A Thinking Reed

Category: Keith Ward

  • Re-post: Evolution, the Fall, and Original Sin

    I don’t usually do this, but it seems relevant in light of the previous post. I originally wrote this back in 2006:

    I enjoyed Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire so much (despite disagreement in places) that when I saw his Religion and Human Nature at a used bookseller for five bucks I snatched it up. RHN is part of Ward’s four-part “comparative theology” which also includes volumes on revelation, creation, and community. His methodology is to compare the treatment of these topics in various world religions as well as modern secular naturalism, and then to provide a Christian response, both where it can affirm and must deny aspects of the other views.

    RHN contains really interesting and illuminating discussions of competing schools of thought in Hinduism and Buddhism in the earlier chapters, but for the purposes of this post I’m interested in Ward’s re-interpretation of the doctrine of Original Sin in light of modern evolutionary thought.

    The basic picture offered us by evolutionary theory conflicts with the traditional Christian view of the fall and original sin at a number of points. Traditional Christian teaching has been that human beings lived in a state of blessedness and innocence until Adam’s sin, and that death and suffering entered the world as a result of sin. Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendents both a propensity or inclination toward sin and the guilt of the first sin (whence one argument for infant baptism).

    Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, tells us that suffering and death long predated the existence of human beings, that our tendencies toward lust and aggression are part of our genetic baggage and probably helped our ancestors to survive long enough to propagate the species, and that there was likely no period when humans lived in harmony with each other and their world as depicted in the Garden of Eden story.

    One popular way to reconcile these two accounts has been to see the story of Creation and Fall as a “myth,” not in the sense of a fairy tale or falsehood, but in the sense of a story that gives us a profound truth about the human condition. The way life is depicted prior to the Fall in the early chapters of Genesis represents creation not as it was some time in the distant past, but creation as it should be and will be when God’s purposes for it are finally realized. “Fallen” humanity is humanity as it is in this world.

    While there is value in such an account, Ward says, it tends to sidestep the question of why a good God would create such inherently flawed creatures, and it even risks locating the source of evil in finite existence as such, rather than in a distortion of what is essentially a good creation. Instead he tries to develop a position that mediates between more literalistic and purely “mythic” ones.

    Ward accepts that “Destruction and death are built into the universe as necessary conditions of its progress to new forms of life” (p. 160), but he suggests that it nevertheless is the case that moral evil entered the world at some point. Proto-humans (or whatever we want to call them) may have tendencies toward lust, aggression and greed as part of their constitutive make-up, but at some point it became possible for them to choose to indulge those tendencies at the expense of another:

    Thus when humans first came into being, they were already locked into a world in which competition and death were fundamental to their very existence. In this long process of the emergence of consciousness, there was a first moment at which a sentient animal became aware of moral obligation. At some point, animal life emerged from a stage of what Hegel called “dreaming innocence,” at which moral considerations were irrelevant, since animals simply acted in ways natural to their species. At that point, a sentient consciousness discerned, or thought it discerned, an obligation to act in one way rather than another, an obligation which it was free to respond to or ignore. It seems to me plausible to say that it was at that point that truly personal consciousness first began to exist.

    Two elements seem to be axiomatic about moral obligation. One is that, if a moral obligation truly exists, then it must be possible to meet it; otherwise it is not an obligation. The other is that it must also be possible to ignore it; otherwise it is not a matter of morality. It therefore seems to me beyond dispute that there must have been a first sin in the history of the planet. There must have been a moment when a conscious being decided to ignore an obligation, when it need not have done so. It is not an antique fable, it is an indisputable fact, that sin entered into the world through the free action of a conscious being which chose to do what it should not and need not have done. (p. 161)

    Furthermore, this choosing of evil ruptures what may have been a “tacit” or “thematic” knowledge and awareness of God. “The Fall consisted in the loss of the sense of a felt unity with the sacred root of being, in the inability to co-operate with its gracious guidance, and so in the growth of that sense of solitude and estrangement which becomes the lot of humanity in a state of sin” (p. 162). Once this unity is ruptured, “spiritual death” is the natural outcome.

    The ultimate human choice, from a theistic viewpoint, is not so much a choice between good and evil, abstractly conceived, as a choice between relationship with God, as the source of love and power, and a form of self-determination which inevitably leads on to self-regard. (pp. 163-4)

    The effects of this choosing of evil reinforce human beings’ already existing drives toward dominating and exploiting others, making it difficult, if not impossible, to not choose sin. And this condition is spread, Ward thinks, because future generations are born among those who’ve already turned away from God, making it even harder for them to choose the good, much less restore the lost unity with the divine. He therefore adopts a view that Original Sin is propagated by social and environmental conditions rather than being passed in some quasi-physical fashion.

    The import of the Genesis story is that our world is one in which at a very early stage all humans rejected God. It is that original and massive embracing of desire that has drastically altered the moral situation of all subsequent human descendents. (p. 167)

    For anyone born into such a world, the choice of good and evil is no delicately balanced, dispassionately contemplated decision. In a world of greed, hatred, and delusion, one must either be an oppressor, a victim, or a resister. One will be born as a child within one of these groups, and one’s historical responses and learned activities will be shaped accordingly. (pp. 168-9)

    Even if someone managed to always make the correct moral decision, she would still not experience the unity in relationship with God that is the real purpose of human life. Instead of experiencing morality as the natural expression of a life lived in friendship with God, we usually experience it as a burdensome obligation and an obstacle to fulfilling our desires, at least where it “pinches.” In our fallen condition our inclinations and our obligations are frequently at variance. To be delivered from our condition requires overcoming our estrangement from God, and the consequent transformation of our desires and inclinations. But this isn’t something we’re capable of pulling off.

  • Re-thinking Wright

    James K.A. Smith puts his finger on something that’s worried me about N.T. Wright in his review of Wright’s latest book. Wright sometimes gives the impression that post-New Testament development of Christian theology was a decline and that it’s possible–or desirable–for us to re-inhabit the thought-world of the 1st century (with the help of some judiciously applied knowledge of second-temple Judaism, of course). While understanding the historical context of Jesus’ life and mission is obviously important, Christians have always “translated” the gospel into different cultural idioms. Arguably this process starts in the NT itself: the theological frameworks of the synoptic gospels, John’s gospel, Paul’s letters, the letter to the Hebrews, and Revelation all have their differences. In the post-NT period, this picks up steam with the translation of the Christian gospel into language and concepts borrowed from Hellenistic philosophy, culminating in the debates at Nicaea and Chalcedon.

    It’s possible, I suppose, to see all this as a departure from a pristine, “original” gospel. But to do that, you have to explain how we, as 21st-century Christians, are supposed to embrace the worldview (assuming there’s just one worldview) of the NT without qualification. A more promising approach, in my view, is to acknowledge that the gospel is always undergoing a process of reinterpretation and translation, and that this can be done faithfully. The earliest expressions of the faith–while clearly normative in an important sense–aren’t necessarily adequate for all later generations of Christians. For a different, and more positive, take on this process of reinterpreting the gospel through the centuries, I’d recommend Keith Ward’s book Re-thinking Christianity.

  • Keith Ward on concepts of God

    Following on the previous post, this video of theologian Keith Ward talking with Robert Wright has a good discussion–mostly at the beginning–of how we might talk about different religions promoting worship of the same God. Ward goes beyond the Western monotheistic faiths and offers reasons for thinking that the ultimate reality of some Eastern religions is not necessarily distinct from the theistic God.

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

    I think we have to respect the fact that there are genuine differences between traditions, and I reject a too-simple pluralism that irons out all the interesting differences among them. At the same time, we often treat some differences as absolute when in fact they may be different aspects, or partial apprehensions, of a single truth. For instance, Christians often contrast the “personal” God of theism with the “impersonal” ultimate reality affirmed in some Indian traditions. But, of course, sophisticated theologians know that God can’t simply be described as a “person” in the same way that an individual human being can–God is personal but also “beyond personality,” to borrow an expression from C.S. Lewis. Likewise, many Indian traditions affirm that the ultimate reality has a personal aspect, or that it relates to humans in a way that is analogous to personal relationships. So what looks at first glance like an irreconcilable difference may turn out to be a set of complementary insights.

  • Participatory soteriology and the shape of Christian life together

    Christopher offers a semi-defense of Pelagius (a semi-Pelagian defense?) and calls for a movement of “Advent asceticism” that sees a particular form of communal obedience not as an attempt to earn heaven, but as a response to Heaven as it has come to live among us in the Incarnation. He notes that much Protestant theology, with its focus on a once-for-all transactional account of salvation, has a hard time underwriting this kind of response. Instead, he advocates a “participatory soteriology”:

    What this means is not that we save ourselves, or that salvation has not been given once-for-all, but rather in Christ we receive this Life as pure gift and participate in and live out of the Life of this One who is our salvation, our healing, our reharmonization as a leavening society and as a people of and friends of the earth, that is, the whole of creation and every creature.

    Somewhat relatedly, I’m reading Keith Ward’s Religion and Human Nature, which is the third volume in his four-volume “comparative theology.” In it, Ward is trying to develop a Christian theology that is open to the insights of other traditions while still remaining a distinctively Christian theology.

    An important distinction Ward makes in this volume is between “forensic” and “soterial” models of sin and salvation. In short, for a forensic model, the fundamental human problem is guilt and the solution is remittance of guilt (whether through punishment, satisfaction, or forgiveness). For a soterial model, by contrast, the fundamental problem is the the sickness of the human self: its affections and desires are disordered. The self is turned in on itself, to borrow Luther’s phrase, loving itself in a disordered way. The corresponding solution is healing: we need a re-orientation of our deepest selves toward love of God and neighbor.

    Writing about different forms of Hinduism (but in a way that he intends, I think, to apply to Christianity) Ward observes that “a concentration on a forensic notion of desert misses something basic to the religious perception”:

    What is missing is the idea…that the goal of human life lies in a relationship of devotion to the supreme Lord. A mechanical and forensic model, concentrating on individual moral success of failure, misses this element of personal relationship that lies at the heart of devotional faith….[A] soterial model…construes the spiritual state of the human self primarily in terms of analogies to disease and health. The healthy soul is one that is in a state of devoted login service to the Lord, that is transfigured by the beauty of the Lord, and empowered by the Lord’s love. The sick soul is one that withers and atrophies because it is incapable either of giving or receiving the love that alone gives life. (p. 53)

    A lot of traditional theology, particularly Protestant, has favored the forensic account. Jesus dies on the cross so that our sins can be forgiven. The problem, as Christopher notes, is that Protestantism (particularly Lutheranism) hasn’t always had a good account of what we’re supposed to do after that. The result has all too often been a complacent conformity rather than lives conformed to the image of Christ.

    Correspdonding to the forensic and soterial models, Ward distinguishes two understandings of “justification.” The first, which has dominated much Protestant theology, understands it as a kind of declaration of legal innocence. God “imputes” the righteousness of Christ to us, even though in ourselves we remain sinful. Arguing for a different view, Ward suggests understanding it more relationally. Justification is being rightly related to God.

    When ‘justification’ is taken to mean, ‘a declaration of legal innocence’, one faces the difficulty that a guilty person has to be declared innocent by God. But, if God is perfectly just, how is this possible? As I have interpreted it, justification means ‘establishing the possibility of being rightly related to God’. How can a person whose deepest motives and dispositions are to cause great harm be rightly related to God? Only if those motivations and dispositions are wholly changed, by an inward turning of the mind, a metanoia. (p. 190).

    What is accomplished in the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection is that God unites humanity to divinity and makes possible this restored relationship. The cross shows both “the suffering that self-regard causes to self, to others, and to God [and] the life of obedient self-giving that God requires” (p. 191). But it is more than that: it is “the historical vehicle of divine power to forgive and heal” (p. 191).

    Instead of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’, it might be better to speak of ‘healing’ and ‘participation’. What God requires of sinners is a transformation of life in penitence and obedient love. This requirement is met by participation in the power of the Spirit, which is luminously expressed in and mediated through the life and self-sacrificial death of Jesus. Jesus’ sacrifice gives particular form to the Spirit’s activity, and founds the community of the new covenant in which the Spirit can transform human lives into the image of cruciform love. (p. 214)

    That last point strikes me as key in light of Christopher’s observation that Protestant Christianity often lacks forms of disciplined community that give a paritcular shape to the Christian life. Participation in the Spirit is participation in the particular cruciform shape of Jesus’ humanity. This incorporation into Christ restores our relationship to God and makes possible a re-ordering of our desires. We “put on the mind of Christ,” to use Paul’s phrase, and are renewed in our humanity. This is a gradual process, one that may not be complete until after death. But by being “in Christ” we are empowered to receive a new self, one that is rightly related to God, our neighbor, and the rest of creation.

  • 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:

  • Ward and Lewis on post-mortem repentance and the possibility of universal redemption

    …it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel to suppose that, though violence is prohibited in this age, it will be perfectly acceptable in the age to come. The German writer Friedrich Nietzsche called this resentissement, the desire for delayed revenge, the belief that we might have to suffer persecution now, but God will take revenge in the end. The true Christian perception is that the cross of Christ is God’s last word on violence. The divine love will never turn into divine hatred. It will go as far as possible to bring people to divine life, and it will always seek the welfare of every sentient being. And that is the last word.

    –Keith Ward, Re-thinking Christianity, pp. 41-42

    Interestingly, Ward doesn’t think this rules out the idea of hell, at least in a qualified sense. He says that God cannot force people to embrace the path of love against their will. “[I]t is possible for rational creatures to exclude themselves from love, and therefore from the divine life” (p. 42). As a result, people might find themselves, after death, in a hell of their own making where they experience the consequences of the choices they have made. Nevertheless, he believes that the divine love remains insistent in trying to draw people into repentance, and that such repentance is possible even in hell. “A God of unlimited love would go to any lengths to persuade them to return to the path of eternal life, and to help them on that path” (p. 42).

    This sounds similar to the view of hell sketched by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce–people are in hell because they won’t choose to let go of their sins, their hatreds, the resentments. But they could. Purgatory and hell are not two separate realms (as in Dante); the difference is whether one chooses to leave. Lewis also imaginatively depicts God’s grace trying to draw people back. In his telling this takes the form of redeemed humans–usually people that the damned knew in the earthly life–entreating them to come “higher up and further in.”

    Where I’m not sure Ward and Lewis would agree is whether there is, at some point, a moment of decision after which one’s eternal destiny is fixed. Both deny that such a moment occurs before death–in both Lewis and Ward post-mortem repentance is a possibility. But Lewis seems more inclined to think that there is a moment when one decides decisively for or against God. (His book is called The Great Divorce, after all.) Ward, on the other hand, seems more optimistic that the divine love will never give up on the unrepentant and that universal salvation is something to be hoped for.

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors.

    –Libraries are part of the social safety net.

    –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.”

    –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites.

    –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?”

    –Jesus and eco-theology.

    –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on the Atonement.

    –Your commute is killing you.

    –Rowan Williams’ Ascension Day sermon: “The friends of Jesus are called … to offer themselves as signs of God in the world.”

    –Grist’s “great places” series continues with two posts on the industrial food system and its alternatives.

    –Keith Ward on his recent book More than Matter?

    –Russell Arben Fox on the Left in America.

    –The Cheers challenge. My wife and I have already been rewatching the entire series. We’re on season 6 now, which replaces Shelley Long’s Diane with Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca. It’s one of my all-time favorite shows, although the earlier seasons are probably the best ones.

    –Ozzy’s first two solo albums, which are generally considered classics, have gotten the deluxe reissue treatment. Here’s a review.

  • Friday links

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick.

    –Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel”

    –From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state.

    –A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.

    –A review of Keith Ward’s recent book More than Matter?

    —Lady Gaga: “Iron Maiden changed my life.”

    –Grist’s David Roberts has been writing a series on “great places” as a reorienting focus for progressive politics: see the first installments here, here, and here. Also see this reflection from Ned Resnikoff.

    –Four different demo versions of Metallica’s early tune “Hit the Lights” (with some, ahem, interesting vocal experimentation by a young James Hetfield).

  • Keith Ward on the sacrifice of Jesus

    In his book What the Bible Really Teaches, Keith Ward spends a chapter on “the sacrifice of Jesus.” He wants to contest the popular view that Jesus had to die as a kind of blood sacrifice to appease or deflect God’s wrath–a view, Ward argues, that’s at odds with the biblical view of what sacrifice is.

    According to Ward, sacrifices in the Old Testament are not inherently efficacious. That is, there’s nothing inherent in shedding animal blood or sending a goat into the wilderness that compels God to act or be disposed toward us in a particular way. To think this is to confuse religion with magic, and to adhere to a view of sacrifice that the Bible condemns as idolatry.

    Instead, says Ward, the sacrificial rituals of the OT are divinely established means for renewing fellowship and communion between God and human beings. They “work” because–and only because–they are appointed by God for this purpose. The value of these sacrifices consists in our symbolic identification with what is sacrificed as a form of whole-hearted self-offering to God. The forms these take are, in a sense, irrelevant. Hence the prophets’ condemnation of punctilious observation of the ritual law when it is not animated by the spirit of justice and compassion.

    These include sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, as well as atonement for sin–and the latter are mainly concerned with unintentional infractions of the ritual law. There is no suggestion, Ward argues, of an atonement-sacrifice that can cancel out intentional sin. “Biblical sacrifices for sin do not pay the punishment due to sin, nor do they remove such a punishment” (p. 122).

    If this is true, then how should we think about Jesus’ sacrifice? In line with the biblical view of sacrifice, Ward says, Jesus’ sacrifice should be understood as his total self-offering to God, a self-offering that is the divinely appointed means for uniting humanity to the divine life:

    What Jesus offers [in his sacrifice] is not an animal-substitute, but himself. He expresses the heart of true sacrifice, the total offering of a life to God. This does not in itself entail that Jesus should die. But Jesus was prepared to face death as the price of his obedience to the divine will in a world that had turned from God. The death of the cross is the final, most complete expression of Jesus’ self-offering to God. It is not that the shedding of blood was necessary before humans could be united to God. That would be to revert to a magical transaction view of sacrifice. It is rather that his whole life, and his loyalty to his vocation even to death, was a full offering of humanity to God, so that God could unite humanity to the divine completely in him. (p. 124)

    But Jesus was more than a martyr, and his life was more than a perfect act of self-offering to God. His obedience “has a double significance”:

    It exposes the hostility of the “world” (the world which rejects God) to God. And it expresses the sharing by God of the suffering of that estranged world. Because the world rejects God, it rejects Jesus, the incarnation of God. The cross represents what the world does to God. Jesus, in freely accepting obedience to God’s will, becomes the expression of God’s suffering, accepted at the hands of disobedient humanity. Jesus’ obedience draws upon himself the disobedience of estranged humanity. In this sense, God does require that Jesus dies–but only because God knows that a complete obedience, in a disobedient world, will inevitably lead to rejection and death. (pp. 124-5)

    Ward continues,

    the death of Jesus is not the placation of an angry God. It is the opposite. It is the expression of the unrestricted love of God. It is the full expression of human obedience to the divine calling, and at the same time of the divine humility that shares the human condition. (p. 125)

    In the death of Jesus, God bears the hostility of disobedient humanity, but in the resurrection God demonstrates that such hostility doesn’t have the final word. Jesus’ life of self-offering is a “perfect prayer” to which God responds with the resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit. This is the means, ordained by God, for restoring relationship between God and an estranged humanity.

    I’m very sympathetic to this overall view, but I might make one slight qualification. Sometimes, maybe because of his desire to distinguish biblical sacrifice from “magical” notions, Ward almost seems to imply that it’s completely arbitrary what means God chooses to restore the human-divine relationship. In part, this is a salutary reminder that the Incarnation is rooted in God’s love and freedom; it’s not something that compels God to be merciful. But surely most Christians (including Professor Ward) would want to say that there’s something especially fitting about this restoration occurring by means of a human life that enacts, in history, the eternal love of God and the perfect human response to that love.

  • Friday links

    – Many people have pointed to this omnibus post at Mother Jones that provides background, context, links, and ongoing updates on the situation in Egypt.

    – Marvin writes on understanding apostolic poverty.

    – At the blog Memoria Dei, a post discussing feminist theologian Mary Daly’s use of women’s experience as an analogue for the divine.

    – Palgrave Macmillan and the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics have launched a new series of books on the ethical treatment of animals. So far, two titles have been published: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory by Alasdair Cochrane and An Introduction to Animals and the Law by Joan E. Schaffner. The series is co-edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn.

    – Crystal has a post discussing John Milbank’s and Keith Ward’s differing views on Kant (complete with a video of Ward lecturing on the subject).

    – Rodney Clapp on giving yourself (and others) permission not to pray.

    – The State of the Union and “semi-Niebuhrianism.”

    – Kevin Drum on the virtues of a strong labor movement.

    – Oasis and Radiohead: two very different British bands that defined alternative rock in the late ’90s.