A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • MLK, nonviolence, and the fusion of ends and means

    My recent visit to the newly opened Martin Luther King Jr. memorial here in D.C. prompted me to pick up Harvard Sitkoff’s 2008 biography, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop. To my embarrassment, I actually don’t know a lot about the details of the Civil Rights movement or King’s life in particular. Sitkoff’s relatively brief (under 300 pages) and very readable book is helping fill in some of those gaps. In contrast to the dominant picture of King as a rather unthreatening and universally beloved American icon, he emphasizes both King’s political radicalism and his rootedness in a profoundly Christian religious vision that sustained him in the struggle for justice and equality.

    I’ve just finished the chapter on the astonishingly successful boycott of the segregated buses in Montgomery in 1955-56. This, at least in Sitkoff’s telling, was the time during which King went from being a somewhat reluctant leader of the boycott to the head of a new kind of social movement and a convinced principled exponent of Gandhian-Christian nonviolence. One thing that strikes me is how the nonviolent means King adopted were intended to effect change in both the oppressor and the oppressed. King was a canny political strategist who recognized that nonviolence had great potential to win allies to the anti-segregationist cause. But at the same time, it was a way for African-Americans suffering under the yoke of Jim Crow to assert their own inherent dignity as persons created in the image of God. King’s advocacy of nonviolence was neither pure pragmatism nor pure principle indifferent to consequences, but a stance that grew, in part, from the “personalist” philosophy he imbibed as a graduate student at Boston University. The ends and the means were fused in an inseparable unity. By refusing to treat their oppressors as less than fully personal beings, the participants in the movement were simultaneously demonstrating and affirming their own personhood.

  • God and the White Whale

    Brandon points to this interesting piece by Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul on Moby-Dick, which Sproul correctly notes is the greatest American novel.

    Sproul argues for a Christian reading of Melville’s work–seeing Ahab as man in rebellion against God (symbolized by the White Whale).

    Melville experts and scholars come to different conclusions about the meaning of the great white whale. Many see this brutish animal as evil because it had inflicted great personal damage on Ahab in an earlier encounter. Ahab lost his leg, which was replaced by the bone of a lesser whale. Some argue that Moby Dick is Melville’s symbol of the incarnation of evil itself. Certainly this is the view of the whale held by Captain Ahab himself. Ahab is driven by a monomaniacal hatred for this creature, this brute that left him permanently damaged both in body and soul. He cries out, “He heaps me,” indicating the depth of the hatred and fury he feels toward this beast. Some have accepted Ahab’s view that the whale is a monstrous evil as that of Melville himself. That the whale is not a symbol of evil but the symbol of God Himself. In this interpretation, Ahab’s pursuit of the whale is not a righteous pursuit of God but natural man’s futile attempt in his hatred of God to destroy the omnipotent deity.

    While I think there’s something to this, I also think it’s a bit too pat–and maybe too comforting to Christian sensibilities.

    The Whale certainly does symbolize transcendence, I think. Sproul points to the key chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” where the many facets and connotations of the property of whiteness evoke what we might, following Rudolph Otto, call the mysterium tremendum et fascians. I would go further and say that much of the book–such as the allegedly boring chapters on cetology, history, the details of whaling, etc.–are intended by Melville to create a mythology of sorts in which the whale (and by extension all of non-human nature) takes on a transcendent, larger-than-life quality.

    However, I think Sproul overlooks another key theme–the inscrutability of the Whale (and, by implication, ultimate reality). One of the things that makes Melville seem so contemporary is what we might call his “perspectivalism.” There is no single privileged perspective that can give us a “true” picture of reality. This comes out perhaps most clearly in “The Doubloon” where the crew members inspect the symbols on a gold doubloon Ahab has nailed to the ship’s mast, each one finding in them a radically different meaning. Each character’s understanding of reality is as much a product of himself as it is of the world. We can also cite the early chapters in which Ishmael, through his relationship with the “savage” Queequeg, comes to a rather “relativistic” view of religious and cultural pluralism.

    Indeed, this perspectivalism is inherent in the very structure of the novel–the shift from first- to third-person narrative, telling the story from the point of view of different characters, the mixing of genres (realistic novel, history, drama), and the general “unreliability” of Ishmael as a narrator. This structure destabilizes the reader by refusing to provide anything like the classic omniscient narrator to tell us how things really are.

    We also see this in the treatment of Ahab. Sproul seems to want to read him as more classically villainous–as man in revolt against God. But Ahab is closer to a Shakespearean tragic figure–someone who is admirable in many ways, but who is set, almost in spite of himself, on a path that can only end in his own destruction. By contrast, the more conventionally pious Starbuck, while perhaps morally in the right, is too weak-willed to prevent Ahab from carrying out his quest for revenge.

    If the White Whale is a symbol of ultimate reality for Melville, then it has to be said that he regarded that reality as deeply mysterious and ambiguous. The world can by turns appear beneficent, brutally cruel, and indifferent. And each character responds to that reality in a different way, none of them obviously “correct.” If we take Ishmael as Melville’s stand-in (a decidedly dicey proposition) we might, tentatively, characterize his response as something like “diffident awe.” But this is certainly far from Christian piety. You could well argue that the novel leaves us with a picture of reality as supremely indifferent to human affairs, with “the great shroud of the sea roll[ing] on as it rolled five thousand years ago” and Ishmael as “another orphan” on that sea.

  • Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    I’ve started reading R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology, which is an attempt to rethink the foundational narrative of Christianity within a “post-supersessionist” context. Christian theology has traditionally held that the church replaces Israel in God’s covenant. However, the realization, post-Holocaust, of how Christian theology has contributed to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews has led many Christian churches to renounce any supersessionist claims. While this is an important step, Soulen argues that simply renouncing supersessionism isn’t enough–we need to attend to the “deep grammar” in the traditional Christian story that makes supersessionism not only possible, but virtually inevitable.

    Soulen introduces the concept of a “canonical narrative” or “canonical construal” of scripture–the overarching story of how the diverse collection of texts that constitute the Bible “hangs together.” In particular, this narrative construal allows us to see how the Old and New Testaments (or, as Soulen sometimes refers to them, the Scriptures and the Apostolic Witness) constitute one canon. This provides a prism for reading the texts as a story about God’s relation to the world.

    In Soulen’s view, the traditional Christian narrative construal is one of “creation-for-consummation, fall, redemption in Christ, and final consummation” (p. 16). God creates humanity with intention of ultimately consummating human existence with eternal life. Tragically, because of the fall into sin, this project of consummation is derailed, and God must resort to “plan B.” This, of course, is the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ and his life, death, and resurrection. This redemptive act restores humanity and allows God’s plans for consummation to proceed.

    The problem with the standard view, from a post-supersessionist perspective, is that it views the role of Israel as temporary and inessential to God’s greater purposes. Or as Soulen puts it “it makes God’s identity as the God of Israel largely indecisive for shaping theological conclusions about God’s enduring purposes for creation” (p. 16). It allows God’s acts of salvation to be seen as individualistic and ahistorical–as dealing with the “universal” problem of sin rather than as part of the story of God binding Godself to one particular people. This is why the church has typically erased any religiously significant distinction between Jew and Gentile.

    What’s needed, Soulen argues, is a new narrative construal that sees the election of Israel of lasting significance. For such a construal to be faithful to the Christian gospel it must maintain the core evangelical conviction that the God of Israel has acted in Jesus Christ for all, to use Soulen’s summary. But it must do so without treating the election of Israel as a temporary detour in salvation history.

  • NPR’s SF and fantasy top 100

    NPR did a listener survey on the best science fiction and fantasy books and posted a list of the top 100. The ones I’ve read are in bold. At a glance, the list seems a little bit too weighted toward more recent stuff. Anything else on here anyone would particularly recommend?

    1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien

    2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

    3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

    4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert [first book only–L.M.]

    5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin

    6. 1984, by George Orwell

    7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

    8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov

    9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

    10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

    11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

    12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan

    13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell

    14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson

    15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore

    16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov

    17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

    18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss

    19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

    20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

    21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick

    22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

    23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King

    24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

    25. The Stand, by Stephen King

    26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

    27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

    28. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

    29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman

    30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

    31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

    32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams

    33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

    34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein

    35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

    36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

    37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne

    38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys

    39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells

    40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny

    41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings

    42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

    43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson

    44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven

    45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin

    46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

    47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White

    48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

    49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke

    50. Contact, by Carl Sagan

    51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons

    52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman

    53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

    54. World War Z, by Max Brooks

    55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

    56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

    57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett

    58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson

    59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold

    60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

    61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

    62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind

    63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

    64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

    65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

    66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist

    67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks

    68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard

    69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

    70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

    71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson

    72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne

    73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore

    74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

    75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson

    76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

    77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey

    78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin

    79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

    80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

    81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson

    82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

    83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks

    84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart

    85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

    86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher

    87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

    88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

    89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan

    90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock

    91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

    92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

    93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge

    94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov

    95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson [first book only–L.M.]

    96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

    97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

    98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

    99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony

    100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

  • What does Oxford have to do with Jerusalem?

    I’m reading Keith Ward’s More than Matter? and found it interesting to learn that two of Ward’s teachers were the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer. Ryle was famous for characterizing Cartesian dualism as “the ghost in the machine,” and Ayer was the famed proponent of logical positivism. Ward says that he came to believe that neither Ryle’s quasi-behaviorist “ordinary language” philosophy nor Ayer’s logical positivism provided a satisfying explanation of the nature of the human person. (Or, by extension, the nature of reality more generally.) The book goes on to defend a version of idealism–the view, broadly speaking, that mind or spirit is the most fundamental reality upon which everything else depends.

    Here’s Ward discussing his move from atheism to Christianity and the celebrity culture surrounding the debates over the new atheism:

  • A word for Borders

    If you care about books, you’ve probably heard that Borders is finally shutting its doors for good.

    I’m so old I can remember when big national bookseller chains were villified for driving out small independent booksellers. Now these big national chains are being run out of business by Amazon and e-readers. One era’s Goliath is another’s David.

    Anyway, I could never work up quite the same righteous ire against Borders and B&N that others could. Maybe that’s because where I grew up, there were no small, quirky independent booksellers. The best bookstore within a 50-mile radius was the Waldenbooks at the local mall.

    So, the first time I visited a Barnes & Noble, I was pretty much in book heaven. As an undergrad studying philosophy in rural northwest Pennsylvania, I lusted after their selection of books–one that far outstripped any other bookstore I’d ever been in. Over the years, I’ve dropped a lot of dough at B&N and Borders and spent a lot of time browsing their shelves. Like most people, in recent years my book buying has shifted dramatically to online retailers like Amazon, so I can’t exactly lament what seems to be the inevitable. But there’s a part of me that’s defintely sorry to see them go.

  • Macquarrie on hell and universalism

    If heaven is fullness of being and the upper limit of human existence, hell may be taken as loss of being and the lower limit. Loss of being need not mean annihilation, but includes every declination from a genuinely personal existence and every divergence from the fulfillment of authentic potentialities for being. Thus hell, like the other eschatological ideas, can stand for a present phenomenon and can in varying degrees be experienced here and now. To talk of hell as a “punishment” is just as unsatisfactory as to talk of heaven as a “reward.” Hell is not some external or arbitrary punishment that gets assigned for sin, but is simply the working out of sin itself, as it destroys the distinctively personal being of the sinner.

    Whether in fact anyone ever comes to the point of utterly losing his personal being, or of falling away altogether from the potentialities of such being, may be doubted. If this should happen, then we would be committed to a doctrine of “conditional immortality,” as we have already mentioned. This utter limit of hell would be annihilation, or at least the annihilation of the possibility of personal being. Since salvation is itself personal, and must therefore be freely accepted, God cannot impose it upon anyone, so we must at least leave open the possibility that this kind of annihilation might be the final destiny for some. Yet since we have refused to draw a sharp line between the “righteous” and the “wicked,” and since we have suggested that even for the man made righteous, heaven is not finally attained, but each heaven opens up new possibilities of perfection, so on the other side we seem compelled to say that the sinner never gets to the point of complete loss and so never gets beyond the reconciling activity of God. Needless to say, we utterly reject the idea of a hell where God everlastingly punishes the wicked, without hope of deliverance. Even earthly penologists are more enlightened nowadays. Rather we must believe that God will never cease from his quest for universal reconciliation, and we can firmly hope for his victory in this quest, though recognizing this victory can only come when at last there is free cooperation of every responsible creature.

    –John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, Revised Edition, SCM Press: 1977, pp. 366-7.

    One of the striking things about this passage is that, although it was written over 30 years ago, Macquarrie barely considers the so-called traditional doctrine of hell to be worth discussing (“Needless to say, we utterly reject…”). Despite all the brouhaha around Rob Bell’s recent book, it’s worth remembering that universalism in some form or another has been a live option in Christian theology for some time. And many of the giants of 20th-century theology (Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, Rahner, Von Balthasar, etc.) seem to have rejected hell, at least if we understand hell as “eternal, conscious torment.” (Did any major theologian of this era defend the traditional view?) This shift was no doubt partly because they all rejected biblical literalism and partly because of a certain moral revulsion toward the traditional view, even though none could be called theological liberals in any straightforward sense. And I would say Macquarrie belongs firmly in this camp too. The fact that Macquarrie dismisses the idea of hell as eternal punishment so readily also suggests that this had become something like a consensus, at least in certain theological circles, by the latter half of the 20th century.

  • John Macquarrie and process theology

    I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie draws on the work of philosophers like Sartre and, especially, Heidegger to develop an “existential-ontological” natural theology. It’s existential in that it uses an analysis of human existence as its jumping-off point; it’s ontological in developing the idea of God as “Holy Being.” By this Macquarrie means that God is not a being among beings in the world, but rather the very possibility of anything existing at all. God is the power of “letting-be.”

    One thing that struck me upon this reading, though, was how close some of Macquarrie’s ideas are to the process thought of A.N. Whitehead and his followers. In particular, Macquarrie’s description of human selfhood, while obviously owing a lot to the existentialists, emphasizes how the self incorporates what is bequeathed to it by the past with its apprehension of future possibilities and creates something genuinely new. This is very similar to the model of selfhood that lies at the center of Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.” Further, Macquarrie develops what I think could be fairly called a “di-polar” version of theism which sees God as having both an eternal, unchanging nature and an aspect that is involved in and affected by what happens in history. One key difference is that Macquarrie preserves God’s ultimacy, while for Whitehead and most (but not all) forms of process theism, God is not properly speaking the ultimate creator or origin of everything. From a Christian point of view, Macquarrie’s view seems much more satisfactory.

    I just ordered Macquarrie’s In Search of Deity, which was the published form of his Gifford Lectures deliverd in 1983 and 1984. Looking at the subtitle (“An Essay in Dialectical Theism”) and browsing the table of contents suggest that Macquarrie may have moved even closer to a semi-Whiteheadian view later in his career.

  • Christianity and the roots of anti-animal sentiment

    Over at the blog Year of Plenty, Craig Goodwin reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It’s a generally positive review, but at the end Goodwin takes issue with some of Hobgood-Oster’s explanations for our troubled relationship with the animal world:

    The references and historical background offered on these key doctrines of the Christian faith are too abbreviated and simplistic. For example I have an entire shelf of my library that is taken up by Karl Barth’s Dogmatics wherein Barth lays out thousands of pages of complex theological perspectives (the joke is that not even Barth read all of Barth.) To sum up Barth’s theology of the atonement in a few paragraphs and to suggest that this is a root cause of the problem is inadequate for the argument being put forth in the chapter.

    Hobgood-Oster’s arguments in the concluding chapter regarding the influence of the Enlightenment on the disconnect are much more on target. The quote from Descartes regarding animals as unthinking “automata” is fascinating and informative.

    I’d likely agree that Hobgood-Oster’s book, which is pitched toward a popular audience, probably doesn’t do full justice to the nuances of Barth’s doctrine of the atonement. (I don’t have the book in front of me, but I’m willing to agree this is the case.) On the other hand, it’s equally simplistic to blame our history of mistreating animals and neglecting their interests on the Enlightenment, which has in any event become much too convenient a whipping-boy in recent theology.

    As Andrew Linzey and others have documented pretty exhaustively, the historical Christian tradition is pretty ambivalent about the status of animals. While there are lots of examples of saints showing compassion to animals and some examples of faith inspiring reform on animals’ behalf, official theology and church teaching have generally taken a much more negative view of non-human animals. Linzey has put a lot of effort into recovering the “animal-positive” aspects of the Christian tradition, but even he admits that this has been an uphill battle. The fact is that for most of its history Christianity has been overwhelmingly concerned with human beings and only tangentially, if at all, with non-humans. Fortunately, both the Christian and Enlightenment traditions have resources that can foster a greater concern for animals’ interests and the place in God’s creation.

  • It’s books all the way down

    A short addendum on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time: One thing that always makes me happy is when a good book leads me to really want to read other books by citing them. In this case, Hill’s book made me want to track down copies of John A.T. Robinson’s (yes, that John A.T. Robinson) In the End, God and E.P. Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism.