A Thinking Reed

Category: Keith Ward

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract from the phenomena of experience in order to provide a more precise mapping or modeling of certain aspects of reality for various purposes; the error of reductionism is to mistake those abstract models for the whole of reality itself. (Huston Smith once compared it to thinking that an increasingly detailed map of Illinois will–eventually–result in a map of the entire United States.)

    Physicalism and reductionism are frequently seen as threats to religious belief. This can be for a variety of reasons, such as that they seem to undermine belief in an immaterial (and possibly immortal) soul, or that they deny the “specialness” of human beings. However, I do think it’s possible for a Christian to affirm a non-reductive version of physicalism. This would mean that human beings are physical beings with consciousness, feeling, and rationality. These are genuinely “emergent” features of the world–features that appeared over the course of evolutionary history and which we share with other animals, but they are not reducible to the physico-chemical aspect of reality. They are not simply the outworking of their underlying material substrate but exert a genuine causal influence on the world. Philosophers and theologians have characterized how this might work in a variety of ways, such as “whole-part” or “top-down” causation. But the point is that the mental introduces genuine novelty into the world and is capable of affecting the course of events. Moreover, if something like this is right, it seems possible that God could, at death, preserve whatever it is that constitutes each person’s unique selfhood (e.g., memories, character traits) and “translate” them into some other medium, whether embodied or not.

  • Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles

    Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events?

    Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve seen, Edwards follows Aquinas in distinguishing between God as the primary cause–that is, the cause of created beings’ very existence–and creatures as secondary causes, “the patterns of relationship we find in the natural world, everything studied by the sciences, and everything that could ever be studied by the sciences” (How God Acts, p. 81).

    A miracle, for St. Thomas, is an event where there is no secondary cause, but which is brought about by God directly. A miracle, in Thomas’s words, “surpasses the capabilities of nature.” Despite following Thomas’s general metaphysical line, this is a point where Edwards differs: “miracles can be seen as wonderful manifestations of the Spirit that occur through secondary causes” (p. 84).

    To flesh this out, Edwards takes a bit of a detour through the philosophy of science. Miracles are often said to be “violations” of the “laws of nature.” But we can distinguish several meanings of “laws of nature.” It can refer to our theories or intellectual descriptions of the patterns and relationships of nature, but it can also refer to those underlying patterns and relationships themselves. Our theories, at best, imperfectly model the reality they seek to describe, and there are multiple levels of reality–mental, personal, ethical, aesthetic–that are, as yet, not comprehensible under some general law-like description.

    The upshot is that so-called miracles may be beyond the laws of nature in the sense that they are not explicable by our currently formulated theories, but may still be intelligible in light of the natural order taken as a whole (if we fully understood it). “This opens up the possibility that miracles may occur though a whole range of secondary causes that our current science cannot yet model or cannot yet model well” (p. 87).

    But if that’s the case, then what makes an event a miracle? Following Karl Rahner, Edwards proposes that a miracles are “signs and manifestations of God’s saving action” (p. 87). To be a miracle, it’s necessary, not that an event be directly brought about by God, but that it be experienced by us as a revelation of God’s grace. For example, in principle, science might come to some understanding of how “prayer, human solidarity, love, or faith can contribute to biological healing,” (p. 89), but that would not detract from the religious significance of such an event.

    It might be useful to compare Edwards’ view with that of another contemporary theologian–Keith Ward, whose book Divine Action is devoted to many of the same problems as Edwards’. Ward would agree with Edwards that miracles are events in which God’s purposes are disclosed to human beings, but he goes further: a miracle can be understood as a sequence of events “which takes physical objects beyond their normal physical realizations, and displays their relation to their spiritual origin and goal” (Divine Action, p. 176).

    Ward argues that contemporary science offers a picture of a universe that is much “looser” and more open than the one offered by, say, deterministic Newtonian physics. The universe, Ward argues, is thus open to being influenced by God: “the whole ‘seamless robe’ picture of nature as a closed causal system is much less compelling than it once may have seemed” (pp. 177-78). In Ward’s view, the universe “is always orientated toward God” as the “purposive causal basis as of the universe itself” (p. 179). Consequently, direct divine action can’t be ruled out.

    This is obviously a complex issue, but there are some considerations that incline me toward Ward’s side of the debate. Edwards is concerned to safeguard the completeness of scientific explanations of phenomena, which, he thinks, requires a closed causal system on the level of creatures. But as Ward points out, miracles and other special divine acts are not the kind of measurable and repeatable events that would fall under general scientific laws or explanations. So, you could theoretically have a “complete” physics without it necessarily excluding divine acts that make a difference to how things go in the world. It therefore seems rash to rule out divine intervention for the sake of preserving a closed causal nexus.

    Secondly, Ward agrees with Edwards that God respects the autonomy of the created order, but that this is not an “unrestricted” autonomy. God will act to bring the divine purposes to fulfillment. “A miracle will be an extraordinary event, improbable in terms of the physical system considered in itself, but fairly probably in the wider context of a spiritual purpose for the whole system” (p. 180). The causal processes of nature are not, in themselves, the final word because the universe as a whole is, by its nature, rooted in and open to its creator (and redeemer).

  • Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

    In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes:

    …ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no possible alternatives to it, since it is the basis of every possibility. It can be spoken of as omniscient, in the sense that it conceives or generates all possible states, knows what they are and knows that there are no more than it conceives. It can be spoken of as omnipotent, in the sense that it brings whatever is actual into existence from the realm of possibility, or it generates actual beings with a derivative power to make some possible states actual. Nothing that comes into being can have more power than ultimate mind has, since the latter is the source of all actuality.

    It might well be as well to note that these definitions of omniscience and omnipotence are not exactly the same as the ones classical philosophers have often given. Many philosophers define omniscience as knowledge of absolutely everything, possible, actual, past, present and future. They define omnipotence as the power to do absolutely anything that is not self-contradictory. The definitions I have given are more restricted than that. They do not entail that God knows what will be actual in the future. Perhaps God leaves the future open for radical freedom. And they do not entail that God can do absolutely anything. Perhaps God leaves, or even must leave, finite reality to follow its own inherent laws of development.

    Yet we can still say that God knows everything that is possible and actual (the future may not be actual yet) and that God is the most powerful being there could possibly be and the ultimate source of all things that come into being. This leaves open the question of exactly which possible states can be made actual adn whether there are restrictions on what possible states can be actual. Though such an ultimate mind can sensibly be called omniscient and omnipotent, this may not be enough to satisfy some religious believers. It is enough, however, to satisfy the requirements of being an ultimate explanation of the universe. (pp. 132-3)

    Elsewhere Ward speaks of God’s “temporality,” as the divine experience of a succession of states. God is still trans-temporal in the sense of transcending the multiple processes of temporal succession posited by relativity theory. But Ward argues, contra the classical view, that it is a perfection, not an imperfection, for God to experience the flow of new experiences and new possibilities for creativity, in response to real relationships with creatures.

    God can enter into many different times, acting and responding in them, while also existing in a trans-temporal way. We cannot imagine this trans-temporality of God, but it should not be conceived as a totally immutable and static existence. It might be better conceived as a transcendent agency that acts incessantly in many temporal streams, manifesting its changeless perfection in continual creative activity, sensitive awareness, and overflowing goodness. (p. 216)

    Obviously a lot of argument would be required to establish this position with any confidence, but I think there are two root insights that motivate it. The first is that, if God does not experience temporality in some sense, then God’s knowledge is, paradoxically, limited. That is, there’s a mode of experience that God has no knowledge of. The second is that God, according to the Bible and much religious experience, exists in responsive relationship with God’s creatures. For this to be a genuine relationship and not an illusory one, God must be able to actually enter into the flow of time and, potentially, be affected by it. Classical Christian thought limited this to the Incarnation, but Ward goes further than that here.

    So, if there is a temporal aspect to God’s existence, then we can begin to see why omniscience might still allow that God doesn’t know certain things. If there are genuinely undetermined events (and there may be quite few for all we know), then even God would only have probably knowledge of how they are going to turn out. As Ward says, God knows all possible states and all actual states, but non-actual future states would not necessarily be part of God’s knowledge.

    I always feel a bit impious even speculating about this stuff.

  • Doubting Dawkins

    An excerpt from Keith Ward’s Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, a response to Richard Dawkins. (In Ward’s defense, he’s been debating Dawkins for years, so this isn’t cheap bandwagon jumping.)

    The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one philosophical view that has the agreement of all competent philosophers. But in this world there are very few materialists, who think we can know that mind is reducible to electrochemical activity in the brain, or is a surprising and unexpected product of purely material processes.

    In the world of modern philosophy, there are idealists, theists, phenomenalists, common sense pragmatists, scientific realists, sceptics and materialists. These are all going concerns, living philosophical theories of what is ultimately real. This observation does not settle any arguments. But it puts Dawkins’ ‘alternative hypothesis’ in perspective. He is setting out to defend a very recent, highly contentious, minority philosophical world-view. Good. That is the sort of thing we like to see in philosophy! But it will take a lot of sophisticated argument to make it convincing. It is not at all obvious.

    Though this is only an excerpt, I think the objection an atheist would naturally raise is that, even if most of history’s great philosophers have been idealists (in the sense of believing that reality has something mind-like as at least one of its most fundamental constituents), we now think that many things can be explained without appealing to consciousness or purpose. Not that I think that’s a knock-down argument by any means, but it’s a challenge that needs to be addressed (and I assume Ward addresses it in the book).

  • Salvation as re-creation

    A while back I wrote about Keith Ward’s understanding of how God acts in the world, as explained in his book Divine Action. Later in the book he devotes a chapter to the incarnation and offers an interpretation of the atonement.

    Ward argues that Jesus is properly seen as the enfleshment or embodiment of God’s love in the world: “We could then say that Jesus does not only tell us about God’s love or even act out a living parable for the distinctly existing love of God. Rather, what he enacts is the very love of God itself, as embodied in this human world and for us human beings” (p. 215).

    However, the incarnation isn’t merely a lesson for us about God’s love. Or, as Ward says, “Jesus is not primarily an educator, who comes to bring salvation through knowledge, achieved in meditation and stilling of the individual mind” (p. 221). The human predicament is more radical than that; “liberal” views of the atonement sometimes suggest that we merely need to see or learn what is right in order to do it, reducing Jesus to an example:

    [God] cannot simply forgive us, while we are unable to turn from our sin — that would be to say that it does not really matter; that somehow we can love God while at the same time continuing to hate him! He cannot compel us to love him, without depriving us of the very freedom that has cost so much to give us. He cannot leave us in sin; for then his purpose in creation would be wholly frustrated. (p. 222)

    What Ward suggests instead is that the atonement is God re-creating human nature in the life of Jesus. In his life, obedience, suffering, passion, and death, Jesus re-enacts the drama of human life, but in a way that maintains its complete fidelity to God. He thus overcomes sin and the powers of evil to which we are subject. “He takes human nature through the valley of the shadow of death, and in him alone that nature is not corrupted. He is the one victor over evil; he has experienced the worst it can do, and he has overcome it” (p. 223).

    In Jesus, human nature is made anew, the way God intends for it to be. But how can this help us? Aren’t we still stuck in our sins? Ward contends that Christ can help us because he “has remade human nature in an uncorrupted form” (p. 223), and we can participate in that nature, or have it implanted in us through faith in Christ. As St. Paul puts it, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).

    The nature that we receive from God is a human nature that has triumphed over evil, that has entered into its heart and remained uncorrupted. It is not that God simply creates a new nature in us when we ask; but that he takes human nature to himself, shows what it truly is and what its destiny is and shows that it cannot be conquered by sin and death. That is the nature he places within us, making us sons by adoption, taken into the life of the Son.

    This view seems to have more affinities with the Eastern Christian emphasis on theosis than certain substitutionary or retributive models of the atonement promulgated in the West, particularly since the Reformation.

    The idea of incarnation and atonement as “new creation” also, it can be argued, fits better with an evolutionary view of the development of human nature. As I’ve argued before, evolution seems to require that we relinquish the supposition that humans existed in a state of perfect righteousness prior to a historical fall. Instead, we might propose that early human beings were immature and undeveloped and that God intended them to develop along a certain path. Instead, however, humanity has taken the wrong road, preferring self-seeking, greed, and violence to altruism, justice and peace. Atonement, then, consists of setting us back on the right road.

    A view very much like this has been developed by George L. Murphy, a physicist and Lutheran pastor, in two interesting articles: “Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin” and “Chiasmic Cosmology and Atonement.” Regarding atonement as re-creation, Murphy writes:

    Atonement comes about because God in Christ actually does something to change the status of people who “were dead through the trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). To be effective, the work of Christ must overcome the nothingness toward which sinful humanity is headed, a nothingness which through its terror of death, guilt, and meaninglessness, it already experiences. If humanity and (as we shall note later) the rest of creation with it, is on the way to nothingness, God must re-create from nothing. Atonement parallels in a precise way the divine creatio ex nihilo.

    One benefit of this view of salvation is that it puts humanity back in its proper place as part of creation. As Lutheran “eco” theologian H. Paul Santmire says:

    The Incarnation of the Word is thus a response to the human condition of alienation from God and rebellion against God, as well as a divine cosmic unfolding intended to move the whole of cosmic history into its final stage. United with the Word made flesh, human creatures are restored to their proper place in the unfolding history of God with the cosmos. Thus united, they are free to live in peace with one another and with all other creatures, according to the imperfect canon’s of creation’s goodness. Now they may live as an exemplary human community, as a city set upon a hill, whose light cannot be hidden. (Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, p. 60)

    I think this provides one fruitful way for thinking about salvation that avoids some of the pitfalls of both a forensic and merely exemplarist view and has a certain consonance with an evolutionary picture of the world.

  • Ward on God’s action in the world

    I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same time natural laws describable by science can provide a full account of what happens in the world.

    In differentiating his position from Peacocke’s account, Ward suggests that we live in an “open and emergent” universe that leaves room for God to act. The indeterminacies of quantum mechanics and complex systems theory show that the Laplacian universe of strict, mechanistic determinism is an unwarranted extrapolation from the success of Newtonian physics. The universe has a “loose,” probabilistic structure–or at least it looks that way, and this means that divine action in the universe can’t be ruled out.

    Is this a return to the much-maligned “god of the gaps”? Ward argues that it’s not. The point isn’t that there are causal nooks and crannies where God can intervene. It’s that science is, by its very nature, an abstraction from the fullness of reality. Physics, for example, takes as its subject matter one slice of reality–that aspect of it which is describable in quantifiable, law-like terms. But, logically, this can’t show that all of reality has this character. An exhaustive account of reality would have to include all the non-quantifiable, qualitative aspects too. To the extent that physics (and other natural sciences) abstracts from the totality of reality, there is something it doesn’t capture. Thus, in principle, God’s acting in the universe can’t be ruled out.

    This isn’t to say that science can positively show that God acts in the universe; on the contrary, given the limitations of its method it couldn’t pick up on divine action. This is because God’s action couldn’t be subject to repeatable, controlled experiment. As the ultimate subject, God’s activity can’t be captured in any kind of regular, law-like conceptual scheme. It would be missed by any natural science acting according to its own prescribed methodology. Evidence for God’s activity comes instead from historical and personal religious experience.

  • Chew the right thing

    I’m surprised I never came across this before, but philosophers David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have a terrific series of podcasts called Philosophy Bites, which consist of relatively short interviews with philosophers on various topics of interest. The site is here; it’s also available as a free download on iTunes.

    So far I’ve listened to Keith Ward on Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy, Peter Singer on using animals, Kate Soper on “Alternative Hedonism,” Roger Crisp on Utilitarianism, Richard Reeves on Mill’s On Liberty, and Chandran Kukathas on the liberalism of F.A. Hayek. Terrific stuff.

  • November/December reading notes

    Also known as the lazy man’s book review, or capsule reflections on books I might not get around to posting on at greater length:

    Ecology at the Heart of Faith by Denis Edwards and Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology by H. Paul Santmire

    A Catholic (Edwards) and a Lutheran (Santmire) offer nicely complementary re-tellings of the Christian story that emphasize the cosmic and ecological context of God’s presence with us.

    Religion and Human Fulfillment     by Keith Ward

    Ward looks at controversial moral issues through the lens of various religious traditions (Christianity and sexuality, Islam and just war, Buddhism and beginning- and end-of-life issues, Judaism and religious vs. secular law); he defends a version of “transcendent personalism,” which holds that reason can discern right and wrong, but that belief in a transcendent source of being and goodness provides an extra impetus for the moral life.

    God, Religion, and Reality     by Stephen R.L. Clark

    A clever and idiosyncratic defense of traditional/classic theism, taking the view–unfashionable in both philosophical and theological circles–that reason can demonstrate the existence and attributes of God.

    Rawls and Religion: A Defense of Political Liberalism by Daniel Dombrowski

    The noted process philosopher/theologian argues for the essential compatibility of Rawlsian liberalism with robust religious commitment. He also addresses weaknesses in Rawls’ view regarding such issues as war and peace, abortion, and animal rights.

    Loving Jesus by Mark Allan Powell

    Powell, a Lutheran seminary professor and self-proclaimed “Jesus freak,” offers a “post-critical” piety that engages heart and head in “loving Jesus in a complicated world.” Very helpful reflections on prayer, personal devotions, stewardship, and spiritual growth that are neither overly abstract nor simplistic.

    On deck:

    Liberty: Rethinking an Imperiled Ideal by Glenn Tinder

    The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel by Craig Koester

  • Mill, liberal perfectionism, and religion

    As a tangential follow-up to this post, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a petty exhaustive discussion of J.S. Mill’s moral and political philosophy here.

    Specifically, here’s a discussion of the relationship between Mill’s utilitarianism and his liberalism; here’s a comparison between Mill’s liberalism and other variants, such as Rawls’s.

    The emphasis here on on Mill’s “moral perfectionism” and how it relates to his liberalism is striking. Mill thought the point of human life was to develop those capacities for rational thought and moral autonomy–capacities essential to human nature. But unlike classical “perfectionist” theories of morality, Mill thought that a liberal society was necessary to foster human flourishing, because no one can exercise those capacities for us.

    Mill’s perfectionist liberalism is part of classical liberal tradition that grounds liberal essentials in a conception of the good that prizes the exercise of a person’s rational capacities. In Mill’s version, the good consists in forms of self-government that exercise the very deliberative capacities that make one a moral agent. He concludes that the state cannot foster this kind of good by regular use of paternalistic or moralistic intervention. Liberties of thought and action are central to the exercise of these deliberative powers. But equally essential are certain positive conditions, such as health, education, a decent minimum standard of living, and fair opportunities for self-realization. Even paternalistic intervention can sometimes be justified when, without it, people’s deliberative powers will be severely compromised. If liberal essentials can be justified by the right sort of perfectionist account of the good, then the perfectionist need not be illiberal. And this sort of classical perfectionism explains ways in which many liberals do think that the state can and should help its citizens lead better lives. In these ways, Millian liberalism articulates a tradition of classical liberalism that has enduring significance.

    What makes Mill’s perfectionism liberal is that these are precisely the sort of capacaties that no one else, particularly the state, can exercise for us. The state can, however, provide certain goods (a guaranteed decent standard of living, education, other public goods) that are necessary conditions for exercising these capacities.This is an interesting contrast to Rawlsian liberalism, in which the liberal state is supposed to be neutral between competing conceptions of the good.

    One thing that interests me about all this is whether it opens the possibility of rapprochement between a Millian liberalism and a religious perspective. Many religious views identify the good of human life as developing and exercising capacities–capacities for knowledge and love, of God, neighbor, and creation. And like the capacities whose exercise Mill identifies as necessary for human flourishing, the development and exercise of these capacities can’t be coerced. No one can make me love God and neighbor, and no one can do it for me. The exercise of these capacities can, however, be facilitated by the provision of certain essential goods and freedoms–freedom of worship and conscience, for instance, as well as the other sorts of goods Mill identifies.

    Keith Ward seems to identify with such a “religious liberalism”; in his book Religion and Human Fulfillment where he advocates what he calls “transcendental personalism”:

    [H]umanism or personalism–the belief that the realization of distinctive personal capacities is the highest moral ideal–is a moral advance on views of morality as obedience to allegedly authoritative rule that need have no relevance to human fulfillment. But humanism is not intrinsically anti-religious. It developed from a Judeo-Christian stress on the value of every human life as made in the image of a God of freedom, creative power, and self-giving goodness. It posits a moral goal for human life, and so it remains strongly suggestive of an objective moral purpose in the universe, and of a being (presumably intelligent and good) who could conceive such a purpose. (p. 6)

    Later, in discussing various interpretations of Jewish law, Ward writes:

    [O]bedience to the laws of justice is rooted in love of the creator who desires that all creatures should find fulfillment, who gives every human being a unique value and unique potentialities to realize, who helps those who seek such realization, and who will ultimately bring creation to fulfillment and final liberation from all that impedes fulfillment–that is, from evil. There is implicit here an ideal of justice, but it is not one that is in conflict with a humane secular ideal. It is rooted in the belief that all individuals are of worth, and that human society should enable all to realize something of that worth in their lives. (p. 180)

    I think it’s pretty clear here that, like Mill, Ward would agree that “moralistic or paternalistic” intervention is not generally conducive to enabling people to realize worth in their lives but, similarly, that there is much the state can do to foster that realization by providing certain essential goods. This might be a more fruitful religious justification for liberalism than the usual quasi-Rawlsian state neutrality arguments. Worth thinking more about.

  • Keith Ward at the National Cathedral

    It was a gorgeous fall day here in DC, and we decided to enjoy it and take an outing to the Washington National Cathedral this morning for their Sunday forum. The guest, as it happens, was British theologian/philosopher Keith Ward, whose work I admire and have written about frequently here at ATR.

    The format was a Q&A with the dean of the Cathedral about the relation between science and religion. Not much of it would have been new to anyone familiar with Ward’s books, especially Pascal’s Fire and his more recent one, The Big Questions in Science and Religion, but it was neat to see him discussing these issues in person. He came across as wise and engaging, but in a witty, self-effacing British way. Topics that were discussed included the so-called anthropic argument (the notion that the laws of nature are “fine-tuned” for the emergence of life), the relationship between religion and evolution, and the nature of the soul.

    We stayed for the 11:15 Mass, at which Ward also preached. He preached on the lectionary reading from First Thessalonians about the Parousia and how we might understand it, given that we have in many ways a radically different worldview from St. Paul’s. Paul, it seems, expected the literal end of the world within his generation, at least at the time that he wrote First Thessalonians, something which obviously didn’t come to pass. So, do we simply throw out Paul’s views about the Second Coming and the Parousia?

    Ward proposed that the deeper meaning of the passage is that each moment of our lives stands under the judgment of God, but because of Jesus’ work on the cross we are granted the possibility of forgiveness and unending life with–and in–God. In particular, Ward connected the image of Jesus coming on the clouds with the concept, important in the Old Testament, of the shekhinah, the cloud of the divine glory. Jesus, in his glorification, has been united to the divine life and through him we can be united to that life too.

    What this life with God will look like is open to speculation, but Ward suggested that it would be a “re-embodiment” of our selves in a dimension of existence suffused with the divine presence. In other words, we shouldn’t expect Jesus to physically return to earth, but that all sentient life will be transfigured and caught up into the divine life in a world beyond this one. (To my delight he was clear that he thought redemption would extend to sentient members of the animal kingdom.)

    I’ll admit that I don’t have well-formed or settled views about the Second Coming or the afterlife, but Ward’s position definitely appeals to me. He’s trying, it seems to me, to steer a course between an implausible biblical literalism on the one hand (e.g. the apocalypticism of Left Behind) and a reductionist liberalism that would reinterpret all talk of resurrection as symbolic of psychological or political change on the other. No doubt there’s a spectrum of positions one might take between those extremes, but is was definitely one of the more philosophically stimulating sermons I’ve heard in a while. (The rest of the service was pretty great too, with some gorgeous Anglican chant and hymns from the 1982 hymnal that I haven’t sung since we were in Boston.)