonely vigil at the feet of her crucified Son. Often scarred and badly damaged by shells and bullets, those shrines gave soldiers on both sides the feeling of Jesus as their brother in the terrible pain and suffering they faced. Jesus had drawn close to them and they knew his presence in their terrifying situation. (p. 192)

    However, O’Collins goes on to emphasize that it is the divine love, not suffering as such, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that has value and the power to redeem us. The love poured out through these events has the power to heal us and unite us to the divine life. The divine self-manifestation is itself redemptive, even though in a fallen world it necessarily has a cruciform shape.

    One way of understanding this is suggested by Paul’s dictum that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In Jesus God has entered into the human experience so thoroughly with his forgiving, healing love that there is no “place” we can occupy where God’s love is absent. Not the place of suffering, of guilt, or of death. Hans ur von Balthasar, as is well known, daringly suggested that this extended to the depths of Hell itself. God’s love in Jesus permeates everything such that we can’t separate ourselves from it by anything we do or suffer.

  • C. S. Lewis on the Bible

    A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters:

    To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952:

    It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

    To Clyde S. Kilby, May 7, 1959:

    To me the curious thing is that neither in own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question [of the inspiration of the Bible] in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone — both first class as literature — is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question “Is Ruth historical?” (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain…

    …That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.

  • Psalm-blogging

    David Plotz, a self-described “proud Jew, but never a terribly observant one” has been “blogging the Bible” at Slate. He’s just gotten to the Psalms and has some interesting observations. I like his description of David as a pickup artist.

  • A reflection on Ps. 109

    I imagine that anyone who makes regular use of the Psalms in their devotional life has had the experience of stumbling over sentiments that seem … less than edifying, or even un-Christian.

    For instance, last night I was reading Psalm 109, following the old-style scheme for praying the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer, and was struck by vss. 1-19:

    Hold not your tongue, O God of my praise; *
    for the mouth of the wicked,
    the mouth of the deceitful, is opened against me.

    They speak to me with a lying tongue; *
    they encompass me with hateful words
    and fight against me without a cause.

    Despite my love, they accuse me; *
    but as for me, I pray for them.

    They repay evil for good, *
    and hatred for my love.

    Set a wicked man against him, *
    and let an accuser stand at his right hand.

    When he is judged, let him be found guilty, *
    and let his appeal be in vain.

    Let his days be few, *
    and let another take his office.

    Let his children be fatherless, *
    and his wife become a widow.

    Let his children be waifs and beggars; *
    let them be driven from the ruins of their homes.

    Let the creditor seize everything he has; *
    let strangers plunder his gains.

    Let there be no one to show him kindness, *
    and none to pity his fatherless children.

    Let his descendants be destroyed, *
    and his name be blotted out in the next generation.

    Let the wickedness of his fathers be remembered before
    the LORD, *
    and his mother’s sin not be blotted out;

    Let their sin be always before the LORD; *
    but let him root out their names from the earth;

    Because he did not remember to show mercy, *
    but persecuted the poor and needy
    and sought to kill the brokenhearted.

    He loved cursing,
    let it come upon him; *
    he took no delight in blessing,
    let it depart from him.

    He put on cursing like a garment, *
    let it soak into his body like water
    and into his bones like oil;

    Let it be to him like the cloak which he
    wraps around himself, *
    and like the belt that he wears continually.

    Let this be the recompense from the LORD to my accusers, *
    and to those who speak evil against me.

    I realize there are other “cursing” Psalms, but this is one long, serious curse, and I was struck more than usually by how hard it is to see these as sentiments that should be prayed.

    Sometimes, when I come across passages where the Psalmist is protesting his innocence, I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s insight that Christ is here praying the Psalms with us and in us, and we are praying them in him. Only he can truly claim to be innocent.

    But in this case, the extended cursing seems entirely removed from the spirit of Jesus, who prayed on the cross that his enemies be forgiven. And yet, thinking about that, I could see this curse as something that, by most normal human standards, Jesus would have been eminently justified in hurling at his enemies! But he didn’t, and therein seemed to be a lesson. The contrast between the cursing of the Psalmist and the forgiving love of Jesus caused the latter to stand out for me in starker relief than ususal.

    And this is driven home even further when I reflect on how often I succumb to the temptation to curse other people in my heart (though not nearly as eloquently as the Psalmist!) for offenses, real or perceived, that are, at their worst, trivial compared both to Jesus’ suffering and to the suffering and oppression that the Psalmist may well have experienced (not to mention all those who suffer in our world today). I can see my own petty resentments reflected in the Psalmist’s curse and, like a photo negative, the suffering love of Jesus.