The issue before us is to discover or determine what we are, and what we are for. Traditional believers–among whom I count myself–suppose that there are answers to those questions, and that they can be found by prayerful examination of the Word of God in Scripture–and the world. Less traditional believers, reacting against the follies that have often been taught as gospel, believe instead that the answers are not for us to discover, but rather to decide. The question is not (for them) about our present world, but about the world to come, and its coming rests on human enterprise. Humanity is a bridge between the unmeaning world of brute biology and the future happy world of human artifice. I am myself less optimistic about the sort of world that human beings, unaided, will create, but also less enthralled by any present order than conservative believers are. It is precisely because I think our nature is imperfect that I distrust the plans of those who would remake it. Conversely, it is because I catch occasional glimpses of a redeemed humanity that I can believe we are not bound for ever within the circles of this world. — Stephen R.L. Clark, Biology and Christian Ethics, pp. 7-8
Category: Books
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June reading notes
In lieu of full-on book blogging, here are capsule reviews of some books I’ve read over the past month or so:
A Moral Climate, Michael Northcott A theological ethicist and priest of the Episcopal Church of Scotland on climate change. Well-informed by the science (as far as I can judge), but also provides a specifically theological perspective. In particular, he suggests ways in which certain Christian practices (pilgrimage, feasting) can provide alternatives to the way of life encouraged by hyper-industrial capitalism that can both help us live more gently on the world and witness to God’s order of things. I wasn’t, however, convinced by his wholesale denunciation of capitalism and industrialism; he appears to think that changing the way we consume things, particularly energy, is insufficient and at times I got the impression that he thinks we should all return to simple pre-industrial village life. A little too much romanticizing of pre-modern communal subsistence for my taste.
The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith Ward Characterisitically clear and accessible philosophical theology from ATR favorite Ward. Each chapter deals with a particularly knotty issue raised by the science-religion intersection (e.g. creation, the soul, free will), which Ward seeks to untangle in generally pro-religion ways. In essence, he argues that science may require some revision of the way we think about spiritual matters, but the claims of reductionist materialism are vastly overblown. A particular strength of this book is that Ward considers different religious perspectives on science, not just Christian or Western ones. For instance, he discusses how a Buddhist and a Christian might respond differently to questions about the self and its relation to brain science. In this he’s continuing the method he pioneered in his four-volume comparative theology. I’m hard pressed to think of many other contemporary theologians who’ve given such detailed attention to non-Christian faiths.
Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr There’s not much I could say about this book–a recognized classic–that hasn’t been said elsewhere. I thoroughly enjoyed it though and really appreciated how Niebuhr was able to sympathetically enter into the five perspectives on “Christ and culture.” Personally, I found myself most in sympathy with the “Christ and culture in paradox” and the “Christ above culture” stances, but I can see the reasons for as well as the limitations of all of them. I was reading the 50th anniversary edition, but, with Christians continuing to argue about their witness to the wider culture, this book is still relevant.
Saving Belief, Austin Farrer I mentioned this book in a post the other day. Farrer’s primer on Christian belief is a small gem of classical Anglican lucidity. Both orthodox and liberal, and reformed and catholic, in the best sense. I found his explanation of the Atonement particularly compelling.
Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir This brief book by philosopher Zamir makes the case for animal liberation from an explicitly “speciesist” perspective. By this he means that radical reform in our treatment of animals doesn’t require an equally radical rearranging of our conceptual furniture. We can maintain that human beings are superior to non-human animals, but still embrace the goals of animal liberation. He does this by showing that common moral beliefs that in no way contradict our speciesist intuitions lead to unexpectedly radical conclusions about our treatment of animals. Noteworthy too are his discussions of vegetarianism vs. veganism (an animal-friendly utopia, he maintains, will stilll allow for egg and dairy production, suitably reformed) and using vs. exploiting animals.
Currently reading:
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson This is the first book in an award-winning trilogy about human colonists on Mars in the mid-to-late 21st century. It’s what the kids call “hard” SF, I belive. Everything is, at least to me, based on plausible near-future science. Very compelling characters and thematic threads about creating a new society and trying leave some of Earth’s violent baggage behind. As a skeptic about both human nature and space colonization I think it’s doomed to failure, of course. But we’ll see where things go in the second and third books.
The Message and the Kingdom, Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman My pastor recommended this social history of early Christianity. It tries to put Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement in the socio-political context of the Roman Empire in the 1st century. I have a feeling that the none-too-subtle left-wing politics (the back cover bears blurbs from John Dominic Crossan and John Shelby Spong) may get kind of annoying, but so far I’m finding this an informative read.
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind Part music history, part true crime story – this tells the tale of the “black metal” scene centered in Norway in the 1990s. Some of the participants started to take the whole “evil” thing a little too seriously, resulting in church burnings, murder, and various occult activities. Promises to be fascinating.
Finally, our public library had a nice, two-volume paperback edition of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, which I checked out. I’m not sure I’ll be equal to the task, but I thought it would be good to stretch my mind by spending some time with a bona fide theological classic. Plus, it’s a period of theology I know very little about and I can’t help but think that all the bad press Schleiermacher has gotten in 20th century theology is a bit one-sided.
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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 Cash3. 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 Adams5. 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 Tarsus7. 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).
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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:
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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.
A Thinking Reed 