A Thinking Reed

Category: Church matters

  • See how these Christians love one another

    A former religion correspondent for the Guardian recounts his loss of faith after seeing how church people treat each other. Sigh.

  • The church’s one foundation

    Christopher and Derek both have strong postings about the need for the church to remain grounded in the gospel first and foremost. You’d think this would go without saying but alas it ain’t necessarily so. They both emphatically affirm that the church should be involved in works of mercy and social justice, but if it doesn’t place the proclamation of the gospel at the center of its life it ends up being just another social service agency (and often a rather inept one at that).

  • Anglicanism, protestantism and “denominational families”

    Interesting piece by Alister McGrath in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland Gazzette. He argues that Anglicanism is, historically and theologically, Protestant and that the concept of “denominational families” – the kind of loose federations that characterize world Lutheranism and Methodism, for example – could provide a fruitful model for the future of the Anglican Communion. And he sounds surprisingly upbeat about the prospect.

    (via Thinking Anglicans)

  • Out in Africa

    Philip Jenkins, who arguably knows as much about Christianity in the global south as any “Northerner,” has an article on the African churches’ controversies over homosexuality at the New Republic (may require subscription to read).

    Jenkins argues that it’s misleading to see the intensity of the conflict over this as merely an extension of debates that have taken place in the West. Traditional denominations in Africa living in a context of competition with upstart Pentecostalism and with Islam have a strong incentive to toe a morally conservative line. Jenkins recounts a story from the late 19th century where Christian courtiers rejected the pederastic advances of the king of Buganda, who had come under the influence of Arab slave-trades, and were martyred for it:

    That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism–both symbolized by sexual deviance. Reinforcing such memories are more recent experiences with Muslim tyrants, such as Idi Amin, whose victims included the head of his country’s Anglican Church. For many Africans, then, sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive.

    The conservative stance can also be a way of burnishing African Christians’ anti-Western and anti-colonialist credentials, “making clear to their own members and their Muslim neighbors that they are not puppets of the West. Moral conservatism thus serves to assert cultural independence–a link that requires sexual immorality to be portrayed as a Euro-American import.”

    Of course, that doesn’t make it the right position, and Jenkins is quick to point out that there are more liberal elements on the continent, particularly in South Africa, where the ANC is not likely to be seen as toadying to the West. There is a plurality of voices there, not to mention in the rest of the Global South, and it is by no means confined to places like South Africa (“arguably one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.”):

    But South Africa is not the only place where gay-rights movements have gained a foothold. An Anglican group called Changing Attitude claims supporters in both Nigeria and Uganda, and the director of its Nigerian chapter, Davis Mac-Iyalla, has earned some notoriety as a liberal foil to Akinola. Some years ago, when Namibia’s then- president declared homosexuality a “behavioral disorder which is alien to African culture,” activists responded by creating a fairly overt gay-rights movement, the Rainbow Project.

    Jenkins’ conclusion is that Westerners should resist the temptation of seeing the African churches’ positions through the lens of our own controversies. Just as liberals have sometimes been prone to romanticize the “Third World,” conservatives have of late tended to see Africa as a bastion of “traditional values” holding out against the decadent West. But Jenkins advises caution: “gays in Africa face very real barriers to acceptance. And we do them no favors by viewing Africa’s culture war over homosexuality as a mere extension of the battle we are witnessing here in the United States, rather than as a fight which raises questions unique to African history and politics.”

    One might criticize Jenkins here for lapsing into a kind of moral relativism. He does tend to talk as though the churches in many parts Africa simply have no choice but to go along with the anti-gay line. This would presumably be of small comfort to gay people on the receiving end of some of the more punitive policies supported by some African churchmen. Still, I think it’s helpful to see both the plurality and the particularity of the situation, rather than as another manifestation of some kind of global “culture war.”

    UPDATE: Here’s a transcript (via The Topmost Apple) of a presentation by Jenkins on this topic with questions from a bunch of journalistic big-shots (Ken Woodward, E.J. Dionne, Jon Wilson of Books & Culture, etc.); a lot of fascinating discussion ensues.

  • Natural law, homosexuality and the ELCA

    Carl Braaten has published a spirited defense of natural law ethics at the Journal of Lutheran Ethics with which I’m in substantial agreement. I think that if natural law ethics didn’t exist we’d have to invent it, and that people who claim to be deriving their ethics solely from uniquely Christian principles have usually smuggled covert premises in from other sources. So, best to be above board about the whole thing.

    However, toward the end of his article Braaten goes on what can only be characterized as a tirade about homosexuality, and this makes me think that he’s working with a defective notion of natural law. Now, Carl Braaten has undoubtedly forgotten more about theology than I’ll ever know, so I enter here with trepidation, but his account of the ethical issue here strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate.

    Braaten writes:

    We know by reason what the natural law tells us — the sexual organs are designed for certain functions. God made two kinds of humans, “male and female created he them.” (Gen. 1: 27) By the light of reason human beings the world over, since the dawn of hu­man civilization and across all cultures, have known that the male and female organs are made for different functions. Humans know what they are; they are free to act in accordance with them or to act in opposition to them. The organs match. What is so difficult to understand about that? Humans learn these things by reason and nature; no books on anatomy, psychology, or sociology are needed.

    Nor do people first learn what the sexual organs are for from the Bible. Scholars say there are seven explicit passages in the Bible that condemn homosexual acts as con­trary to the will of God. This is supposed to settle the matter for a church that claims its teachings are derived from Scripture. But for many Christians this does not settle the matter. Why not? The answer is that they don’t believe what the natural law, transpar­ent to reason, tells us about human sexuality. In my view the biblical strictures against homosexual acts are true not because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible be­cause they are true. They truly recapitulate God’s creative design of human bodies. The law of creation written into the nature of things is the antecedent bedrock of the natural moral law, knowable by human reason and conscience.

    The problem with this passage is that both the argument from reason and the argument from Scripture elide crucial factors. Let’s start with the argument from reason. It’s undoubtedly true that human sexual organs have particular functions. But does it follow straight away (pardon the pun) that human beings must always use their sexual organs in those particular ways, or that it’s never permissible for them to be used in any other way? Anyone who thinks that it’s morally ok to have sex for non-procreative reasons is conceding that it’s permissible to use one’s sex organs in a way that doesn’t constitute their primary function.

    But this doesn’t get at the deeper issue. What gives natural law ethics its traction isn’t that it asks what the purpose of bodily organs are. It functions as an ethic because it asks: what is good for human beings (and the rest of creation)? To ask what the functions of sexual organs are is only part of the broader question of what is good for human beings. To say that organs function in a certain way and so must (only) be used in this way is actually to revert to a rather crude version of divine command ethics – God created them that way, so that’s the way you have to use them, and don’t bother asking why.

    If we do ask why, however, we see that human sexuality functions to further the good of human beings, individually and as members of a series of ever-widening communities. But then any particular sex act is necessarily subordinate, in terms of moral evaluation, to this broader notion of what is good. And determining what this broader good is requires the use of our reason and powers of observation to understand what kind of life is good for human persons. Non-procreative sex was long held by the Christian tradition to be immoral, but seen in the broader perspective of what’s good for individuals, communities, societies, and creation as a whole, we can see reasons why it can be moral.

    Braaten assumes that because sexual organs are made to function a certain way that they can therefore only be used that way, morally speaking. But if we can simply read our ethics off of nature in this way, what do we do with the fact that there are people who find themselves exclusively attracted to members of the same sex? They’re just as much a part of “nature” as the particular configuration of human sexual organs, at least in the sense of being something naturally occurring (if not statistically “normal”). If what is given is the standard for what is right, how do we decide between two seemingly incompatible natural givens?

    What a more “holistic” natural law ethics needs to ask, it seems to me, is this: Given that gay people exist, what is good for them (and the communities of which they are a part) and how should their sexuality be ordered toward those distinctively human goods that we are all called to realize? The fundamental question then, is not: what are sexual organs for, but what are people for? As Keith Ward puts it “[t]he physical and biological structures of the natural world must always be subordinated, in morality, to the realization of those universal goods which all free agents have good reason to want” (“Christian Ethics” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, Geoffrey Wainwright, ed., p. 232). The kinds of goods that free personal beings are naturally oriented toward realizing take moral precedence over the biological processes that constitute the substratum of those persons.

    Again, this is something that can only be answered by reason and experience. Some conservatives have contended that gay sex is intrinsically ordered toward narcissism or other anti-social tendencies, which is at least the right kind of argument, since it claims that homosexuality is inherently opposed to human flourishing. But it simply doesn’t measure up to empirical reality. Gay people’s sexuality is capable of contributing to the building up of relationships that exhibit all the virtues that straight ones do and in my view the onus is on those who would deny this fact.

    Regarding the argument from Scripture, Braaten surely knows that there is widespread disagreement not so much about whether the Bible condemns certain same-sex acts, but whether the kinds of monogamous faithful relationships exhibited by many gay people fall under that condemnation. Again, the question can’t be settled simply be saying that the Bible forbids x until we ask further why does it condemn x? What underlying reason is there for a given prohibition and does it apply to this particular case?

    Natural law ethics is animated by the idea that creation is rational and that it mirrors, if imperfectly, the mind of God. A corollary of this is that God’s commands aren’t inscrutable demands, but are intended to guide us toward our ultimate good and are, in principle, transparent to our understanding. To understand what that good is requires the exercise of our own reason, which partakes, at least in some small way, of the Divine Reason. This doesn’t mean that our reason is perfect or that it doesn’t require additional illumination from God, but there is an underlying rationality to the moral principles that arise out of the fact that we have been created in a particular way.

    Braaten seems angry that the ELCA should even take up this issue, since the right answer is so obvious (to him). But it’s only obvious (if at all) if one adopts the biological reductionism that he (erroneously in my view) identifies with natural law ethics. A more holistic view sees biology in service to the realization of distinctly human goods and, as such, doesn’t give it the last word in determining what is right. Straight people who think of themselves as safely “in” the charmed circle of being approved by God might consider what it would mean to adopt this biologistic ethic in all its rigor.

  • Sex, marriage, and false dichotomies

    Marvin has a terrific post on same-sex marriage in the church, pointing out the silliness of some of the slippery slope arguments (Next it’ll be group marriages! Marriage to animals!) made against churches blessing these relationships. Far from being part of some hedonistic collapse in moral standards, the movement for recognition of gay relationships is in many ways a conservative one, with same sex couples seeking to reap the benefits of stable, committed, monogomous relationships.

    I don’t post on this much, because it’s amply covered elsewhere, but one of the reasons I support same-sex marriage (as well as civil marriage or unions or whatever they end up being called) is because I’m conservative about sex. Eros is a powerful and dangerous force, one that is best channeled into a stable, faithful relationship that is enabled to contribute to the well-being of the surrounding community. Both Paul and Luther seem admirably pragmatic about marriage, seeing it as a way of taming our sinful impulses. And Jesus says that it is a penultimate institution, intended for this world, but not the world to come. To me this suggests a certain flexibility in approaching marriage: it’s intended to contribute to human flourishing here and now, not necessarily to mirror some eternal archetype. I’d add, of course, that it can be a kind of school of virtue where we learn to love by committing ourselves to loving one particular other person (a bit more on that here).

    Maybe I’m unusual, but I had no objections same-sex relationships before I became a practicing, adult Christian, so I didn’t really go through some process of “overcoming” ingrained objections to them. I was raised in a conservative small town, but pretty much as soon as I came into contact with gay people I couldn’t discern any reason to object to two people of the same sex being in a romantic relationship. Maybe it was partly due to the fact that I was routinely accused of being a “fag” by other kids in school (it seemed to be a generalized term of abuse for bookish, awkward, or otherwise anomolous kids, which is not to trivialize the torment that actual gay kids often undergo, mind you), but I found myself rather instinctively sympathizing with gay classmates.

    As someone who leans to the traditional side in matters theological I’ve tried to understand and sympathize with the traditionalist position here, but, in my judgment, the biblical evidence is too ambiguous (a useful overview here) and the arguments from natural law, etc. too unconvincing to sustain that position in the face of my experience of gay folks (and I would now add gay Christians). And I’d add that the fact that this has become a “debate” over an “issue” that often takes place at a very abstract level far removed from people’s actual lives and relationships seems to me to be quite wrongheaded.

    So, in the church I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with the “liberals” about this but not about certain theological matters, while being out of sync with a the “conservatives” on what for many has become the sin qua non of faithfulness. However, I do think that a lot of people “on the ground,” especially younger ones, are less likely to line up in quite the way that the most vocal people on both sides would have it. So I’m hopeful that there’s a possibility of a “third way” that isn’t just in the mushy middle but rejects what I think are the false choices being presented to us.

  • Fraser: against centralization

    Giles Fraser writes (perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek?) about his recent “turn to the Right”:

    Over the past few months, I have had something of a conversion to the Right. I no longer believe that the Left is capable of delivering on its progressive promises. I no longer trust the Left to sustain an inclusive vision of human togetherness. The culture wars in global Anglicanism have brought me to this.

    The trouble with the Left is that it is always looking for the big picture, the overarching narrative of human community — hence big government. The problem is that the grand plan frequently involves casualties and betrayals. Ordinary people are squashed in the search for a utopia. But, because the cause is so noble, the casualties are easily justified. There is nothing more dangerous than people who are convinced of their own virtue.

    The latest grand plan for Anglicanism is called the Covenant. The Primates of the Communion have fallen out, and have refused to share communion with each other. Their answer to this situation is that we vote them more decision-making power. It is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. But, because these Primates have whipped up an atmosphere of panic, they are persuading some people that theological martial law needs to be imposed.

    My turn to the Right persuades me that Anglicanism does not need bigger church government. It does not need a new internationalism imposing uniformity top-down from a committee of Primates. My text is 1 Samuel 8: God instructs Samuel to tell his people that if they put too much power in one place, it will return to bite them. “When that day comes, you will cry out because of the king that you have chosen; but the Lord will not answer you.”

    To the extent that I take an interest in intra-Anglican ecclesiastical conflicts (which is to say: not that much), I’m generally with Fraser here. I’m very cautious of imposing some kind of ecclesiastical “big government” as he puts it. And it strikes me as more than a little bit ironic that Anglicans would be in a rush to institute a centralized form of church governance given the origins of Anglicanism.

    It’s also ironic, however, that, at least in recent US history, the nominal party of the Right has been characterized by increasing centralization. I was very much convniced by the kind of anti-centralization arguments offered by conservative and libertarian thinkers when I was first exposed to their ideas. It’s just that I don’t see that understanding much reflected in the current GOP.

  • Lutheran World Federation – following in the footsteps of the Anglican Communion?

    The Christian Century has a brief article on tensions in the Lutheran World Federation over … suprise! Homosexuality! As in the Anglican Communion, the split is largely along north/south lines.

    However, I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see the same level of acrimony that the Anglican Communion has experienced. Lutherans, in my admittedly limited experience, are not at all inclined to think of the LWF as “the church” in any meaningful sense (do most Lutherans think about the LWF at all?). And I have a really hard time imagining anyone pushing for a more centralized global Lutheran church body in order to impose a uniform policy as some parties have done in the AC.

  • The church that prays together…

    Since last fall I’ve been helping to facilitate a small community group that meets about once a week primarily to study the Bible (we typically read and discuss the Gospel lesson for the upcoming Sunday), pray and socialize. I guess it’s a “small group” in the parlance of evangelicalism.

    Anyway, one of the things I really like about our group is its theological diversity. We have evangelicals, Roman Catholics, lifelong Episcopalians, one guy who’s Armenian Orthodox, and your scribe. We also range from liberal to conservative. The end result is some really lively and interesting conversation.

    Case in point: last night we were reading this Sunday’s lesson, Luke 20:9-19, a.k.a. the Parable of the Tenants. Somewhat naturally, the conversation turned to Atonement theory. Some of the folks from more evangelical backgrounds were suprised to learn that there were ways of understanding how Jesus saves us besides the theory of Penal Substitution. Another guy mentioned that he didn’t really like to think of the Cross in terms of some kind of payment for sin, but preferred to focus on the idea of God coming into our world and suffering alongside us (e.g. Whitehead’s “fellow sufferer who understands.”). Another said that his Episcopalian upbringing had taught him to emphasize the Incarnation more than the Atonement. For my part, I tried to defend a more-or-less Anselmian account.

    Unsurprisingly, we didn’t come to any consensus, just as the universal church hasn’t. But one of the really valuable things I’ve gotten out of this group is the conviction, and experience, that it’s still possible for Christians with serious theological differences (including differences over things like women’s ordination and homosexuality) to read the Bible and pray together (and head off to the pub for a friendly pint afterwards!). In spite of all the nastiness going on at the macro-level, maybe there are seeds of something hopeful there.

    Also, regarding the Atonement, and in the spirit of the Anglican via media, I’ve often been impressed by the way the Eucharistic Prayer A weaves together different understandings of the Atonement:

    Holy and gracious Father: In your infinite love you made us for yourself, and, when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.

    He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world. (BCP, p. 362)

    I really like how this includes elements of an “Abelardian” account of Christ coming and sharing our nature to manifest God’s love, but without losing all talk of sacrifice or satisfaction.

    Obviously all our differences aren’t necessarily going to be resolved in some harmonious whole, but I like to think that there’s something to that idea of holding seeming opposites in a fruitful tension.

  • So great a cloud of witnesses

    Chris, the Lutheran Zephyr, is wrestling with the question of asking the saints to pray for us.

    For me this falls under the category of “all may, none must.” I can see why some are uncomfortable with it, and I wouldn’t presume to judge someone else’s piety.

    The argument that it’s permissible is, I think, pretty straightforward: We ask fellow Christians to pray for us, and we have no reason to think that death severs our communion with the Christians who’ve gone before us. As Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has put it, “the New Testament hardly permits us to think that death can sever the fellowship of believers — and the eucharistic prayers also of Protestant bodies explicitly deny that it does.” So, there’s no insuperable theological reason for not asking the saints to pray for us.

    I can see how, in practice, devotion to the saints can and has led to abuses. But the abuse of a thing is not a compelling argument against its proper use. Many good things in Christendom have been subject to abuse: confession, the Mass itself, and so on. We might even suspect that things which are very good and valuable are particularly prone to abuse since they’re so important in people’s lives.

    Which is why, I think, the best way to get over worries about invoking the saints (if one wants to get over it) is to actually do it. Although Mariology is a different, though obviously not unrelated, issue, one thing that I think has helped me gain a better understanding of it is by actually incorporating some Marian devotions into my prayer life. I’ve found the Angelus to be a good place to start. It’s beautiful, brief, and easily incorporated into one’s daily routine (the tradition is to recite it morning, noon, and evening). It’s also very Scriptural and Christocentric, being a commemoration of the Incarnation and of our salvation and hope in Jesus.