A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in.

    It seems to me that a lot of the climate change “skepticism” (which I put in scarequotes because much of it is an industry-funded attempt to muddy the waters, not a good faith pursuit of the truth; see the chapter on climate change skepticism/denial in George Monbiot’s Heat for some damning details) is about pouncing on uncertainty at the level of detail, whereas the big picture remains pretty clear. Take for instance the way that skeptics jumped on some recent minor revision by NASA of some temperature rankings for the US (see this post for some clarification, via Confessing Evangelical).

    As Daly says, if the big picture is clear, then by asking the right questions, like “can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes?” or “what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere?” or “does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer?” can yield a fairly definitive answer to the question of what direction we should be going in.

    As he puts it:

    Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

    I discussed Daly and theologian John Cobb’s book For the Common Good a bit here and here.

    In a similar vein, D.W. Congdon is asking some questions for churches about consumerism, which is surely relevant to this topic.

  • Re-thinking Hegel

    In the second half (or maybe last third) of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity he discusses some of the post-Enlightenment developments of Christian thought and the prospects for a 21st century liberal-yet-orthodox Christianity.

    Interestingly, Ward attempts a partial rehabilitation of one of the currently most unfashionable theological thinkers of the post-Enlightenment era: Hegel. Since at least Kierkegaard Hegel has been the poster boy for hubristic metaphysical system-building and the attempt to reduce Christian particularity to philosophical generality. But Ward thinks that Hegel still has valuable contributions to make to Christian theology.

    Ward concedes that Hegel overreached in identifying the progress of history with the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, and in his confidence in speculative reason. However, he argues that Christianity necessarily involves doing metaphysics and the strictures against “Hellenism” by German liberal theologians like Harnack, et al. aren’t sustainable. On the positive side Hegel contributed a new understanding of God that departed from the static deity of classical Greek philosophy and is more congenial to the biblical picture of God as deeply involved in history. Thus a “chastened” Hegelianism that properly qualifies Hegel’s historical optimism and his inattention to the particularity and importance of Jesus, can still be of some use:

    For Hegel, history both expresses and changes God, as it realises aspects of the divine that would otherwise have remained potential in the divine being, and as God truly relates to these aspects in new and creative ways. It is compatible with this view to say that God also has a proper divine actuality even without creation, and certainly without this specific universe. So we may not wish to say that this universe is necessary if God is to be conscious of the divine nature. However, there is a great deal of force in the thought that, if God is to realise the divine nature as love — in the sense of relation to truly free personal agents — then the creation of some universe in which true freedom is possible will be needed.

    The sort of love that obtains between God and created persons — a kenotic love that enters into humility and suffering, that seeks those who are lost and reconciles those who are estranged — is not possible solely within the being of God itself. Because of that, the creation of a universe is the necessary condition of the actualisation of kenotic love in God. A stronger stress on the value of personal relationships leads to involving God more in time and change than classical theologians like Aquinas thought. We may not want to follow Hegel in the detail of his philosophy, but this is a move that he was the first major philosopher to make. (p. 156)

    This sort of thing is apt to make more traditional thinkers nervous. It seems to imply that the divine being in itself is somehow incomplete and requires the creation of something in addition to God in order for the divine potentiality to be actualized.

    There’s a connection here to the doctrine of the Trinity: Ward is suspicious of more “social” versions of the Trinity that emphasize the fully personal existence of each trinitarian person. These models see the “inner” life of the Trinity as a fully complete interchange of self-giving love; consequently, there is no need for creation to actualize God’s nature as love.

    Ward writes, in criticism of this kind of view:

    In any case, it is hard to see what sort of love could exist between persons who are all parts of the same being. It is as if different parts of a human being with three different personalities could all be said to love one another. That would be a very peculiar, even pathological, sort of love.

    […]

    If the love of Jesus is our model for the love of God, then God, as love, must go out to persons who are other than God, who are capable of rejecting God, but who can be healed by divine love and united to the divine life by compassion nad co-operation. This is not a love of one hypostasis of God for another hypostasis of God. It is a love for what is other than God but can be united to the life of God in fellowship. It is a love that requires a created other, perhaps, but not a love that can be operative within the divine being itself, where there is no possible scope for rejection, compassion, healing or a real autonomy of the other. (pp. 76-77)

    This is an interesting argument because it suggests that the intra-trinitarian divine love is in some sense inferior to the extra-trinitarian reconciling love that seeks the lost. In some sense I can see the force of this: it does seem that a love where there is literally no possibility of the beloved not reciprocating is somehow diminished in that there is no risk or vulnerability involved.

    On the other hand, it is somewhat worrisome to say that God must create a world in which there is a risk of rejection and estrangement in order to actualize this aspect of the divine love. For one thing, this seems to suggest that evil is necessary for God’s being to be fully actualized: for a world in which rejection and estrangement are a live possibility is one that would seem to (necessarily?) contain suffering. This is the same worry I have about Robert Jenson’s theology, that God’s self-determination is so bound up with the historical process that evil becomes part of the very being of God.

    Maybe there can be a mediating position: perhaps it’s possible (at least logically) for God to create creatures who are capable of estrangement without necessarily falling into it. In other words, the kind of risky love demonstrated in God’s decision to create free creatures who may fail to respond to the divine love does differ from God’s self-love, and is thus something good to be actualized, but it doesn’t necessarily entail the existence of evil.

    Regardless of what we want to say about this, I do think Ward is right to distinguish between the kind of love we might imagine between the persons of the Trinity and the kind of love that exists between God and finite persons, or between finite persons themselves. Some theologians have taken to seeing the relationship between the persons of the Trinity as a model for human community, but this seems like a bad idea for a couple of reasons.

    First, a lot of the descriptions of the nature of the love between the Persons is, let’s face it, rank speculation. And using fancy Greek terms like “perichoresis” doesn’t really change the fact that we have only the dimmest idea of what the “inner” life of God is like, much less does it provide some kind of blueprint for human relationships.

    Secondly, the life of the Trinity, we’re told, instantiates a perfect union of wills, a unity of wills in fact. The three Persons will all and only the same things. But this is a very bad model of human relationships. There is never perfect agreement of will in human communities, and to try and ensure such unity would be a recipe for tyranny. Conflict is an essential part of human living, due both to our differing interests and limited knowledge about what is good. Human beings are different from each other in a way that the Persons of the Trinity aren’t. So, it is, I would suggest, an inadequate model for human relationships to say the least.

  • Only a suffering God can help(?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • A 21st century latitudinarianism

    I’m traveling for work, currently staying at a resort in Florida for a company meeting. There’s a reason people don’t vacation in Florida in August it turns out. Though it may actually be more pleasant here than it was in DC when I left…

    Anyhoo, my flight was delayed for three hours, which gave me time to make it through a big chunk of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity. This has been billed as a sequel of sorts to Pascal’s Fire, and the themes will be familiar to anyone who’s read much of Ward’s other work.

    Ward is an anomaly in some ways. He’s liberal in certain respects, wanting to subject Christianity to critical scrutiny (the book jacket has blurbs from Hans Kung and John Shelby Spong), but he’s also a staunch defender of theological realism and natural theology against the attacks both of its atheistic despisers like Richard Dawkins and non-realist religious thinkers like Don Cupitt. Ward also affirms the Resurrection, the possibility of miracles, and the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, though sometimes in ways that might make those of a more traditionalist bent somewhat uneasy.

    The main thrust of Re-Thinking Christianity is to argue for a more pluralist and generous Christian theology in part by appealing to the history of, well, rethinking Christian beliefs. This process of rethinking, Ward argues, didn’t begin with the modern period, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. If a certain theological revisionism is part of the warp and woof of Christian theology, then further development can’t be ruled out a priori.

    Ward contends that this process is discernible in the New Testament itself, where we see a variety of theological perspectives existing side-by-side and can trace some evidence of development. For instance, it seems that at least some early Christians expected an imminent parousia followed by the restoration of Israel with Jesus and the Apostles ruling an earthly kingdom. In time this Jewish messianic gospel came to be eclipsed by John’s logos theology and Paul’s drama of death-and-resurrection. Even Paul himself seems to have moved from an early belief that the Lord would return soon to a longer time horizon for his eschatology.

    Ward’s aim isn’t to debunk later developments by pointing out their divergence from some early pristine Jewish gospel. Quite the opposite in some ways. He sees the process of re-thinking as drawing out the implications of the Christian response to God as disclosed in Jesus when this conviction is set in different contexts.

    Unlike some 19th and 20th century liberal theologians (and some more recent neo-orthodox ones), Ward isn’t interested in purging the “simple message of Jesus” from alleged Hellenistic accretions. In his discussion of the early centuries of the Church during which the great ecumenical creeds were hammered out he affirms the value of using the tools and concepts of Greek philosophy to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the universal divine wisdom, as the logos theology of some of the early Fathers did. This was both a salutary response to the intellectual and cultural context in which they found themselves and a creative use of ideas that would’ve been foreign to Jesus and the Apostles to deepen their apprehension of the divine mystery.

    Ward also points out that recognizing the process of rethinking that has gone on over the centuries makes it more difficult to ascribe a sacrosanct status to particular expressions of the faith. For instance, medieval conceptualizations of the Atonement or purgatory can rightly be seen as innovations that have to be judged on their merits rather than simply accepted as “the traditional view.” Old innovations aren’t necessarily more correct than more recent ones.

    The Reformation, Ward thinks, elevated the principles of pluralism and re-thinking even if in some cases it was against the intentions of the Reformers themselves. Replacing the Pope with the Bible as the supreme religious authority may not in theory demand a proliferation of interpretations of the Christian faith, but this is what happened as a consequence of the inability of all parties to agree on the correct interpretation of the Bible. But rather than lament this fact, he sees it as a step toward recognizing that the things of God will always yield divergent interpretations and thinks that Christians should accept this as a fact of life rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of their interpretation (or that of their church, sect, pastor, favorite theologian, etc.).

    If the Reformation yielded at lest a de facto more pluralistic Christianity, the Enlightenment and succeeding centurie pushed this principle even further. The critical approach to the Bible and church history, the revolution in the understanding of the natural world, and radical changes in social affairs all helped to undermine the certainties of Christendom. The appeal to authority and tradition largely ceased to carry the weight that it had even for many of the Reformers. The new knowledge yielded by science and critical historical investigation haven’t yet, Ward thinks, been fully assimilated into Christianity. They call for re-thinking many of the traditional expressions and conceptualizations of things like original sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos.

    On the whole Ward thinks that this can be an enrichment of Christian thought and faith. For instance, a cosmos as vast and intricate as the one revealed to us by modern astronomy and physics, perhaps populated with many species of intelligent life, can give us a greatly expanded vision of God’s power and providence as well as a richer and more diverse vision of God’s kingdom.

    Ward examines one particular tradition that has tried to assimilate the findings of science and critical history into Christian faith, the German liberal tradition associated with Harnack, Ritsschl, and Troeltsch. While Ward admires the way in which they tried to focus on the ethical core of Christianity, their distrust of metaphysics, de-Judaized Jesus, and radical skepticism about the reliability of the Gospels leave us with a seriously impoverished faith. He argues that the principles undergirding such skepticism beg major metaphysical questions and that it’s possible to affirm Jesus as the Incarnation of God in history even while accepting the principles of historical criticism and the findings of modern science. Neither history nor science commit us to the kind of metaphysical reductionism that is often passed off in their names.

    Ultimately what Ward thinks we should take away from this history of re-thinking Christianity is not that it’s impossible or unreasonable to affirm traditional Christian beliefs such as the Resurrection or divinity of Jesus. It’s that we can no longer take for granted that the way in which we formulate those truths is final and adequate to reality. Ward doesn’t put it this way, but you might call this an “eschatological reservation” about all our theological claims. Since in this world we see through a glass darkly all of our ideas about God and attempts to describe the divine reality will fall short. Consequently, we should maintain a sense of humility about our beliefs, especially those that lie away from the center of core Christian commitments or are the result of fine philosophical distinctions and abstract argument (he uses the example of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity).

    If there’s one place where I might quibble it’s that Ward doesn’t seem to have a very strong sense of the consensus of the Church as at least having a significant presumption in its favor. Granted that re-thinking has always occurred, doesn’t the burden of proof lie on the innovator? It’s hard to say exactly what this burden consists in or what kinds of considerations merit overturning a settled conviction, but it seems to me that if we affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, then we will be inclined to think that she has gotten at least many of the important things rigit over the long haul. I’m not sure Ward would deny this, but he does say things that seem to suggest that more traditional beliefs don’t enjoy special privileges here, whereas I’d want to say that beliefs which have stood the test of time shouldn’t be lightly cast aside.

    What Ward seems to me to be defending is in many ways a kind of old-fashioned Anglican latitudinarianism. This was the view that required agreement on essentials but allowed diversity on inessentials, with “essentials” being defined rather narrowly. Thus debates about the precise nature of the Trinity, free will and predestination, and other thorny theological issues, disputes over which had led to bloodshed, could be left as matters over which people of good will could disagree. In our time we might add debates about various ethical issues which threaten to split the churches. Clearly the challenge is walking the line between latitudinarianism and indifferentism, but that might be something worth doing in a time when dogmatism seems nearly as prevalent as ever.

    In a follow-up post I’ll talk a little about the balance of the book where Ward discusses re-thinking Christianity in the thought of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Christianity in a global context, and the relationship between liberalism of the kind he’s been defending and liberation.

  • July reading notes

    I recently finished a book called Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine by Vincent Brummer. Brummer is a Dutch philosopher of religion in the Reformed tradition and this book is an attempt to give an account of these central doctrines of Christian belief. Brummer starts from the premise that loving fellowship with God is our greatest possible good and that we have nevertheless become estranged from God. He then analyzes the Atonement as the way God effects reconciliation. The subsequent chapters on Christology and the Trinity tease out the implications of this view.

    Brummer heavily emphasizes the existential, personal, and relational aspects of Christianity, such that certain accounts of the Atonement (such as penal substitution) are ruled out as inadequate. This is because they don’t show how genuine reconciliation and restoration of fellowship is made possible by the Cross, but focus on things like paying off debts or removing guilt. It relies on a model of relationships couched in terms of rights and obligations rather than one of loving fellowship.

    In Brummer’s view, the Atonement is God’s act to remove obstacles that prevent us from being reconciled to Him. These obstacles include our ignorance of our own predicament, our ignorance of the divine love and will, our impotance to align our will with God’s will, and our lack of love and delight in the divine will. Brummer relates his discussion of soteriology to all three persons of the Trinity, arguing that they work to restore our lost fellowship with God.

    There’s also an interesting discussion of “social” vs. “Latin” models of the Trinity. Brummer critiques recent social trinitarians for lapsing into de facto tri-theism and says that any form of social trinitarianism that abandons the Platonic assumptions of, e.g. the Cappadocians is prone to this error. He then attempts to defend “Latin” trinitarianism against charges of modalism. My takeaway was that neither of these models is fully satisfactory.

    Currently I’m in the middle of Ronald Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, a little paperback I picked up at a used bookstore in Georgetown. This is a series of biographical studies from the Reformation and early modern periods of persecutors, heretics, and those who remonstrated for religious liberty, essentially tracing the period from the Spanish Inquisition to the British Act of Toleration. Bainton is probably better known for his book on Luther and his study of Christian attitudes toward war. But this is a little gem, full of fascinating historical detail and theological insights.

    On deck is Keith Ward’s new book Re-Thinking Christianity. This is billed as a sequel of sorts to his Pascal’s Fire (see here for more) and promises to examine the way that Christian theology has changed in significant ways over the centuries in response to different contexts. Part of his agenda, I think, is to construct what you might call a “liberal orthodox” theology, or a theology that is faithful to the central claims of Christianity while being open to insights from secular learning and culture as well as other faiths.

  • The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society 3: The Christian revolution

    (See previous posts here and here.)

    In chapter 8 Jardine discusses what he calls the cosmological and anthropological revolution wrought by Christianity and why it holds the key to facing the dilemma of the technological society. That dilemma, recall, is that we human beings have found ourselves with the capacity to radically alter our environment but without a moral understanding adequate to direct us in using that power. Traditional moral theories, such as those inherited from Greek philosophy, have assumed a static order both in the natural world and in human nature. Consequently, natural law theories don’t provide guidance in how we should use our ability to alter what was previously thought to be an unchanging order.

    Furthermore, Jardine thinks, liberalism doesn’t provide an answer to this dilemma either. This is because of its inbuilt tendency toward nihilism. While liberalism recognizes the human capacity for altering the environment, in seeking a “neutral” ethic that prescinds from making judgments about the good it fails to set direction or limits to that capacity. Thus, he thinks, individual preference becomes the sole source of value in a liberal society.

    Despite the fact that Christianity would seem to be one of the main foundations of Western civilization, Jardine thinks that we haven’t sufficiently assimilated its cosmological and anthropoligical outlook. Unlike either ancient paganism or Greek rationalism, Christianity is characterized by two distinct tenets that can help re-orient our technological society. First, Christianity recognizes that human beings, while creatures, have a share in God’s creative power. We are co-creators in a sense. Secondly, the Bible views the universe as a dynamic expression of the divine being. In “the word” we find the key metaphor for understanding the biblical view of the universe.

    God, Genesis tells us, speaks the world into existence. Unlike ancient paganism which viewed the gods as capricious, the biblical God is trustworthy and faithful. Thus his creation will display a certain order and reliability. But unlike Greek rationalism, which saw the world’s order as unchanging, the biblical God is dynamic and involved in history. History becomes a key concept for understanding the creation: it is more like an ongoing process with new potentialities unfolding over time. This dual view of humans as co-creators and the universe as an orderly but dynamic process, Jardine thinks, is much more in tune with the world revealed by our technological capcities and scientific knowledge.

    And this view provides the foundation for an ethic that can grapple with the problems of being co-creators in such a world. Just as God speaks the world into being, humans can think of themselves as speakers before God. Speech is key because, in a sense, speech is what allows us to create new worlds of possibility and thus is at the root of our creative capacities. “Using language in certain ways creates human capacities that could not exist otherwise” (p. 175). Our creative powers are real, though limited.

    The proper response of such creatures, living in a dynamically ordered world created by a good God, is to try to be “faithful speakers before God.” Jardine provides an illuminating interpretation of the story of the Fall. The human situation is that we seek to transgress the limits of our knowledge and creative powers in order to be like God:

    We are creators, but we are also creatures. As such, there are limits to our creative capacities, and limits to our knowledge. But because we are creators, we will have a powerful tendency to forget, or willfull ignore, the fact that we are creatures, and we will frequently try to be only creators–that is, to be God. This behavior is what is meant by the term sin, and its paradigm is attempting to claim absolute knowledge, which of course only God can have.

    The reason people sin is precisely because of our ambiguous situation as creators and creatures. As creatures we are limited beings, but as creators we can imagine ourselves as unlimited beings, and thus we will tend to attempt to cast off all limitations–or, in theological terms, we will be tempted to be like God. Or, putting this in terms of our model of creating a world through speech, sin is the attempt to become creators only, instead of cocreators, and to create our own little world. This is precisely what one does when one lies; one attempts to replace the world created by God and the speech of other humans with a world created only by oneself. More generally, all attempts to dominate other people are cases of trying to create one’s own world by force. Similarly, the delight that humans sometimes–indeed, rather often–take in acts of destruction can be understood as another attempt to create one’s own world by force. Stating the idea of sin in these terms makes it clear that fundamentally, sin comes from a lack of faith, that is, a lack of trust, in God and his created world; it is an attempt to replace God’s creation with our own. Sin means essentially unfaithful human acts.(pp. 186-7)

    If sin is essentially unfaithfulness, then faithfulness will be embodied in an ethic of unconditional love. Since human beings are co-creators with the capacity to create their own “worlds” plurality is an essential feature of the human condition. You and I may well disagree about how we should live together, or how our powers of creativity should be used. Jardine defines unconditional love as the persistent attempt to understand and empathize with those whose perspective differs from our own. Concretely, this means practicing forgiveness and mutual correction. These balance each other because while we must stop the person who is sinning, a recognition of the limits of our knowledge highlights the importance of forgiveness.

    Jardine goes on to distinguish this Christian ethic from that of liberalism. Unconditional love is not the same thing as liberal tolerance. Tolerance implies a kind of indifference to what others are doing so long as they harm no one but themselves. But unconditional love corrects and forgives out of a concern for the well-being of the other. “From the standpoint of an ethic of unconditoinal love, liberal tolerance is, for the most part, indifference, and fails to help or correct people unless their actions affect others in a direct, blatant way” (p. 189).

    Indeed, Jardine goes on to argue that “[g]enerally speaking, liberalism is best understood as a distortion of–or better yet, a reductionisitc version of–Christiainity, or more specifically of the Christian ethic of unconditional love” (p. 189). Liberalism enjoins toelrance and avoiding persecution rather than the deeply involved personal love commanded by the Christian ethic. Christianity may have inspired the idea that all people are fundamentally equal and thus one could engage in productive exchanges with those outside of one’s family, clan, or culture, but liberalism goes too far in reducing all social relationships to market exchanges. The Christian ethic of unconditional love provides the foundation for faithful speaking before God and communal deliberation about the good.

    I think this would be a good point to ask some critical questions. Jardine has argued that liberalism leads to nihilism and that only Christianity can provide the means for a fruitful deliberation about the good, providing some guidance in the use of our powers as cocreators in a dynamic and creative, but ordered and reliable universe. He maintains that liberalism is a reduction of the Christian idea of equality and unconditional love to a bland tolerance. However, does he grapple sufficiently with what gave rise to liberal tolerance in the first place? As good as mutual correction and forgiveness sounds, it’s very difficult to see how this would apply to society as a whole, rather than to close-knit Christian communities. Liberalism flourished initially in part because the churches were being rather too zealous in the cause of fraternal correction. In other words, “mere” tolerance is no mean accomplishment and not something to be dismissed lightly. In a vast society tolerance may be the best thing we can give to a lot of our fellow citizens. Mutual correction requires a degree of intimacy and trust that isn’t easily attained. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, the modern nation-state may well be incapable of being a genuine community in the sense of providing an arena for communal deliberation about the good.

    Secondly, Jardine seems to conflate political liberalism, understood as a regime that refrains from enforcing a particular vision of the good, with liberalism as a way of life. The latter takes human autonomy as the highest good and is in that sense itself a comprehensive philosophy of life. But not all political liberals are liberals in this sense. In his book Two Faces of Liberalism the political philosopher John Gray distinguishes between liberalism understood as a way of life and liberalism understood as a kind of modus vivendi that allows different ways of life to peacefully co-exist. A modus vivendi liberalism isn’t necessarily committed to enforcing liberalism as a way of life, the kind of philosophy of life that may well lead to nihilism as Jardine fears.

    It might be worth pointing out that most people in modern Western liberal societies are not in fact nihilists. And this may be because they have adopted more of a modus vivendi style of liberalism that allows different ways of life to co-exist. This doesn’t mean that every person in a liberal society suddenly becomes an atomized individual unattached to any larger context for making sense of her life. Granted that liberalism as a way of life has certainly made inroads in these societies, it doesn’t seem to follow, either empirically or as a matter of logic, that it must overwhelm all more communitarian or traditional ways of life.

    And this brings me to one more point. Jardine, like some writers in the Radical Orthodoxy school of thought, holds that liberalism necessarily leads to nihilism and that only Christianity provides a viable alternative to liberalism. But I think we’re well beyond the point where Christian thinkers can ignore the plurality of other points of view in the world and treat secular liberalism as though it were the only serious rival to Christianity. The irreducible fact of pluralism – of a diverse array of religious and philosophical ways of life – is, in my view, precisely the best argument for some variety of modus vivendi liberalism. This would be an order that allows people to live in relative peace without denuding themselves of their particular religious, cultural, and other kinds of identity.

    That said, Jardine’s re-interpretation of the story of the fall and its relation to our technological capacities is suggestive, and something I think Christians would do well to bring to the debate on how those capacities should be used. They might well find common ground here with believers from other traditions. In the next (and probably final) post in this series I’ll talk a little about Jardine’s concrete proposals for social change in light of the discussion so far.

  • Placher’s Triune God

    I see that William C. Placher has a new book out on the Trinity. Placher’s long been a favorite of mine – his Domestication of Transcendence and Jesus Our Savior in particular. Does anyone know anything more about this?

  • Jardine’s Making and Unmaking of Technological Society

    One of the pleasures of moving is that in going through all your earthly possessions you rediscover books that you either hadn’t read or hadn’t fully digested. One such book of mine is Murray Jardine’s The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society. I think I may have blogged about it a bit a few years ago, but I thought I might revisit parts of it.

    Jardine’s central argument is that the moral malaise of modern Western society is the result of the fact that we have acquired massive new powers to alter the natural and human environment but lack a corresponding moral framework for guiding our choices about how to use that power.

    The reason for this is that traditional moral theoires assumed a relatively static view of the natural and social orders and therefore have a difficult time providing guidance to us once we’ve acquired the ability to radically alter those orders. One proposed solution is that offered by liberalism: the proper moral order for society is the one which maximizes individual choice so long as those choices don’t harm others and so long as people don’t impose their values on others.

    However, Jardine makes the now-familiar criticism of liberalism that, since it lacks a substantive concept of the good life, it is unable to give a coherent account of why the non-imposition of values should trump all other values or what constitutes harm to others. Abortion provides an excellent example: all parties to the debate agree that it’s wrong to harm the innocent, but they disagree about whether abortion counts as a case of such harm. Ultimately, Jardine argues, liberalism results in nihilism since it can provide no solid foundation for moral values, and thus doesn’t provide a workable alternative to traditional natural law theories of morality.

    What’s needed, Jardine says, is a moral framework that provides guidance for our choices while recognizing the changeability of the natural and social orders. His view is that recovering a geniunely biblical idea of morality can provide such a framework because it explicitly recognizes human beings as co- or sub-creators, creatures who have a share in the Creator’s power to shape reality.

    I’ll try to post more thoughts on what Jardine takes to be the Christian alternative for grappling with our technological power soon.

  • Hopeful Christocentric universalism

    I’ve been re-reading Carl Braaten’s Principles of Lutheran Theology – it’s really a good read and a great encapsulation of some classic Lutheran themes.

    One of the best chapters is the one on The Christocentric Principle. Here Braaten discusses the work of Christ and its implications.

    He recognizes that soteriology has fallen on hard times, especially with a shift from an otherworldly to a more this-wordly focus. Liberation and other political theologies have taken their cue from the story of the Hebrews in the OT, especially the Exodus, as the paradigmatic act of God’s liberation for his people.

    However valid this insight might be, Braaten thinks that it is at best a partial account of salvation and shortchanges the gospel. Liberation, understood as political praxis has two major shortcomings: it shifts the burden of providing salvation from God to human beings. It is at best synergisitc and at wost Pelagian. Secondly, it doesn’t sufficiently reckon with the enemies of human life and flourishing that go beyond the structural injustice and political oppression. “[F]or all the liberating praxis in history can do nothing to produce love and freedom and can do nothing about human bondage to sin and death” (p. 78).

    Instead, Braaten contends, Christians need to hold on to the cosmic and universal signficance of Jesus. “The most important notion, common to preaching, piety, and dogmatics, is that ‘Christ died for us.’ This is the sin qua non of every doctrine of atonement.”

    He goes on to say:

    In dying for us, Jesus did not die instead of us, for we all still have to die. In suffering for us, he did not suffer instead of us, for we all have to suffer. Yet he represents us before God. He speaks for us when we are silenced by death. He claims that each one of us is unique, indispensable, and absolutely irreplaceable even though the world treats us as expendable and exchangeable and as mere statistical units. Here we have the solid ground of personal identity free of charge, while people are madly searching for security in a supermarket full of answers with high price tags. In this world in which the value of individual human beings is becoming infinitesimally low, Jesus is our representative in his life and in his vicarious death and in his victorious resurrection.

    Faith is an act of letting Jesus be our representative. Because he died for us, we never die alone without representation, without hope for personal identity beyond the grave. We will never have to die alone on a Godforsaken hill outside the gate. We can die in a communion of his love, in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins, with undying hope for resurrectoin and eternal life. Because Jesus died the death of the sinner as the sinless one, assuming our lot by his love, he can be our representative. Because he died the death under the law as the man of love, full of life to share and taking time for others, he can be our representative. He can be our representative because, in being raised from the dead, he was approved by God as having the right credentials to be the ambassador of the human race. (pp. 72-3)

    This seems similar to what some theologians have described as “inclusive substitution.” Jesus doesn’t die instead of us so much as he enters into our condition and transforms it. We still have to die, but death has been transformed; it need no longer be a source of terror and hopelessness.

    Braaten goes on to discuss the universal implications of Jesus’ saving death and resurrection. He acknowledges that Christians have to take account of the other great religions of the world in a way that wasn’t always clear to Christians in the past. However, he also doesn’t think that Christians can sacrifice the uniqueness of Jesus as God’s “only saving bridge to the world.”

    He identifies two unsatisfactory positions about salvation. There’s the old-fashioned view which requires as a condition of salvation that one be a member of the Church in good standing (the traditional Catholic view) or that one have explicit faith in Jesus (the conservative Protestant view). Both of these variations consign possibly the majority of the human race to eternal damnation by God’s sovereign decree. Then there’s the modern pluralism that sees all the great religions of the world as equally valid means of attaining salvation (the position of someone like John Hick).

    Braaten points out that the first view, held by traditionalist Catholics and conservative Protestants has already been forced to create various loopholes (for infants, virtuous pagans, the Old Testament patriarchs, etc.) and thus isn’t as rigorous as it first appears.

    The second view frankly sacrifices the universal significance of Jesus, treating him essentially as one potential savior among many. This is hardly compatible with the main thrust of the New Testament witness, which sees Jesus not simply as the savior of a small band of followers, but as the cosmic Christ and Lord of all.

    Parenthetically, it’s always seemed to me that the “hard pluralist” position claims to know a lot more about the divine than seems to be justified. If particular religious traditions are relativized in their truth claims, on what grounds does the pluralist claim to know that God/the divine can be reached by any of these channels? It seems to me, rather, that Christian assurance of God’s good will is rooted firmly in the revelation of God in Jesus, which requires the kind of robust Christology and doctrine of the Atonement that is anathema to pluralists.

    In Braaten’s view, a Christian hope for the salvation for all people has to be firmly rooted in the person and work of Christ. “The Christian hope for salvation, whether for the believing few or the unbelieving many, is grounded in the person and meaning of Christ alone–not in the potential of the world’s religions to save or in the moral seriousness of humanists and people of goodwill or even in the good works of pious Christians and church people, who perhaps are compulsively believing too many things and going to church more than is good for them[!]” (p. 82).

    It’s important to note, I think, that Braaten is also ruling out what we might call the modern “inclusive” Christian view that wants to hold on to the uniqueness of Jesus, but nevertheless holds that everyone who “does their best” can be saved. This ends up being semi-Pelagian at best. If all I need to do is the best I can, what need is there for a savior in the first place? This is precisely the attitude that Luther railed against – the view that God would give his grace to those who “do what is in them.”

    Lutherans have traditionally not followed Calvinists in holding to double predestination and limited atonement. However, there is an unresolved tension there in that the implication of monergism (human beings don’t contribute to their salvation; all is a gift from God) and unlimited atonement would seem to be some form of universalism. After all, if Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for the sins of all, and we can do nothing to secure that salvation for ourselves, and God doesn’t predestine to reprobation, then it seems like all will be saved.

    The traditional response has been to say that God predestines for salvation but not perdition. But it’s far from clear that this is more than a verbal distinction. What we might say, though, is that the mysteries of the divine will remain permanently inscutable to us, at least conernign these matters.

    Braaten writes:

    Will, then, all people be saved in the end? We do not already know the answer. The final answer is stored up in the mystery of God’s own future. All he has let us know in advance is that he will judge the world according to the measure of his grace and love made known in Jesus Christ, which is ultimately greater than the fierceness of his wrath or the hideousness of our sin. (p. 84)

    This has always seemed to me like the best answer. We hope that all will be saved, but that hope rests in Christ, not in us.

  • Fowl play

    Speaking of chickens, this review of a new book about the treatment of chickens under the conditions of industrial farming utterly fails to engage with the moral issue at hand.

    The author, Mick Hume, seems to think that factory farming is a mark of progress and anyone who questions whether the end (cheap meat) justifies the means (untold suffering of millions of sentient creatures) is nothing more than a know-nothing hater of humanity and enlightenment.

    At no point in the article does Hume consider whether we have any moral duties to animals. Nor does he try to argue that they can’t suffer or feel pain. He simply asserts a version of might makes right: people “need” cheap meat, so whatever we do to provide that is ipso facto a mark of progress.

    Hume seeks to discredit concerns about factory farming by asserting that what critics “really” oppose is industrialism and material progress per se:

    Like many issues to do with food and farming today, this chicken debate is not really about the details of different techniques for raising them. It is pecking at bigger targets: industrialised farming and, by implication, the social and economic advance of our society. The demand that we should all ‘reconnect’ with the animals that provide our food, for example, is really a call to turn back the clock on a social division of labour that has been developed over centuries.

    Of course, this is argument by armchair psychoanalysis and Hume has done nothing to prove this point. I’m not saying that there aren’t environmentalists and animal rights advocates who don’t look askance at our industiral economy, but one hardly needs to be a luddite to question whether the suffering we inflict on animals is justifiable, especially in light of the fact that, at least for most people in the Western world, meat is hardly essential to be healthy. It’s ridiculous on its face to claim that “complain[ing] about the ‘injustice’ done by humans to chickens … is to call into question the entire basis of human civilisation.”

    Interestingly, Hume writes that “Regular readers will know that, in an anthropomorphic age when those who suggest that man is superior to beast are branded ‘speciesists’, spiked writers rightly insist upon drawing a clear and uncrossable line between humanity and the ‘animal kingdom’.” As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, spiked is a resolutely secular publication, so I’m curious on what grounds they draw this “clear and uncrossable line.”

    But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, once you’ve given up the idea that there is a metaphysical difference between human beings and other animals and you’ve embraced the doctrine that we can do whatever we like to them, it’s hard to see why, in principle, “might makes right” can’t be extended to other classes, races, or whatever other group stands between us and our interests.

    One tires of pointing this out, but it’s possible to recognize degees of moral considerability among various creautres. That one can recognize that animals are wronged when they are treated in the ways characteristic of modern factory farming doesn’t imply that there is no significant moral difference between a chicken and a human being.

    (Note, I’m not vouching for the book under review, which I haven’t read. And thanks to Chip Frontz for sending along the link.)