A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Salvation as re-creation

    A while back I wrote about Keith Ward’s understanding of how God acts in the world, as explained in his book Divine Action. Later in the book he devotes a chapter to the incarnation and offers an interpretation of the atonement.

    Ward argues that Jesus is properly seen as the enfleshment or embodiment of God’s love in the world: “We could then say that Jesus does not only tell us about God’s love or even act out a living parable for the distinctly existing love of God. Rather, what he enacts is the very love of God itself, as embodied in this human world and for us human beings” (p. 215).

    However, the incarnation isn’t merely a lesson for us about God’s love. Or, as Ward says, “Jesus is not primarily an educator, who comes to bring salvation through knowledge, achieved in meditation and stilling of the individual mind” (p. 221). The human predicament is more radical than that; “liberal” views of the atonement sometimes suggest that we merely need to see or learn what is right in order to do it, reducing Jesus to an example:

    [God] cannot simply forgive us, while we are unable to turn from our sin — that would be to say that it does not really matter; that somehow we can love God while at the same time continuing to hate him! He cannot compel us to love him, without depriving us of the very freedom that has cost so much to give us. He cannot leave us in sin; for then his purpose in creation would be wholly frustrated. (p. 222)

    What Ward suggests instead is that the atonement is God re-creating human nature in the life of Jesus. In his life, obedience, suffering, passion, and death, Jesus re-enacts the drama of human life, but in a way that maintains its complete fidelity to God. He thus overcomes sin and the powers of evil to which we are subject. “He takes human nature through the valley of the shadow of death, and in him alone that nature is not corrupted. He is the one victor over evil; he has experienced the worst it can do, and he has overcome it” (p. 223).

    In Jesus, human nature is made anew, the way God intends for it to be. But how can this help us? Aren’t we still stuck in our sins? Ward contends that Christ can help us because he “has remade human nature in an uncorrupted form” (p. 223), and we can participate in that nature, or have it implanted in us through faith in Christ. As St. Paul puts it, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).

    The nature that we receive from God is a human nature that has triumphed over evil, that has entered into its heart and remained uncorrupted. It is not that God simply creates a new nature in us when we ask; but that he takes human nature to himself, shows what it truly is and what its destiny is and shows that it cannot be conquered by sin and death. That is the nature he places within us, making us sons by adoption, taken into the life of the Son.

    This view seems to have more affinities with the Eastern Christian emphasis on theosis than certain substitutionary or retributive models of the atonement promulgated in the West, particularly since the Reformation.

    The idea of incarnation and atonement as “new creation” also, it can be argued, fits better with an evolutionary view of the development of human nature. As I’ve argued before, evolution seems to require that we relinquish the supposition that humans existed in a state of perfect righteousness prior to a historical fall. Instead, we might propose that early human beings were immature and undeveloped and that God intended them to develop along a certain path. Instead, however, humanity has taken the wrong road, preferring self-seeking, greed, and violence to altruism, justice and peace. Atonement, then, consists of setting us back on the right road.

    A view very much like this has been developed by George L. Murphy, a physicist and Lutheran pastor, in two interesting articles: “Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin” and “Chiasmic Cosmology and Atonement.” Regarding atonement as re-creation, Murphy writes:

    Atonement comes about because God in Christ actually does something to change the status of people who “were dead through the trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). To be effective, the work of Christ must overcome the nothingness toward which sinful humanity is headed, a nothingness which through its terror of death, guilt, and meaninglessness, it already experiences. If humanity and (as we shall note later) the rest of creation with it, is on the way to nothingness, God must re-create from nothing. Atonement parallels in a precise way the divine creatio ex nihilo.

    One benefit of this view of salvation is that it puts humanity back in its proper place as part of creation. As Lutheran “eco” theologian H. Paul Santmire says:

    The Incarnation of the Word is thus a response to the human condition of alienation from God and rebellion against God, as well as a divine cosmic unfolding intended to move the whole of cosmic history into its final stage. United with the Word made flesh, human creatures are restored to their proper place in the unfolding history of God with the cosmos. Thus united, they are free to live in peace with one another and with all other creatures, according to the imperfect canon’s of creation’s goodness. Now they may live as an exemplary human community, as a city set upon a hill, whose light cannot be hidden. (Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, p. 60)

    I think this provides one fruitful way for thinking about salvation that avoids some of the pitfalls of both a forensic and merely exemplarist view and has a certain consonance with an evolutionary picture of the world.

  • Bacevich book club

    TPM Cafe is hosting a “book club” on Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, wherein various smarty-pants foreign policy thinkers weigh in on the book and Bacevich gets an opportunity to respond. Read it here.

    I blogged about Bacevich’s book here.

  • Of liberals, libertarians, and utilitarians

    I don’t recall exactly how I came across it, but this is interesting: from a 1975 issue of the New York Review of Books, Peter Singer reviews philosopher Robert Nozick’s libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

    Surprisingly, Singer suggests that many of Nozick’s criticisms of John Rawls’ redistributionist liberalism hit their mark. In fact, Singer seems to want to use Nozick’s position as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of Rawls’ rights-based liberalism, thus clearing the way for utilitarianism (Singer’s preferred ethical theory) to underwrite the kind of distributive policies that liberals favor.

    I’m actually quite sympathetic to Singer’s view that we should be utilitarians, at least as far as property rights are concerned. Certainly I don’t think that libertarians have provided a convincing or adequate account of how property rights are initially acquired, much less that the property holdings in our current society are, in general, derived from just initial acquisitions. (If anything, the historical record would suggest the opposite.)

  • A dual-aspect political theory?

    I started reading Thomas Nagel’s Equality and Partiality, on the subject of moral and political philosophy. Those familiar with Nagel’s work will note a recurring theme concerning the different, and often apparently irreconcilable, views of ourselves that we’re compelled to take by personal experience and more reflective, impersonal stance. For instance, from my own first-person perspective I think of myself as an agent who freely chooses to do or not do various things. But from an impersonal perspective, especially one informed by modern science, I quickly begin to appear as one object among many in the world, buttressed and determined by forces far outside my control. The problem, Nagel says, is it’s very hard to see how these two perspectives can be reconciled by any “higher” or more inclusive perspective, and yet we can’t rid ourselves of either one.

    A similar division of the self appears, he thinks, in our moral and political life. From my own perspective, my needs, desires, and happiness appear to be extremely important. But when I consider things form a more impersonal vantage point I quickly realize that there’s no good reason to suppose that my interests count for any more than anyone else’s. Each person’s life is just as important to him or her as mine is to me; objectively, no person counts for more than any other.

    Yet, like in the case of free will, we can’t simply rid ourselves of either perspective. Utilitarians think we should aspire to be benevolent, impartial agents of the greater good, with each person (or sentient being) counting for one and not more than one in our moral calculations. But Nagel argues that it’s psychologically impossible for us (or most of us at any rate) to completely discount our own happiness, interests, and particular attachments for the sake of moral equality. To avoid both utopianism and what he calls “hard-nosed realism,” an adequate moral and political philosophy has to somehow account for and give adequate recognition of both perspectives, without simply resolving the tension in favor of either one.

    This strikes me as a potentially fruitful way of posing the problem. Having just read Peter Singer’s One World, I was struck that Singer’s utilitarian view would seem to require us to divest ourselves of most of our particular attachments, as well as the right to pursue our own interests and life projects. On the other hand, though, neither egoism nor tribalism (looking out strictly for our own nation, race, religion, etc.) rise to a truly moral perspective; any such perspective has to have a universalist thrust and aspect, especially one that a Christian could endorse. I’ll be interested to see where Nagel goes with this.

  • One world?

    I recently read Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures in 2000. I had a longish post in the hopper about national loyalties and obligations to strangers, but it didn’t really go anywhere so I junked it. Suffice it to say, I don’t always agree with Singer’s reasoning or his conclusions, but this is a very lucid and well-argued overview of some of the major issues facing the world: global warming, international trade, international law and humanitarian intervention, and poverty. Singer thinks we need a more cosmopolitan outlook as well as instruments of global governance, but his prescriptions are tempered with pragmatism and realism about what’s possible. He also marshals actual facts about the various subjects at hand (the discussion of international aid is well worth the price of admission alone) and is willing to follow that evidence where it seems to lead (he is undogmatic about economic globalization for instance, recognizing that it’s very difficult to say, based on the available evidence, whether it has been a net benefit, particularly for the world’s poor). In each case I was forced to carefully re-think my existing views. (I think I’m more of a nationalist and less of an interventionist than Singer would like me to be.)

    By way of criticism, I don’t think we need as big a revolution in our moral outlook as Singer thinks we do to tackle these problems. This is similar to my view of his writing about animals; I think we can reduce the exploitation of non-human animals without necessarily giving up our partiality for human interests. Likewise, I think we can take major steps toward discharging our obligations to the rest of the world without denying that we have special duties to our own compatriots. Elevating the status of one group doesn’t mean downgrading another’s. I readily agree, for instance, that we have a duty to increase foreign aid to alleviate severe poverty and still think that I have special ties to my own country and its citizens. On the other hand, Singer is probably right that in our world speciesism and nationalism carry far more weight than their opposites, so maybe a shove in the other direction is necessary. Reservations aside, this is a model work of accessible, practical philosophy.

  • Just war at the JLE

    Always a timely topic (unfortunately): the Journal of Lutheran Ethics has a review symposium of Gary Simpson’s War, Peace & God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition.

  • Cooking with ATR

    Jennifer’s post here makes me think that this sort of thing might actually be interesting or useful to some folks. One of the most common questions I get as a vegetarian is “What do you eat?” I chalk this up to a couple of things. One is that, for many people, the standard American meal, which I like to define as meat+potato+some sorry looking looking veggies, is…well, the standard most people use for what a proper meal should be. So, when they imagine a vegetarian meal, they imagine the standard meal, but without the meat. And, understandably, a plate of mashed potatoes and overcooked carrots doesn’t sound all that appealing. Either that, or they think vegetarians just eat salad all the time. (I’ve been to more than one restaurant or function where a salad was the sole “vegetarian option.”) Another popular misconception is that eating vegetarian essentially means eating the standard American diet but replacing all the meats with meat substitutes (veggie burgers, soy bacon, veggie dogs, etc.). And I imagine these are common reasons why people either don’t try vegetarian eating or don’t stick with it.

    Consequently, I think successful long-term vegetarian eating requires a kind of paradigm shift in the way you think about meals. As long as you have the standard American meal as your template, vegetarian food is going to have a hard time measuring up. It’s going to be a stumbling block in exploring the different kinds of vegetarian cuisine and discovering the ones you really like, which are usually (though not always) not going to be imitations of meat-based dishes. Which is why, if you do decide to go veggie, or just decide to cut back on meat, getting some good vegetarian cook books is an important first step. Good cook books will introduce you to meal possibilities that go way beyond replacing your hamburger with a tofu burger (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). And they’ll help you discover the possiblities of ingredients that form the basis of a lot of vegetarian dishes and can help you maintain good nutrition (hello, lentils!).

    So, as a public service to my dear readers, I thought I’d suggest some vegetarian cook books that get a lot of use around our place:

    Donna Klein, The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen

    This is one of my favorites and ideal for people new to vegetarian eating. Don’t let the “vegan” label put you off; the beauty of this book is that it’s fool of delicious traditional recipes for foods that will be familiar to most people without using any soy-based meat or dairy substitutes. Great stuff.

    The Moosewood Collective, Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home

    This one focuses on quick, easy-to-prepare meals. Mostly vegan, but also has a section on fish.

    Mollie Katzen, The Moosewood Cookbook

    A classic. Mollie Katzen is credited with bringing heatlthy vegetarian cooking into the mainstream.

    Catherine Hackett, Meatless Main Dishes

    This is a slim volume, but has great single-skillet dishes. Some of our favorite soups and stews come out of here.

    Robin Robertson, Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes

    As the title indicates, this book is full of hearty, stick-to-your-ribs food. Who says vegetarian eating has to be about tofu and bean sprouts?

    Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, Veganomicon

    I just got this over Christmas and we haven’t had a chance to use it much, but it got good reviews. It’s billed as the ultimate vegan cook book. I did make a chili verde recipe that used tomatillos and Granny Smith apples which was tasty, if a bit labor-intensive.

    What most of these books have in common is that the recipes are relatively easy, they contain interesting dishes that go beyond imitating meat-based foods, and they don’t rely on a lot of processed ingredients or soy-based meat and dairy substitutes. And learning the basics by using these recipes will eventually help you improvise with your own creations. And I haven’t even touched on the many ethnic cuisines (Indian, Thai, etc.) that offer bountiful and delicious veggie options.

    Also, anyone who decides to go veggie, or change their diet in a significant way, ought to consult a trustworthy source on nutrition. Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis’s Becoming Vegetarian is a handy and comprehensive reference. (They also have a companion volume, Becoming Vegan.) It’s actually pretty easy to eat a balanced, nutritious diet as a lacto-ovo vegetarian (trust me, getting enough protein is not really a problem for most Americans); vegans have a few more specific dietary holes they need to fill, but I’m not the guy to ask about that.

    Finally, here’s a good piece from the Audubon Society magazine making a passionate case for reducing our meat consumption.

  • The anti-foodies’ foodie

    Salon has an informative review of Mark Bittman’s new manifesto/cook book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. Bittman is the author of several cookbooks and writes for the NYT, including the “Minimalist” column about cooking. The reviewer, Laura Miller, calls Bittman the “anti-foodies’ foodie” and describes his book as an application of Michael Pollan’s principles aimed at making us healthier, saving money, and benefitting the environment:

    The formula is very simple (Bittman is the Minimalist, after all): “Eat less of certain foods, specifically animal products, refined carbs, and junk food; and more of others, specifically plants, in close to their natural state.” It is a recommendation that owes much (as Bittman repeatedly acknowledges) to the work of Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food”; the spirit of Pollan presides over this book like the Virgin Mary over a Catholic Church. In fact, you could describe “Food Matters” as “applied Pollan,” because Pollan, for all his endlessly inventive, inquisitive and adventurous writings on American eating and food production, lacks Bittman’s pragmatic touch.

    Miller raises two points worth thinking about. First is that what will sound like common sense to some will seem radical and totally impractical to others:

    It can be easy for someone like me to forget that many people would see Bittman’s plan as untenable, since the kinds of foods he recommends aren’t sold in affordable chain or fast-food restaurants or available prepared or frozen in every suburban supermarket. Some of his advice — carry nuts and fruit around with you for snacks, so you can avoid vending machines — may be tenable for them, but some of the rest will seem even less practical than the Atkins Diet.

    This is related to Miller’s second point, that “Americans simply don’t know how to cook”:

    Real home cooking means having a good repertoire of reliable, quick, uncomplicated recipes and understanding enough of the underlying principles to improvise when needed. It means knowing how to stock a pantry and plan your menus so that you shop for groceries only once a week. It’s a set of skills manifested as an attitude, something you can acquire only through regular practice, and it’s the one thing that can make a person truly at ease in a kitchen.

    […]

    Like writing, driving, touch typing and balancing a checkbook, basic cooking is a life skill (not an art or hobby) that everybody needs, and it ought to be taught in public schools as a matter of course. The fact that cooking can also be a craft, featuring a certain amount of self-expression, or that contemporary star chefs have been exalted to a degree far exceeding their actual cultural worth, shouldn’t be allowed to obscure that humbler truth.

    And of course, though Miller doesn’t mention it explicitly, many people don’t cook because they don’t have time to: they’re working long hours, maybe at more than one job. Preaching at people to cook won’t change the way many of their lives are structured by the demands of work and other obligations.

    Miller is optimistic, though, that just about anybody can learn to incorporate uncomplicated recipes of the sort Bittman favors here and in his cookbooks, even if much of what he proposes will seem radical to some people. Recipes like those offered in the magazine Everyday Food, “familiar American fare yet free of processed and fake foods,” should be feasible for most of us, she says, and can help us save some dough to boot.

    I want a both/and approach here: I do think there are ways of changing our diets to be healthier and more eco-friendly that are within the reach of nearly everyone. And it’s important to point out that this doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing affair; every little step helps. If there’s one thing that probably discourages people from radically chanigng their diet for whatever reason, it’s probably that it seems like such a daunting task.

    But let’s also not forget that forces beyond our immediate control influence the way we eat. For instance, our existing farm policy, as amply documented by Pollan and others, makes a lot of bad foods artificially cheap (e.g. virtually anything with high fructose corn syrup in it), so it’s no wonder that overworked, cash-strapped people hit the frozen food section or reach for a bag of snack chips instead of whipping up an all-natural meal of whole grains and leafy greens. Reducing everything to a matter of individual choice ignores the way market forces and food policy structure the choices available to us. A more sensible policy would make it easier to choose foods that are healthier, more humane, and better for the environment (which, needless to say, wouldn’t eliminate the need for individual choice).

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008):

    Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power

    “Empire of dysfunction”

    Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice

    Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4

    Jay McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans

    “Creation and omnipotence: a process perspective”
    “More thoughts on omnipotence and creation”

    Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation

    Index of posts here.

    John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World

    Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

    Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation

    “Initial thoughts on Gutierrez’s Theology of Liberation”

    S.F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals

    “What kind of equality?”

    James Alison, On Being Liked

    “An end to sacrifices”

    John Gray, Straw Dogs

    “John Gray contra humanism”

    Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

    “Against the globalized food chain”
    “Pollan on the ethics of meat eating”
    “More on Pollan and vegetarianism”

  • Empire of dysfunction

    If I could put one recent political book in the hands of conservatives trying to rebuild their movement and liberals irrationally exuberant about all the “change” that’s about to take place, it’d be Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power. Heck, as long as I’m wishing, I’d like to get it in President-elect Obama’s hands too.

    In under 200 pages Bacevich dissects our interrelated economic, political, and military woes. In short, Bacevich’s diagnosis is that we are living on credit in the broadest sense, and the bills are coming due. This is literally true in our economic dependence on cheap goods, cheap oil, and cheap credit–the pillars of what Bacevich calls our “empire of consumption.” Instead of learning to live within our means, Americans have been living as though we could have it all.

    Interestingly, considering that Bacevich–a West Point grad, career military man, and Catholic–is an avowed conservative, the villain of the piece turns out in large part to be Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who convinced us that it was morning in America and that there was no need–contra that killjoy Jimmy Carter–for us to learn to live within limits. At the moment when America might have tamed its dependence on foreign oil, for example, Reagan helped open the gates to a flood of consumerism.

    Maintaining this empire of consumption, Bacevich argues, drives our foreign policy: globalization and its attendant military hegemony. The more dependent the US is on other countries for goods and resources, the more incentive there is for us to try and control those countries through the application of military force. In Bacevich’s telling, the imperial presidency and the swollen and dysfunctional national security state are part of the bargain we’ve struck: we have exchanged our constitutional republic for a (seemingly) endless supply of cheap consumer goods. Liberty has been defined down as the freedom to get and have.

    One of the more striking parts of the book is Bacevich’s recounting of the way that defense intellectuals–the “Wise Men” who’ve advised presidents since the Kennedy era–have preempted democratic deliberation about the contours of our foreign policy. Bacevich traces a lineage from little-remembered figures like Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, and Paul Nitze to the likes of Paul Wolfowitz. The connecting thread between Nitze, who devised the rationale for much of our Cold War military buildup, and Wolfowitz, one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, is a tendency to exaggerate threats, a penchant for secrecy, and an aversion to democratic accountability. The result is a lopsided foreign policy too prone to using military power as one tool among others, rather than a last resort to be employed under carefully specified circumstances (as in traditional Just War thinking).

    The fly in the ointment, however, is that this arrangement isn’t working. Our exercises in military policing are becoming quagmires; cheap credit and cheap oil are both drying up; and our political system serves entrenched special interests rather than citizens. One reason is that our faith in military power suffers from a historical naivete that Bacevich eviscerates with Niebuhrian precision. (Indeed, Niebuhr, who Bacevich invokes repeatedly, is the patron saint of this book.) Only fools imagine they can manage history, or guarantee a final victory of good versus evil, or, for that matter, that evil resides only in “the other” and never in ourselves.

    Instead of a crusade to rid the world of evil, Bacevich says, the US should pursue a similar policy to the one we used against the Soviets. Containment, he contends, is a more realistic–and ultimately more moral–policy than the doctrine of global hegemony and the Bushian corollary of preventive war. In addition, he says, focusing on attainable goals like curtailing nuclear proliferation and tackling the effects of global warming holds the promise of addressing some of the root causes of our predicament.

    I wonder here if Bacevich’s proposed solutions are actually proportionate to the problem as he’s diagnosed it. If our democracy is so dysfunctional and captive to a thirst for cheap oil and special interests, then why, for instance, has Barack Obama made combating climate change and developing alternative sources of energy such a centerpiece of his transition? If Bacevich is right, then it seems either his solutions are too timid, or our democracy isn’t as bad off as he thinks. It’s too early, of course, to know if Obama’s promised policies will materialize, and Obama has given little indication that he dissents in any radical way from the US consensus on foreign policy. But it might also be that there’s a greater difference between the parties than Bacevich seems to want to admit.

    Nevertheless, American exceptionalism is firmly ensconced as the default ideology for both parties, as is our over-reliance on military power. Bacevich’s book is a bracing critique of the Washington consensus, even if there’s little chance that we’ll voluntarily chart a change of course.