A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • The year in book blogging

    Inspired by a post from Elliot, I thought it might be neat to collect in one post the year’s book blogging here at VI.

    January:

    Keith Ward, What the Bible Really Teaches (here, here and here)

    Rowan Greer, Christian Hope and Christian Life (here and here)

    Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (here and here)

    February:

    Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (here)

    Oswald Bayer, Living By Faith (here)

    March:

    No book blogging!

    April:

    Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons (here)

    Gerald O’Collins, The Tripersonal God (here)

    May:

    Anders Nygren, The Essence of Christianity (here)

    Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (here)

    June:

    Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (here)

    Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation (here, here, and here)

    July:

    Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement (here)

    Bill Kauffman, Look Homeward, America (here)

    August:

    John MacQuarrie, Mary for all Christians (here, here, and here)

    Keith Ward, Pascal’s Fire (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here – whew!)

    David B. Hart, The Doors of the Sea (here)

    September:

    Keith Ward, Religion and Human Nature (here)

    October:

    Ward, Religion and Human Nature, continued (here)

    C.W. McPherson, Grace at This Time (here)

    November:

    Jon Sweeney, St. Francis Prayer Book (here)

    Henry Chadwick, History of the Early Church (here and here)

    Andrew Linzey and Richard Kirker (eds.), Gays and the Future of Anglicanism (here)

    December:

    Stephen R.L. Clark, The Political Animal (here)

    That’s no small amount of book blogging! Keith Ward clearly comes out as the most-blogged-about author this year at VI. Also, an impartial observer might point out that it wouldn’t hurt me to read more fiction.

  • Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"

    I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting.

    But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics, from animal rights to natural theology. He seems to be a Christian Platonist of some sort, but also with a strong bent toward understanding human beings as parts of nature and continuous in a strong sense with other animals.

    The present work attempts to look at political and ethical issues in light of seeing human beings as quite literally political animals. Clark arrives at what he calls “Aristotelian anarchism.” Contrary to the Hobbesian view that posits the necessity of a strong state to keep us from a perpetual state of war, Clark’s Aristotelianism sees humans as social animals who naturally form communities.

    Hobbesians, including most modern liberals, justify the state on the ground that it is what ideally stiuated rational agents would choose. But this, Clark thinks, masks the fact that the state is essentially brigandage writ large. No one actually consents to the existence of rule by the few over the many, in any sense that would seem to be morally significant. And when political philosophers argue that they would choose it if they were “truly rational,” what they often seem to mean by “rational” is “good liberals like us.”

    Of course, even if the state isn’t legitimate in the sense that any of us have ever actually consented to being ruled by other men, the ever-present fear is that it’s the only thing that stands between us and social chaos. Besides the obvious point that, given the historical record of governments in terms of murder, theft, and oppression, the cure may well be worse than the disease, Clark points out that state power may yet be intrinsically wrong:

    No one is to enslave anyone, nor coerce anyone except to prevent such enslavement or absolute coercion. No one, in particular, is to force another to do what he/she does not him/herself consider right: that is, to treat another source of action merely as material. … State power is born in conquest, not in free contract, and has no more right to its prey than any other robber band. (p. 33)

    The statist assumption is that top-down control is the only means of establishing social harmony, but the anarchist’s claim is that the “peace” provided by coercion is actually just war in another form, and that, moreover, there are other means by which social order arises.

    Like other anarchists, Clark distinguishes two means of securing social cooperation: the military (or political) means, and the economic means. The former uses coercion to compel behavior and its use tends to result in a caste of rulers who lord it over the rest of us. The latter includes free exchange, gift-giving, and other positive-sum forms of social interaction. The anarchist’s political agenda, Clark says, is not to impose some utopian blueprint for the perfect society, but to replace the military means of civil association with non-coercive methods.

    Non-coercive anarchism (which is to say, just anarchism) rests … upon a method of civil association, not on a perceived goal. That method, the organization of the civil means, has no one obvious outcome, and to that extent the critics are correct to see that anarchists have no definite political goal, no ‘good society’ the far side of catastrophe. Certain possible futures are rejected (as imperial consolidation, bureaucratic world state, military nationalism), but the anarchist methodology is compatible with as many more, including the free market, communitarian federalism and even ‘fractured feudalism’ [i.e. competing and partly overlapping sources of authority]…. (p. 86)

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.
    Nevertheless, he admits that the anarcho-conservative requires a certain kind of patience:

    and that may be easiest for those who can trust in God. If the God of justice will bring the Empire down, and we, God’s people, will be there to see it fall (even if I, in this mortal body, never do), we can afford to wait, and not attempt to rule the world by force. (p. 90)

    This last quote reminds me of John Howard Yoder’s argument that Christians aren’t called to make sure that history comes out right. That’s God’s business. The job of Christians is to be faithful to a certain way of life in the midst of the dawning of the new creation and the death-throes of the old. And certainly non-coercion looms large in Yoder’s vision of what the Christian life is about.

    Clark does recognize that there can be a just war, but he sees this as essentially a defensive action, and not one that should be resorted to in order to bring in some glorious new social order. And, in fact, the support of wars or revolutions is so inherently dangerous to the preservation of the civil means of order, they require a very high degree of justification:

    Just revolutions, in sum, are theoretically possible, on the same terms as just wars. But there is very strong reason to be suspicious of any candidates for that high status. Certainly neither war nor revolution can be just that does not revert as soon as possible to the civil means, to peace. Certainly the very establishment of a war machine will almost always make that return less likely. The means constitute and modify the end, as Gandhi saw. All would-be revolutionaries need to ask themselves which programme is likelier to succeed: armed revolution, with its ensuing injuries to innocents, its creation of another brigand power, or else some unsung, unrebellious organisation of the civil and economic means alongside or out of the way of politics? (p.88)

    I think this is key to the argument. Attending to the means, not just the ends, however laudable, we’re seeking to realize, is necessary for any just social order. Politics often adverts to ends-justifies-the means reasoning. But the anarchist, like the pacifist, is the fly in the ointment, reminding us to scrutinize the means we choose. It’s much easier, in some ways, to coerce people than to earn their free consent. But treating them as ends in themselves, rather than material for our schemes, demands it.

  • Moral diversity in the church

    I recently picked up a collection of essays from the library called Gays and the Future of Anglicanism, edited by Andrew Linzey and Richard Kirker. The essays cover a broad range of topics responding to the Church of England’s Windsor Report, which censured the American Episcopal Church and a diocese within the Canadian Anglican church for proceeding with the consecration of an openly gay bishop and the blessing of same-sex unions respectively.

    Among the essays that I found most helpful were those addressing the question of what constitutes legitimate diversity in the church on moral issues, in particular, essays by Keith Ward, Rowan Greer, and Linzey himself.

    Ward argues that Anglicanism, unlike, say, Roman Catholicism, doesn’t have a mechanism for pronouncing definitively on contested moral questions. He then takes the Fourth Commandment (Sabbath observance) as an example of where the church has allowed widely divergent interpretations to exist side-by-side. What constitutes adherence to the Fourth Commandment is determined by context as well as reading the intention of “spirit” of the law. Hardly anyone would insist that Christians not “work, leave home, gather wood, or light a fire” on the Sabbath. Alternatively, one could follow Calvin and (arguably) St. Paul and say that for Christians there is no specially mandated day for observing it, since the law has been abrogated for them. However, Ward says, what you often end up with in practice is a kind of hodge-podge or halfway observance, where Christians are discouraged from working but not required to fulfill the other parts of the commandment. At the end of the day, he says, how we observe the Sabbath should be determined by the intent of the commandment, namely, to honor and remember God in all we do.

    Analogously, Ward contends that the apparent biblical prohibitions on sexual relations between members of the same sex likewise have to be judged both in their original context and in light of the fact that Christ is “the end of the law.” Appealing to the OT prohibitions, for instance, is undermined by the fact that Christians (and Jews) routinely mitigate or outright ignore parts of the law. Likewise, he argues, for some of St. Paul’s statements. To take them as legalistic commands is to misunderstand the teaching of the gospel. “If Paul teaches that the whole law has been set aside by Christ, then appeal to the law to back up a moral view has been rendered impossible. To appeal to the moral beliefs of Paul, who taught that we should not be bound by any written words, would hardly make sense” (p. 25).

    But lest this lead to relativism, Ward says that we have been given a way of testing our actions: “That criterion is love of neighbor, concern for their wellbeing. Such neighbor-love is to be modelled on the example of Jesus, which asks for self-giving, humble, unreserved and unlimited concern for the good of others” (p. 25). Ward concludes, then, that “when safeguarded by a stress on the need for loyalty and total commitment in relationships, and by an insistence that sexual practice should express and be subordinated to mutual personal love, a sexual relation between two people of the same sex who are by nature attracted to one another is acceptable and natural” (p. 26).

    Nevertheless, Ward allows that Christians can in good faith disagree about this. Interpreting and applying the Bible is a complex matter over which sincere and well-informed Christans can and will disagree. He proposes that a diverstiy of viewpoints existing in one church has been, and should continue to be, a hallmark of Anglicanism. He suggests that one way of embodying that diversity is the existence of inclusive churches “whose vision of human relationships as related in Christ includes those living in same-sex partnerships” (p. 29), and that there is no reason that pastors or bishops likewise situated shouldn’t minister to such churches.

    Rowan Greer looks at the diversity of viewpoints in light of traditional Anglican views on the authority of the Bible and church polity. He begins his essay by noting two opinions he holds with confidence:

    First, what could be called the traditional view [of sexuality] no longer compels widespread assent, not only with respect to homosexuality, but also in reference to issues such as the remarriage of divorced persons, heterosexual cohabitation outside marriage, and childless marriages of those capable of bearing children. It does not seem to me reasonable to treat the gay issue in isolation of other aspects of human sexuality. Second, granted that moral norms should not be severed from doctrinal considerations, I find it difficult to think of them as quite the same, and remain unconvinced that a particular view of human sexuality must be held necessary to salvation. (p. 101)

    Greer goes on to consider how the appeal to “scriptural authority” can be misleading because Anglicanism at least has never had a settled view of how scriptural authority functions. He canvasses the views of early Anglican divines like Richard Hooker, Joseph Hall, and William Chillingworth and notes that “even in early Anglicanism it is impossible any one clear understanding of biblical authority” (p. 105). Similarly with the other two legs of what he calls “that shibboleth of contemporary Anglicanism, ‘scripture, tradition, and reason” (p. 105).

    He then discusses what he considers to be a fairly persuasive view of biblical authority – that of an inspired witness or response to revelation – which he associates with figures like S.T. Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, Charles Gore, and William Temple. The upshot is that “the repudiation of infallibility is characteristic of Anglicanism and that this carries with it the conclusion that all human authority is fallible” (p. 109). Consequently, Greer argues that proposals to create a more centralized Anglican communion with quasi-legal mechanisms for enforcing unanimity on controversial issues is a mistake and constitutes taking the easy way out.

    Andrew Linzey’s essay “In Defense of Diversity” makes the point that it’s inconsistent to demand uniformity on one moral issue like homosexuality, while allowing for wide diversity on issues of at least as great, if not greater, moral import:

    Like many church reports, [the Windsor Report] likes to think that there is greater uniformity than acutally exists. It scolds ECUSA and the Diocese of New Westminster for failing to observe the “standard” of Anglican teaching, but omits to mention that it is, like all such “teaching,” based on Lambeth resolutions, wholly advisory at best. Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of war and violence. Successive Lambeth Conferences of 1930, 1948, 1968, and 1978 declared that “war as a method of settling international disputes is incompatible with the teaching and example of Our Lord Jesus.” But this hasn’t stopped individual churches authorizing priests to serve in the armed forces as chaplains, even though they are required to wear military uniform and are subject to service discipline. And neither has it stopped individual Christians and ordained ministers making up their own minds about the rights and wrongs of particular wars, and participating in the ones they believe to be just. (pp. 176-7)

    Linzey’s point is not that any moral position is as good as any other, but rather that sincere Christians can legitimately reach different conclusions on particular issues in good faith. “We must give up as infantile the notion that all Christians have to morally agree on every issue. … Unity and communion would have been better served by a frank and honest recognition that disagreement is not in itself a sign of infidelity to Christ, or the demands of truth, or the fellowship that Anglicans can, at best, have within the church” (p. 178).

    Indeed, Linzey says, though some may dream of a “pure” church where everyone agrees on all moral issues of importance, such a church would in fact be a sect. And, whatever the value of sects, that isn’t historically what Anglican churches have tried to be. The “Elizabethan settlement” that gave rise to Anglicanism as we know it was in part a reaction against the sectarianism of the Puritans, who sought just such a “pure” church.

    I’m not sure how persuasive these arguments would be to someone who wasn’t already at least sympathetic to the “liberal” view on same-sex relationships in the church (though I think a case could be made that it’s also a deeply “conservative” view, but that’s a topic for another post…). However, it seems to me that a diversity of opinion on important issues isn’t going away and I’m convinced that it’s a mistake to make one’s position on this particular issue the litmus test for “genuine” Christianity.

    For better or worse, there is no unified Christian view on many of the perplexing issues of the day. One unfortunate tendency of Protestantism has been to splinter in the face of disagreement, whereas Catholicism has tended to try and enforce unity from the top down. But, as Keith Ward puts it, “If there is to be any hope of Christian unity in the world, Christians will have to learn to embrace diversity of interpretations, doctrines and ways of life, while always seeking to relate those diverse patterns to the disclosure of the divine nature in the biblical records of the person of Jesus, and in the creative power of the Holy Spirit” (p. 29).

    There are other essays in this volume worth discussing, which I may get to in future posts, but as a whole I think it’s a worthwhile read for Christians, not just Anglicans or pseudo-Anglicans like me, concerned with the splintering of our churches.

  • Praying with St. Francis

    The venerable Massachusetts Bible Society bookstore in downtown Boston is closing its doors next month, and, consequently, they’re selling off their stock at discounted rates. Despite what the name might seem to imply, the MBS is actually something of a “progressive” Christian outfit.

    Anyway, I was in there yesterday and picked up a copy of the St. Francis Prayer Book, compiled by Jon Sweeney. Sweeney, who’s Episcopalian I think, has edited an edition of Paul Sabitier’s biography of St. Francis and written a book appreciating the saints from a Protestant perspective.

    The St. Francis Prayer Book consists primarily of a one-week daily office (morning and evening prayer) with a particularly Franciscan emphasis. The Psalms and readings (chiefly from the Gospels) are selected to reflect Franciscan spirituality, and they are framed by prayers attributed to him or his followers, as well as traditional prayers of the church. In addition, each day’s prayers and texts are chosen to reflect a particular theme such as detachment from possessions, peace in human relationships, and love for God’s creation that we associate with Francis.

    Sweeney also contributes a couple of historical essays about Francis’ approach to prayer, emphasizing the importance he placed on praying the Office, times of silence for listening to God, and meditating on the figure of Jesus as we have it in the Gospels. Sweeney also mentions the memorization of texts and prayers as particularly important in Francis’ time, and as something that modern Christians could stand to recover. This may be a place where the various simpler forms of the office now available may have an advantage; they enable us to enter more deeply into certain prayers and texts through repitition and memorization. The downside, of course, is that you aren’t exposed to the full sweep of Scripture as you would be in following, say, the daily lectionary of the Episcopal office.

    Naturally the test of any prayer book is actually using it to pray, which I haven’t done much of yet, but it’s a very nicely put together little book.

  • Revolutionary pamphleteers as proto-bloggers

    I started reading Bernard Bailyn’s fascinating book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and was struck by his description of pamphleteering as the primary means by which revolutionary ideas were spread:

    It was in this form — as pamphlets — that much of the most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution appeared. For the Revolutionary generation, as for its predecessors back to the early sixteenth century, the pamphlet had peculiar virtues as a medium of communication. Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form.

    Bailyn offers this quote from Orwell:

    The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high-brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

    Bailyn continues:

    The pamphlet’s greatest asset was perhaps its flexibility in size, for while it could contain only a very few pages and hence be used for publishing short squibs and sharp, quick rebuttals, it could also accomodate much longer, more serious and permanent writing as well. Some pamphlets of the Revolutionary period contain sixty or even eighty pages, on which are printed technical, magisterial treatises. Between the extremes of the squib and the book-length treatise, however, there lay the most commonly used, the ideally convenient length: from 5,000 to 25,000 words, printed on anywhere from ten to fifty pages, quarto or octavo in size.

    The pamphlet of this middle length was perfectly suited to the needs of the Revolutionary writers. It was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument — to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions; it could accomodate the elaborate involutions of eighteenth-century literay forms; it gave range for the publication of fully-wrought, leisurely-paced sermons; it could conveniently carry state papers, collections of newspaper columns, and strings of correspondence. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.” And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consquently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care. (pp. 2-4)

    Bailyn goes on to identify three main types of pamphlet: the direct response to a current event, the “chain-reacting polemic” – a series of back-and-forth debates “which characteristically proceeded with increasing shrillness until it ended in bitter personal vituperation,” (my emphasis) and ritualistic commemorative orations.

    At any rate, I think it’s clear that if the Revolutionary generation had lived today they would’ve been ardent bloggers. 😉

  • McPherson’s Grace at this Time

    Last week I read C.W. McPherson’s short book Grace at this Time, which is an explanation and commendation of the Daily Office as a form of daily prayer for Christians. The practice of the daily office – a structured form of daily prayer consisting of a prescribed order of psalms and readings with responses and prayers – can be traced back to early Christian practice and even arguably has roots in Judaism. McPherson gives a brief historical overview of the development of the office, tracing the evolution of “cathedral” and “monastic” forms of the office culminating with Thomas Cranmer’s reform of the monastic offices into the simplified morning and evening prayer services found in the Book of Common Prayer.

    McPherson provides a walk-through of morning prayer (which is, in his view, the paradigmatic office) as well as a brief theology and spirituality of the office. Though the office is designed as a form of corporate prayer, McPherson emphasizes its usefulness as a form of personal devotion. The office, he argues, provides a certain stability in our prayer life as well as keeping us from getting bogged down in subjectivity. It does this be mandating a disciplined encounter with the Bible (through the praying of the Psalms and the lectionary readings) and by connecting us to the rich theological and liturgical tradition of the church.

    One interesting point McPherson makes is that the office is compatible with a variety of spiritualities. For instance, he says, the psalms and lessons can be approached in the spirit of the monasitc practice of lectio divina. And he recommends introducing periods of silence for meditation and free prayer, especially when praying alone.

    If the publishing industry is any indication, lots of people from various traditons have found a new interest in praying some form of the office. There has been a proliferation of books about this form of prayer as well as various specialty versions (Celtic versions, versions for times of grieving, etc.). McPherson’s book is helpful in laying bare the structure that unites various forms of the office and why it takes the form that it does. In essence, it’s a conversation with God wherin we alternate between hearing God’s word and responding (often using the words of the Bible to do so, as in the canticles).

    The form of the office that McPherson recommends is that found in the current version of the US Book of Common Prayer, but most of what he says would apply to other versions just as well, at least as far as I can tell. I for one still find the BCP office a bit daunting in its rubrics and page-flipping, much less some of the more elaborate versions like the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, or the Anglican Breviary. However, it’s hard to take exception to the prescription of a daily dose of psalmody and scripture readings framed by some of the classic prayers of the Christian church.

    There are a variety of simplified office books available, though most of them don’t seem to provide the range of scripture that one would get in using the BCP version. If one wanted to do a stripped-down version of the office one could simply follow the lectionary readings with appointed psalms and supplement them with the Lukan canticles, Lord’s Prayer, and perhaps the creed, though that wouldn’t get you the variety that the full version provides.