A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • A Christian defense of liberty

    The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold.

    From the review:

    What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and timely is not merely his resistance to simplistic answers, but his willingness to explore these supremely philosophical issues from an explicitly Christian point of view. Tinder believes that arguments about liberty take on new resonance when they are voiced from within the Christian context. While the dignity of the individual can be grounded in humanistic principles, for example, those principles do not provide its best defense. For Christians, the dignity of an individual reflects the creative act of a God who made humanity in God’s own image.

    If Christ is the Logos and humans are given reason by God, then an unreasoning Christianity is a self-contradiction. Christians are by nature not dogmatic but rather “Socratic,” Tinder tells us. They fulfill their religious character through free engagement with and respect for others. “A strong faith would not recoil from dialogue” but would promote it. Thus individual liberty is an essential component of the Christian life. Protecting individual liberties is a Christian value.

    The irony here, Tinder explains, is that the positive goods of the Christian life are perhaps best realized through the Christian’s support of negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from constraint—from limitations imposed by the state, society, corporations and, yes, religion. It is the freedom to do what one wishes to do, and this negative liberty is reflected in the political and legal apparatus through which individuals gain license to worship freely as well as to engage in all kinds of “non-Christian” acts: premarital sex, substance abuse, adultery.

    This is timely as there seem to be a lot of Christians afoot these days disparaging “mere” negative freedom as a bourgeois, individualistic, modernist snare. “True” freedom is freedom for, they say–freedom to obey God’s will.

    Undoubtedly, obedience to God’s will can be said to be a “higher” freedom. But two qualifications need to be registered. First, negative freedom, or freedom from constaint, seems to be a necessary condition for the higher form of freedom. Obedience that is compelled isn’t obedience worthy of the gospel. Second, when people talk about true freedom being found in obedience to God, they often elide the thorny issue of how we discern God’s will and who has the authority to interpret it. All too often in the church’s history, the freedom of obedience to God has been the “freedom” to obey some particular group of people who’ve set themselves up as God’s official spokesmen.

  • Redeeming the time

    LutherPunk has started up a new blog less focused on theology and ministry and more focused on crafting a lifestyle of self-sufficience and reduced consumption in what might seem like a not-too-promising location: modern suburbia.

    Derek weighs in here and points out that resisting consumerism dovetails with classic Christian virtues like “prudence, temperance, moderation, and respect for the creation.”

    Which brings me to one of the, for me, most compelling parts of Michael Northcott’s recent A Moral Climate, which I mentioned briefly here. Although Northcott firmly defends the scientific consensus on climate change, he offers a Pascal’s wager-style argument to the effect that changing our current lifestyle would be a good thing even if global warming wasn’t happening:

    action to stem climate change would be prudent even if certain knowledge that it is happening, or about the severity of its effects, is not available or believed. If global warming is humanely caused, then these actions will turn out to have been essential for human survival and the health of the biosphere. In the unlikely even that it is not, then these good actions promote other goods — ecological responsibility, global justice, care for species — which are also morally right. (p. 274)

    Northcott deepens his argument with a discussion of the Christian conception of time. Humanity, in the Christian understanding, is not called primarily to seize control of historical processes, but to witness to God’s love and mercy:

    Time in modernity thus becomes a human project, and ordering time towards human welfare requires economic and political artifice. By contrast, in the Christian account of redemption the future is hopeful because of the Christ events in which bondage to sin and suffering is undone by the definitive redeeming action of God in time. In the Christian era time is no longer a political project as it had been for Plato, and as it has become again in post-Christian modernity. Instead Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection are teh actions of the eternal, transforming the direction and future possibilities of human existence within time from beyond time. (p. 278 )

    In previous chapters Northcott had outlined certain key Christian practices – such as dwelling, pilgirmage and eucharistic feasting – that are in sharp contrast with our technological-industrial world’s obsession with mobility, speed, and utility. These practices aren’t means of engineering history, but ways of dwelling within history, in light of the cross of Jesus:

    In these practices Christians take time to order their lives around the worship of God because they believe that they have been given time by the re-ordering of creation which occurs when the Creator dwells inside time in the Incarnation and so redeems time and creation from futility, and from the curse of original sin. In the shape of this apocalyptic event, Christians understand that they have seen not only the future redemption of creatureliness, but the way, the ‘shape of living’, that they are called to pursue between the present and the future end of time. (pp. 278-9)

    For Christians, living in a way that minimizes our use of limited resources and impact on the planet isn’t simply a means to reducing envionmental despoilation, it’s living “with the grain of the universe,” to use John Howard Yoder’s memorable phrase. Peaceableness, which encompasses our relationships with the human and non-human creation, is ultimately in sync with the deepest and most lasting reality, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

  • Book meme redux

    Marvin also tagged me for this book meme, which I’m pretty sure I did a while back, but maybe it’d be interesting to do it again without looking at my old answers. Here goes:

    1. One book that changed your life:
    Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. Reading this book as an undergrad was the occasion for my seriously considering that Christianity in more-or-less its traditional form (rather than some attenuated or watered down version) might actually be true. Or at least that it was a live option.

    2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
    Cash: The Autobiography, by Johnny Cash

    3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
    I guess I should say the Bible, right? Or maybe the collected works of Shakespeare? Or something clever like “How to Escape From a Desert Island”?

    4. One book that made you laugh:
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

    5. One book that made you cry:
    I can’t really think of a time this has happened. Maybe I’m just a cold-hearted SOB.

    6. One book that you wish had been written:
    How I Changed My Mind, by Saul of Tarsus

    7. One book that you wish had never been written:
    I’m with Marvin here: I’m enough of a Millian liberal to be for the untrammeled expression of ideas. Though the world probably would’ve gotten by fine without Luther’s Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants and On the Jews and Their Lies.

    8. One book you’re currently reading:
    A Moral Climate, by Michael Northcott (just came yesterday!)

    9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
    The End of Oil, by Paul Roberts. I’ve had this one on my shelf for months.

  • The literature of peace

    Here’s a review of an interesting-sounding book on pacifism and English literature (though, given the subject, the review spends a surprising amount of time talking about Tolstoy).

  • Creative destruction

    The book reviewed here asks if capitalism as we know it is compatible with reining in environmental destruction. The author is pretty convinced that the answer is no. If this is right, the problem then seems to be that 1. there’s no particularly attractive alternative to capitalism currently on offer and 2. even if there was, there’s absolutely no political will to shift in that direction.

    My view up to this point has been that you need some kind of “social market,” that is, a market hemmed in–via laws, norms, etc.–by non-market values. But if growth itself, the very reason for a market economy’s being, is the problem, then I’m not sure that would be sufficient.

  • What kind of religious “center”?

    Bill McKibben reviews two books on Christianity: one by Harvard preacher Peter Gomes, and the other a book from the Barna Institute, the Gallup of evangelical Protestantism, reporting on young people’s perceptions of Christianity.

    Gomes is an interesting guy: a black, old-school New England conservative, Anglophile Baptist minister who happens to be gay. He’s widely regarded as one of America’s best preachers and has published popular collections of sermons as well as a book on the Bible. (I once heard him preach at a Christmas “Carols and Lessons” service in Harvard Memorial Church.)

    In McKibben’s telling, Gomes’ new book focuses on the Gospel texts and seeks to recover the scandalous and countercultural message of Jesus from religious accretions. Jesus, Gomes writes, “came preaching not himself but something to which he himself pointed, and in our zeal to crown him as the content of our preaching, most of us have failed to give due deference to the content of his preaching.”

    McKibben elaborates:

    That preaching, in Gomes’s telling, has several important dimensions. First, it is a doctrine of reversal — of the poor lifted up and the rich laid low. It’s not just that the meek will inherit the earth, a sweet enough sentiment, but that the powerful will lose it. In Jesus’ words, “How terrible for you who are rich now; you have had your easy life; How terrible for you who are full now; you will go hungry!” Jesus takes sides, and usually he is found on the side of the oppressed and unlucky: “The good news was for those who had no good news,” writes Gomes, sounding much like the Catholic liberation theologians of late-twentieth-century South America, now largely suppressed by Rome, who spoke often of Jesus’ “preferential option for the poor.” For the rest of us, we are instructed to love our enemies, to practice the Golden Rule, “love those beyond our comfort zone, and be merciful to others as we hope God will be merciful to us.”

    Turning to unChristian by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, we see a portrait of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 who have turned against a Christianity that they perceive as “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned,” “insensitive to others” and having a single-minded emphasis on conversion that’s irrelevant to their lives. “This is a brand of religion that, for all its market share, seems at the beginnings of a crisis.”

    McKibben sees signs of hope, however, in a cross-pollination of moderate evangelicalism and a revivified social gospel movement. He points to the National Association of Evangelicals’ statements on global warming, the work of Jim Wallis-type evangelicals, and the fact that even Rick Warren, the veritable poster boy for suburban mega-churches, has changed the focus of his ministry to addressing dire social needs like third world poverty. Further, McKibben thinks that someone like Peter Gomes, with an emphasis on the message of Jesus, can challenge the nascent moderate and center-left varieties of evangelicalism further in this direction, and in particular on its attitudes toward homosexuality.

    In general, I think the idea of a revitalized religious “center” is a good thing. Not in the sense of a restoration of the oldline quasi-establishment, but in the sense of a living alternative to ultra-conservative or socially comfortable brands of Christianity that have, until recently, been its chief public face in the U.S. The oddness of this situation is only highlighted by the fact that, for instance, in the UK evangelicals seem to be spread over a much broader portion of the political spectrum; the close identification between evangelical Christianity and the Right seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon in significant respects. (Compare, for instance, the views of “conservative” British evangelicals like N. T. Wright and John Stott on issues like debt relief, war, and globalization with their American counterparts.)

    However, I am wary of too pat a distinction between the “preaching about Jesus” and the “preaching of Jesus,” with the latter being preferred to the former. While recovering the challenging and countercultural message of Jesus is surely something American Christians need to do, there’s an opposite danger of ending up in the empty cul-de-sac of 19th and 20th century religious liberalism that reduced Jesus to a preacher of ethics and social reform while downplaying any supernatural claims about his status. This particular stream always ends up running into the sand for a very specific reason: if Jesus is merely a teacher of morals or social reform, once you’ve learned the lesson you don’t need the teacher any more. And, for that matter, once it becomes clear that these teachings are discernible by all people of good will, what does Christianity offer that’s distinctive?

    I think more recent biblical scholarship also reinforces the close identification, rather than separation, of the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. Once scholars have dropped certain progressivist assumptions from the 19th century they were able to see that in the preaching of Jesus one’s response to him was decisive for one’s standing in God’s kingdom. This doesn’t return us to an individualist pietism, since the kingdom is a social reality, but it’s a reality with Jesus at the center. (An overview of recent scholarship that I found helpful is Michael McClymond’s Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth.)

    My worry then is that, in its quest to be socially relevant, “neo”-evangelicalism may be in danger of repeating some of the mistakes of Protestant liberalism. In my view, a revitalized religious center has to hold together dogma and ethics, personal transformation and social reform, mysticism and ministry. If Christians have anything to offer the world it can only be because they think Jesus offers something that transcends (but also affects) politics or social reform. Interestingly, there seems to me to be a real thirst among younger mainliners for a recovery of the traditional spiritual practices of the church along with a recognition that the mainline has too often forsaken mystery, worship and holiness for political activism. And, no doubt, mainliners can learn a lot from the warm-hearted piety of evangelicals. A whole church will, to borrow a phrase from John Paul II, breathe with both lungs – those of the active and contemplative life.

  • Elvis, rock, modernism, and authenticity

    I’ve recently been reading Charles Ponce de Leon’s (awesome name!) biography of Elvis, called Fortunate Son. One of the running themes is that Elvis’ “rebel” image belied an underlying conservatism that was born of his working-class Southern upbringing which emphasized deference to authority in order to earn “respectability.” But also important was Elvis’ love (and encyclopedic knowledge of) music from a variety of genres: country, gospel, R&B, etc. He was a true aficionado, who impressed even Sam Phillips with his wide and deep tastes. All of this combined to make Elvis skeptical of the direction rock took in the 60s, as Ponce de Leon explains:

    By 1967 many musicians identified themselves as “artists” in ways that echoed the modernist commitments that poets, novelists, painters, and photographers had expressed in the early twentieth century but that would have been incomprehensible to Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Committed to writing their own songs and displaying their abilities through complex, often pretentious lyrical wordplay or instrumental virtuosity, they rejected many of the pop-rock conventions established in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Because they defined their own work in opposition to the pop mainstream, their inroads onto the pop charts seemed all the more like acts of defiant subversion. The surprising commercial success of much of this music encouraged record companies to sign artists working in the same vein. More important, it led many musicians and fans to believe that the record business–and perhaps all of Western civilization–was in the throes of a major artistic renaissance, a trend being spearheaded by a new vanguard: affluent youth. The rock and roll developed by Elvis and his comrades had morphed into rock, a more varied set of styles that perfectly captured the heady spirit of the late 1960s. In such a milieu, Presley’s records didn’t just sound dated; they sounded like they came from another century.

    […]

    But as much as part of Presley might have yearned for such [artistic] freedom, another side of him looked on it with contempt. He was, after all, a child of the working-class South, where music was central to the forging of communities and linked young and old–and, if Presley and Sam Phillips had had their way, black and white. He had grown up enamored of the pop conventions he had encountered in the movies and on network radio. For Elvis, these pop conventions were the ticket to acceptance and inclusion, the basis for the forging of a national community that might transcend class, race, and region. He could never comprehend the desire to move beyond them, much less the belief, derived from the modernism that now influenced rock musicians, that they limited artistic creativity. Elvis loved virtually every kind of music, and he couldn’t imagine making the kinds of value judgments and critical distinctions that were becoming common among musicians and many fans. The concept of authenticity, which had arisen in many fields in response to the commercialism of the culture industries and provided fans and musicians alike with a yardstick for measuring quality and who had sold out, was utterly mystifying to him. He was equally bewildered by the cavalier attitude that artists like Dylan and the Beatles sometimes displayed toward their fans. He was appalled, for example, by Dylan’s decision to “go electric,” which caused a great row among folk music fans and, for Elvis, was evidence of Dylan’s disrespect for the people who had made him a success. (pp. 154-6)

    There is something almost Ayn Randian in the “public be damned” attitude of a lot of rock musicians who see themselves as pure artists with no obligations to the wider public. Not to mention the insufferable game of one-upmanship where artists and fans constantly look to identify “sellouts” and establish their credentials as more authentic than thou.

    Elvis, by contrast, always saw himself as primarily an entertainer, and he kept recording in a variety of genres until the end of his career. But, as Ponce de Leon points out, Elvis’ desire to please often prevented him from taking creative risks which might’ve led to greater personal fulfillment. He cites Elvis’ frustration as one of the reasons he ultimately retreated into a cocoon of hedonism and drug abuse, surrounded by sycophantic flunkies who couldn’t tell him he was heading for disaster.

    “Guitar Man,” from the 1968 “Comeback” special:

  • The end of the world as we know it (6): animals

    (Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian presuppositions, sharply divided the world into spiritual and material realms, with only human beings partaking of the former. Off the top of my head I can think of a few exceptions: John Wesley addressed the issue, as did C. S. Lewis. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the mainstream view has been that only human beings have an eternal destiny, either because they are specially loved by God or because only they possess immortal souls.

    Polkinghorne doesn’t spend much time discussing animals, but they do have a role to play in his scheme of cosmic redemption. He balks at the notion that “every dinosaur that ever lived, let alone the vast multitude of bacteria … will each have its own individual eschatological future” (p. 122). But he does allow that representatives of each kind of animal will exist in the world to come, preserving the type if not each token. He also speculates that pets, “who could be thought to have acquired enhanced individual status through their interactions with humans,” might have a share in the new creation. This is similar to a suggestion made by Lewis, who argued that, in bonding with their human masters, pets may acquire a “self” that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

    The question of animal “selfhood” is obviously a vexed one. Some philosophers and theologians have suggested that animals don’t have selves because they lack self-awareness. But this seems wrong: just because they aren’t self-aware (assuming they aren’t) doesn’t mean they don’t have selves to be aware of. The central question, it seems to me is whether animals posses some measure of individuality and interiority. And it seems clear that they do. Modern science indicates that there is a continuity between humans and other animals in capacity for feeling and thought. This isn’t to deny that human beings have capacities that animals lack, merely to say that many animals are in fact “subjects of a life” as Tom Regan puts it. The fact of individual personality among animals is obvious to anyone with a pet, and only dogmatic materialists and behaviorists deny that animals experience sensations like pain and pleasure. The ancients were actually wiser than some moderns here: they acknowledged that animals had souls that gave them the power of self-motion, feeling, and even a measure of thinking.

    It seems at least possible, then, that God, if he wished, could preserve animal “selves” in existence beyond death. Certainly if a human soul consists of an “information bearing pattern” similar patterns would exist in the case of non-human animals. But would God have reason to do so? Why would God wish to provide post-morterm existence to individual animals? One reason is simply that God loves all things in his creation:

    For you love all things that exist,
    and detest none of the things that you have made,
    for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.
    How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?
    Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?
    You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. (Wisdom of Solomon, 11: 24-26)

    A related consideration is the question of animal theodicy. Will there be some recompense for the animals who have suffered through no moral fault of their own? And would a world built on such enormous suffering be worth it without restoration for the victims? It would be presumptuous to insist that God has to resurrect individual animals, but at the same time we can hope that the wideness of God’s mercy might make room in his kingdom for all creatures.

  • The smiling God

    I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out.

  • The end of the world as we know it (3)

    (See here and here for previous posts.)

    The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus, in its illustration of the principle of continuity/discontinuity, provides the key to understanding the future of the cosmos as a whole. Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical promises that God will redeem the entire creation, not just human beings. He envisions a transmutation of the material cosmos into a new cosmos that parallels the transmutation of Jesus’ dead body into his glorified raised body (Polkinghorne suggests that part of the significance of the empty tomb is to be found here; matter is not to be discarded, but taken up into something new).

    Eschatology is concerned with hope. What can we hope for in a world in which it appears that human aspirations, both individual and collective, are destined for ultimate defeat? “Hope,” says Polkinghorne

    is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect. (p. 94)

    But what is hope’s positive content? It’s the conviction that “all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning” (p. 94). But the only thing that can guarantee this kind of meaning is “the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history” (p. 94). Polkinghorne says that a “thick” eschatology requires an equally “thick” theology and Christology. “To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4:17)” (p. 95).

    This is a robust, “supernaturalist” eschatology, wherein God will act to bring about a new creation that will supplant the old. Polkinghorne’s background as a physicist may give him a more cosmic perspective here. Theologians frequently seem to reduce eschatology to concerns with human destiny, sometimes even to political aspirations. Polkinghorne distinguishes his view from a fully “realized” eschatology that doesn’t privilege the future over the present (a view he attributes to Kathryn Tanner; I’m not sure if this is right since I find Tanner pretty obscure on that point), as well as from the concept of “objective immortality” favored by some process theologians. Both of these options condemn the lives of countless beings to permanent incompleteness. “Actual eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem” (p. 100).

    Polkinghorne thus stakes out a position between a fully “realized” eschatology and a strictly “futurist” one which he calls an “inagurated eschatology.” The pledge of God’s future victory of sin, death, and suffering has been given in the resurrection of Jesus, but the final consummation is still in the future. We can to some extent participate in that future now by being incorporated into Christ’s body through his church and the sacraments. Ethically, this means that follow the way of the crucified and risen one, even though we can’t see exactly where that way is leading us. But we can be assured that “our strivings for the attainment of good within the course of present history are never wasted but will bear everlasting fruit” (p. 102).