A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Purpose and design

    …the question of whether there is a point or purpose to the universe is not answered simply be reference to evidence for or against a designer. Purpose is a much wider notion than design, and it can live much more comfortably with chance, disorder, and the abyss of cosmic time than can the all too simple notion of design. Thus, it is not fruitful for a theology after Darwin to counter the sense of nature’s apparent absurdity simply by cataloging more and more apparent evidence of design.

    –John Haught, God After Darwin (p. 106)

  • On the righteousness of Jesus

    From Michael Ramsey’s God, Christ, and the World (p. 85):

    So the righteousness of Jesus is the righteousness of a Godward relationship of trust, dependence, receptivity. It is a terribly hard kind of righteousness. It is sometimes hard because it involves the calls of sacrifice and self-renunciation which Jesus gives. But it is more often hard because of the shattering generosity of God, demanding an utterly childlike receptivity. To receive like a little child an unmerited gift and to be humbled in the receiving time and time again: such is the righteousness of the kingdom. It follows that in Christian ethics humility has a continuing place which throughout history secular forms of ethics find very hard to understand. It also follows that St Paul’s teaching about justification by faith, the doctrine of being right with God on the basis of God’s own gift, is in a true line with the ethics of Jesus.

  • On “existential” Christianity

    One of the chapters of God, Christ and the World is a critical appreciation of the thought of Rudolf Bultmann. (The earlier quote on demythologization was taken from the same chapter.)

    Bultmann’s project of demythologization was tied to his desire to unearth the essential message – the kerygma – of Christian faith. He reinterpreted the language of the New Testament so that it could be seen to be about effecting a transformation of human existence. In part, this was because he believed that modern science excluded the possibility of divine action in the field of nature; divine action has to do, at least so far as we can know, exclusively with God’s relation to humanity. Drawing on Heidegger’s existentialism, Bultmann interpreted the symbols of the Bible as making it possible for us to move from inauthentic to authentic existence. It is not Jesus the man who provides a pattern for us to emulate, or the Atonement and Resurrection as cosmic events that make possible forgiveness and new life, but the proclamation of the possibility of authentic existence, realized in Christ.

    Here Ramsey questions whether Bultmann’s “existentialist” interpretation of Christianity is adequate:

    …while the existential element in the New Testament has, as we saw, an important place, so that an existential theology today is able to recapture it, there is also an ontological element in the New Testament as utterly essential for New Testament Christianity. In the experience of salvation existentialism may seem to suffice, for the Saviour is definable as ‘what he means to me’. But in the experience of worship the Christian was and is concerned with One who is. The worshipper forgets his own being and experiences in the adoration of One who is, and the ‘isness’ of deity is there, behind and before, now and for ever. The ‘isness’ of deity–prominent in the Old Testament–is reaffirmed when it is revealed that Jesus shares in it. St John shows that the glory of Jesus which men encountered in his life and death is the glory of deity in eternity. Is it that an exclusively Protestant view of Christianity as the religion of the Word, which misses the deep emphasis of Catholic Christianity upon adoration, causes Bultmann to suppose that an existentialist concept can convey the whole meaning of Christianity? Ontology, ‘isness’, ‘being’ is ineradicable from the Christianity of the New Testament. (pp. 56-7)

    In retrospect, what seems to me most dated about existentialism–and existentialist interpretations of Christianity–is its excessive anthropocentrism. At the time, existentialism seemed like it offered an end run around the “scientific” worldview that seemed to preclude divine action in the world and to deny the possibility of human freedom. But the price paid was to erect a wall between humanity and nature which later thought has shown to be untenable. The human-divine encounter occurred only in the depths of the self and its transition from “inauthentic” to “authentic” existence. There was no room left for divine revelation through nature, or for the idea that nature might have its own inherent value or meaning. This dovetails to some extent with Ramsey’s concern that “existentialist” Christiantiy talks about God only as the power of salvation for human beings; this risks turning into an instrumentalist view of God and the death of true worship. A better cosmology and theology would allow that 1. human beings are fundamentally part of nature, 2. that God is revealed through all parts of the created order, and 3. that God’s purposes encompass more than human salvation.

    See here for a summary of Bultmann’s thought.

  • Ramsey on the Resurrection

    More from Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s God, Christ and the World (p. 78):

    The Resurrection is something which ‘happened’ a few days after the death of Jesus. The apostles became convinced that Jesus was alive and that God had raised him to life. It is not historically scientific to say only that the apostles came to realize the divine meaning of the Crucifixion for them or that the person of Jesus now became contagious to them. Something happened so as to vindicate for them the meaning of the Cross, and to make the person of Jesus contagious to them. The evidence for a stupendous happening, which the New Testament writers mention, was the survival of the Church, the appearances of Jesus in a visible and audible impact on the apostles, and the discovery that the tomb was empty. The several elements in this threefold evidence no doubt had different degrees of evidential weight for different people, and they have such varying degrees still. As to significance, if it were the existential encounter of Jesus which alone mattered, then the empty tomb would have little or no significance. If, however, Jesus has a cosmic meaning with cosmic effects then the empty tomb has great significance, akin to the significance of the Incarnation itself.

  • ATR summer reading list

    I have several books going now, and I always feel guilty if I don’t finish a book I’ve started. But I also have a bad habit of borrowing books from the library before I’ve finished other books I’ve started (or buying books at used bookstores, or from online vendors…).

    Anyway, here are the books I hope to finish (or at least start!) by the end of summer:

    Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity

    Jay McDaniel and Charles Pinches (ed.), Good News For Animals? Christian Approaches to Animal Well-Being

    Michael Ramsey, God, Christ and the World

    Bill McKibben, Eaarth

    John Haught, God After Darwin

    Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal

    Harvey Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America

    And…casting its vast shadow over all of these, I’ve decided, inspired by Philip Hoare’s The Whale, to take a long-delayed crack at Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. I read it–or parts of it and superficially at least–when I was in college, but I want re-read it, really taking my time with it. They say that 20-year-olds aren’t really ready for Moby-Dick anyway. I imagine that’ll take me well into autumn (if not beyond!).

    Maybe to keep myself honest I’ll update this post as I finish books on the list.

    UPDATED July 19, 2010: Borg, McDaniel/Pinches, and Ramsey finished.

  • Heart of Christianity 5 – Jesus

    Marcus Borg made his name as a scholar (and popularizer) of the “historical Jesus,” so it’s not surprising that his chapter on Jesus has some rich material. (His book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time is well worth reading, though hardly the last word on the topic.)

    One common way to talk about the relationship between Jesus as a historical figure and as the object of the church’s confession has been to talk about the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” Borg prefers to talk about the “pre-Easter” and “post-Easter” Jesus.

    The pre-Easter Jesus is the man of Nazareth who lived, preached, healed, and taught in 1st-century Palestine; the post-Easter Jesus is Jesus as he has been experienced by Christians for the last 2,000 years–as the one who mediates the presence and Spirit of God.

    Borg says–and here I have a hard time disagreeing with him–that the church’s Christology has tended to obscure the humanity of Jesus. This is despite the fact that in its creedal confessions the church affirms his true humanity along with his true divinity.

    The problem, Borg argues, is that our picture of Jesus has been over-formed by a particular theological narrative: Jesus is the Son of God who came down from heaven, chiefly to die for our sins so that we could “go to heaven” after we die. When this is taken to be the sum, or at least the essence, of the gospel, the man Jesus and the life he actually lived tend to recede from view.

    Part of the reason this happens, he says, is that we have over-literalized our Christological metaphors, particularly “Son of God.”

    But “Son of God” is a metaphor like the rest [e.g., lamb, door, light, word, wisdom]. It affirms that Jesus’ relationship to God is intimate, like that of child to parent. To echo language from John’s gospel: the son knows the father, and the father knows the son, and son is the father’s beloved. This relational understanding of “son of God” is found in the Jewish world of Jesus. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel is called son of God, as are the kings of Israel and Judah. Closer to the time of Jesus, Jewish mystics who were healers were sometimes referred to as God’s son. And “son” resonates with agency as well; in his world, a son could represent a father and speak with the authority of the father. To call Jesus “Son of God” means all of this. (pp. 87-88)

    In essence, says Borg,

    Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. (p. 88)

    So, what kind of life was that? What kind of man was Jesus? Borg sketches a portrait based on his work, which naturally will be at least somewhat contentious. In brief outline, Jesus was

    – a Jewish mystic,
    – a healer,
    – a teacher of wisdom,
    – a social prophet, and
    – an initiator of a movement.

    Most contentious in Borg’s portrait of Jesus is that he denies that Jesus thought of himself in any conscious way as “the Messiah.” I also wonder how essential the “Jewish” part of “Jewish mystic” is for Borg–is it an accidental feature, or does it condition Jesus’ mysticism in an essential way?

    The larger point Borg wants to make, though, is that in over-emphasizing Jesus’ divinity–seeing him as a kind of Clark Kent figure who is really Superman underneath his disguise–we lose sight of what a remarkable man he actually was. In traditional language, his experience of God, his acts of healing, his teaching, and his passion for social justice–those things that captivated (or alarmed) his contemporaries–are properties of his humanity.

    It has to be said that Borg has a “lower” Christology than a lot of us are comfortable with. But–this chapter helped clarify for me the value of his work. I see him as providing an entry point into the Christian tradition for people who can’t currently (and may never) accept all the metaphysical baggage associated with the creeds and confessions of the church (at least as articulated by a lot of theology). And, speaking personally, that includes me, at least part of the time.

    After all, what more do we really want to require to be a Christian than to confess that Jesus is the revelation of God and to commit (in the same stumbling and halting way that we all do) to following him? I’ll give Borg the last word:

    I do not think the church’s extravagant devotion to Jesus is a mistake, for the purpose of the church, of Christology, of the creed is to point us to Jesus. And then Jesus says, “It’s not about me.” He points beyond himself to God–to God’s character and passion. This is the meaning of our christological language and our creedal affirmations about Jesus: in this person we see the revelation of God, the heart of God. He is both metaphor and sacrament of God. (pp. 98-99)

  • Heart of Christianity 4 – God

    In chapter 4, “God: The Heart of Reality,” Borg continues his now tried-and-true approach of contrasting aspects of the earlier paradigm and the emerging paradigm. Here he discusses the nature and character of God.

    Borg calls the earlier paradigm’s concept of God supernatural theism. This concept identifies God as a transcendent, personal being who created the universe and may occassionally intervene within it to engineer certain outcomes.

    By contrast, the emergent paradigm embraces panentheism, a notion that has received a fair bit of attention in contemporary theology, from such diverse quarters as Jurgen Moltmann, thinkers associated with the science-and-religion dialogue, and process theology. In supposed contrast to supernatural theism, panentheism emphasizes the “closeness” of God to the created world (pan + en + theos = “all things in God”).

    According to Borg, supernatural theism sees God as “out there,” as fundamentally separate from the world, which largely operates according to its own laws and nature. For God to have any influence on the world, God must “intervene” by “breaking” those laws. It also, he says, has contributed to an ecologically desctructive view of the natural world by minimizing the presence of God in the world.

    Panentheism, on the other hand, emphasizes the immanence of God. God is the “encompassing Spirit… the one in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’” (p. 70). God is thus not absent from creation, but includes it, even while transcending it. Borrowing a phrase from Lutheran theology, God is “in, with, and under” creation, or a “presence beneath and within our everyday lives” (p. 67). Borg says that instead of using the language of “intervention,” panentheism uses terms like “divine intentionality” or “divine interactivity” to describe God’s relation with the world (see p. 67).

    A critic of Borg might well say that his description of supernatural theism is a straw man. For instance, what proponent of traditional theism has actually denied the immanence (or omnipresence) of God? Relatedly, it’s not clear to me that panentheism solves all the alleged problems of classical theism, at least not without a great deal more fleshing out than Borg gives it here–and it may introduce new ones of its own. Nevertheless, with the popularity of the slot-machine God of “prosperity” preaching and the all-determining deity of neo-Calvinism, fresh thinking about God and God’s relationship to creation is definitely needed.

  • Heart of Christianity 3 – Bible

    Unlike his take on faith, I found Borg’s treatment of the Bible surprisingly weak. He starts out by saying that Christianity is centered on the Bible because it points to God, but that the Bible has become a stumbling block for many because of biblical literalism. Literalism, according to Borg, puts an undue emphasis on 1. infallibility, 2. historical factuality, and 3. moral and doctrinal absolutes.

    By contrast, his emerging paradigm is 1. historical, 2. metaphorical, and 3. sacramental in its treatment of the Bible. Let’s unpack that a bit:

    Historical: The Bible, Borg says, is a human product, created by two historical communities (Israel and the early Christian communities). It tells us how these communities saw their life with God, but, as such, it is historically and culturally conditioned. The Bible should be interpreted in its historical context–as texts written from and to particular communities.

    Metaphorical: Borg defines metaphor as the non-literal but “more-than-literal” meaning of a text. In his account, the more-than-literal is what matters most. For example, the Genesis creation story is primarily about God’s relation to us and the world, not whether the world was created in six 24-hour periods. Likewise, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth as reported in the gospel (the virgin birth, the star of Bethlehem, the wise men, the shepherds, etc.) have rich symbolic meaning that doesn’t depend on their historical factuality.

    Sacramental: The Bible is a “means of grace” whereby God becomes present to us. In personal or public devotional reading of scripture (e.g., lectio divina) we can hear the Spirit speaking to us through the words of the text.

    For the emerging paradigm, Borg says, the Bible is fundamentally a “way of seeing” God and our life with God (metaphor) and a means or way that God speaks to us and comes to us (sacrament).

    I agree with Borg that much of the Bible can–and should–be understood metaphorically and that flat-footed literalism often misses the point. Borg’s key claim is that the stories have this meaning independent of their historic factuality, and, despite the importance of historical context, focusing on the question of “what really happened” detracts from their meaning. While true as far as it goes, I think this is an over-simplification.

    After all, the Bible is a different kind of literature from Shakespeare or Moby-Dick, or even the Bhagavad-Gita. Its spiritual or religious meaning depends, at least to some extent, on historical factuality. To take the most obvious example, Christian faith would collapse–or at least be radically different–if it turned out that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived or that he lived a life very different in character from the one depicted in the gospels (leaving aside how we could ever learn that this was the case).

    Historical truth does matter–even if we agree that there is a lot of mythical embroidery on the basic facts. The meaning of Jesus–the more-than-literal meaning if you like–would be a lot different with a different set of historical facts. This is because the Christian claim is that the divine life was actually lived out among us. I’m not sure Borg would deny this, given the work he’s done on the “historical Jesus” question, but he gives little indication–in this chapter at least–that the history matters much at all. (Which, as Jonathan pointed out, makes you wonder why getting the historical context right is so important.)

    Borg seems at times to want to replace a one-dimensional “literalist” interpretation with a one-dimensional “metaphorical” one. But I think he’s asking the concept of metaphor to do too much work here. (In fact, at times I think he’s using “metaphorical” to include every non-historical type of meaning, from “moral” to “theological” and “metaphysical.” This confuses more than it clarifies.). The Bible is more complex than a simple dichotomy between “literal” and “metaphorical” captures, and I think other approaches do more justice to that complexity.

  • Heart of Christianity 2 – Faith

    I liked chapter two, “Faith: The Way of the Heart,” not so much because it breaks any new ground, but because it clearly lays out what I (at any rate) find to be a helpful understanding of the nature of faith.

    Borg notes that some people criticize Christianity for being more about believing than being a way of life. While this criticism has some bite, he points out that Christianity was originally known as “the Way” and that faith is, properly understood, a way of life.

    Borg distinguishes four meanings of faith:

    – Faith as assent: This refers to giving one’s intellectual assent to the truth-claims of Christianity. Borg claims that this idea of faith rose to prominence during and after the Reformation when the various Protestant sects and the Catholic Church came to be distinguished primarily by their belief-systems. In the wake of the Enlightenment, faith came to be almost identified with the act of believing highly improbable, or at least questionable, things. Borg argues that this definition of faith “puts the emphasis in the wrong place” because it “suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads–as if ‘believing the right things’ is what God is most looking for, as if having ‘correct beliefs’ is what will save us” (p. 30).

    – Faith as trust: Specifically, “radical trust in God.” God is the one who keeps us afloat. This means that we can relax and not be anxious because we can trust in the “sea of being in which we live and move and have our being” (p. 31).

    – Faith as fidelity: Borg describes this as a “radical centering in God.” It is ultimate loyalty to God and God’s commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. The opposite of faith as fidelity is idolatry–putting something ahead of God as our ultimate concern.

    – Faith as vision: This is our synoptic view of reality as a whole. In particular, is God/reality hostile or indifferent to us, or is it consonant with our best interests? To have faith in this sense is to view God/reality as “life-giving and nourishing” or “gracious” (p. 35) rather than out to get us or unconcerned with us.

    Borg cites the last three understandings of faith as particularly congenial to the emerging paradigm because of their relational quality–they define the nature of our relationship with God and shape our response to God, which is lived out in love of and service to our neighbor. He also recognizes, however, that they are important to the earlier paradigm too. The problem with the earlier paradigm, he thinks, is that it over-empasizes the propositional component of faith to the detriment of the relational.

    As a Lutheran, I find Borg’s discussion of faith appealing. Whatever else it might mean, “justification by faith” can’t mean you will be saved if you can manage to believe six impossible things before breakfast. For Luther, it was radical trust in the graciousness of God that constituted “saving” faith.

    However, I’m less persuaded that this approach to faith is distinctive of the “emerging” paradigm. I think that this more relational notion of faith has always been present in the tradition at its best. Even fundamentalism goes beyond “mere belief” to “trust in the Lord” (or “accepting Jesus into your heart”). I suspect that any genuine faith includes elements of all four of the types Borg has identified.

  • Borg’s Heart of Christianity – 1

    Taking a break from the denizens of the deep, I started reading Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity. This is a kind of Mere Christianity for liberal Christians, and something that people at my church have found helpful, so I thought I’d give it a read. (I’ve been critical of Borg in the past, but also appreciative of his work.)

    The agenda of this book is set by what Borg calls two “paradigms” for viewing the Christian tradition–the “earlier” paradigm and the “emergent” paradigm. Now, paradigm has been an overused concept ever since Thomas Kuhn mainstreamed it, but Borg makes a good case for there being multiple comprehensive ways of seeing the same “data”–Jesus, the Bible, and the Christian tradition. No one paradigm can claim to be the Christian tradition; they are all different expressions of it.

    So what distinguishes these two interpretations of the tradition? According the Borg, the earlier paradgim, which has been the dominant one for “the last few hundred years,” emphasizes belief, understood as assent to certain truths. The key beliefs are that God exists, that the Bible is a “divine product”–God’s revealed word–and is to be interpreted “literally,” and that Jesus is God’s Son whose atoning death makes possible the forgiveness of sins.

    According to this paradigm, the main point of Christianity is to get “saved” (understood as ensuring one’s blessedness in the afterlife) by meeting certain requirements, including having the correct beliefs about God and/or Jesus.

    So, what’s the “emergent” paradigm, then? Borg says that this is a more recent view–dating back about one hundred years–that arose in response to the challenges of modernity, especially modern science, historical criticism of the Bible, and religious and cultural pluralism. (Actually, Borg sees both paradigms as responses to modernity; he thinks the earlier paradigm adopts many of modernity’s epistemological assumptions, particularly its emphasis on “literal-factual” truth-claims.)

    The characteristic features of the emergent paradigm, according to Borg, are that it 1. interprets the Bible in its historical context, as a set of writings originally addressed to a diverse set of ancient communities; 2. focuses on the metaphorical or “more-than-factual” meaning of the texts; and 3. sees the Bible and tradition as sacramental mediators of the Spirit–that is, the Bible is sacred in status and function, not origin (inerrancy).

    The emergent paradigm, in contrast to the earlier paradigm’s focus on belief, puts a stronger emphasis on personal response and the relational nature of faith. What’s important is not so much having the “correct” beliefs (which, Borg notes, would make faith a “work” by which we are saved), but being transformed at the level of the “heart”–i.e., the deepest, most fundamental orientation of our selves.

    Given the differences between the two paradigms, does it make sense to even see them as expressions of the same religion? Borg thinks so, for two reasons. First, Christianity has always had multiple interpretations–cultural and theological diversity have been part of the Christian tradition from the beginning. Second, and more importantly, the two paradigms affirm the same central commitments:

    – the reality of God,
    – the centrality of the Bible,
    – the centrality of Jesus,
    – the importance of a relationship with God as known in Jesus, and
    – our need (and the world’s need) for transformation (see p. 17)

    Hinting at a somewhat pragmatic understanding of religious (or at least doctrinal) truth, Borg says that

    the issue isn’t that one of these visions of Christianity is right and the other wrong. Rather, the issue is functionality, whether a paradigm “works” or “gets in the way.” (p. 18)

    By “functionality,” what Borg seems to have in mind is that the tradition of which we’re a part leads to “a sense of the reality and grace of God, to following Jesus, and to lives filled with compassion and a passion for justice” (p. 18). The problem with the earlier paradigm, he says, is that for many people living today it causes unnecessary “static,” preventing them from hearing the message of the gospel.

    I already have a few questions about Borg’s approach, but I want to hold off until I see how he fleshes it out. In a future post (or posts), I’ll take a look at Borg’s exploration of the meaning of faith, the importance of the Bible, the nature of God, and other topics that he thinks require a fresh understanding.