Keith Ward – Page 4 – A Thinking Reed

Category: Keith Ward

Affirming liberalism (and conservatism)

There’s a newish Church of England group calling itself “Affirming Liberalism” that, I gather, is kind of like Affirming Catholicism, but not tied to a particular form of churchmanship.

In any event, the webiste has some interesting articles, including this one from Keith Ward called (perhaps optimistically) “Why the Future Belongs to Liberal Faith.” Ward’s is talking specifically about holding the Christian faith in a liberal way, and he identifies seven marks of a liberal faith:
Christians enjoy freedom from the absolute authority of any written text, including the Bible
The church should include different interpretations of the Christian faith
People should be free to dissent from any human authority, including the church
The search for truth is best served by critical discussion and inquiry
Faith is a relation of trust in a person more than an affirmation of propositional truths
Religious belief may need to be re-evaluated in light of new knowledge from other areas
The church exists to serve the world and contribute to the flourishing of all creation, both material and spiritual

Now, I substantially agree with all these points, so why would I be uncomfortable describing myself as a theological liberal? I think it’s because, while I affirm the need for critical discussion, acceptance of diversity and dissent, and the possibility of revising traditional theological beliefs, I still think there is a core of orthodox Christian belief that retains, if not unchallengable authority, then at least a strong presumption in its favor.

I don’t think Ward would necessarily disagree with this if his other writings are anything to judge by. But I think his article is nicely balanced by this passage from one by Mark Chapman at the same site:

I want to begin with the bold claim that a certain amount of woolly liberalism is necessary for the functioning of a healthy Christianity. This is something that needs to be re-asserted in the contemporary church, particularly when there are so many who would like to confine Christianity solely to its more dogmatic and sectarian forms. And I would contend that the reason for this is extraordinarily simple and uncontentious: whatever else religion might be it is a human practice open to all the distortions of human sin which means it simply demands to be scrutinised and criticised. That is something that would be understood by the Hebrew prophets and virtually every reformer since. For the greater glory of God there is thus a responsibility to open up our practices and beliefs to critical scrutiny. This, I think, is where a dose of liberalism becomes necessary for all Christians. Liberalism is consequently far more an attitude of mind than a church party, and it can even look prophetic.

Now, I would not want to belong to anything called a liberal party in the church. My religion is really quite traditional Anglo-Catholic, but my disposition and attitude is liberal. It doesn’t take much to reveal the ironies, hypocrisies and idolatries of Anglo-Catholicism. But at the same time the continued vitality of religion requires that it be practised, cherished and loved and approached with reverence and awe.

The “liberal” and “conservative” dispositions, then, can be seen as complementary, and even necessary for one another’s health. A merely corrosive and critical liberalism will lack “reverence and awe.” But an uncritical conservatism will confuse religion with God, and ironically fail to revere the very God religion aims to worship.

October reading notes

A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month:

The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is a nice overview of environmental problems, a survey of the common philosophical and theological approaches to environmental ethics, and a defense of the notion that a traditional Christian outlook can ground concern for, and fairly radical positions on, the environment (as opposed to approaches of a lot of eco-theology which are fairly revisionist). Northcott also argues that social justice for human beings is not in opposition to care for the earth, but an essential component of it.

Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce. Reviewed here.

Animals and Their Moral Standing, Stephen R. L. Clark. A collection of papers dealing with various aspects of the moral problems associated with non-human animals. Hits most of the uniquely Clarkean themes: a traditionalist philosophical and theological orientation combined with radicial views on animal welfare. (A nice companion to Northcott’s book come to think of it.)

A Case of Conscience by James Blish. I mentioned this book here. I’ve also just started The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, who seems, to say the least, to have borrowed some ideas from Blish as both books revolve around Jesuit priests who have disastrous encounters with alien civilizations. Russell’s book is contemporary, while Blish wrote his in the 50s. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.

Early this mont the Templeton Foundation Press reissued Keith Ward’s Divine Action, which had been out of print virtually from the time of its original publication due to a publishing acquisition. This is his account of how modern science and philosophy allow us to give a coherent account of how God can act in the world. While taking some ideas from process thought, Ward goes beyond the view of many process theologians that God acts sheerly “persuasively” on the world. Ward argues that modern physics has given us a picture of the physical world that is much “looser” than that of classical Newtonian physics, and that, in principle, God can act in the world in ways that would make a real difference, but be undetectable by the methods of science. He also offers persuasive and insightful accounts of miracles, the Incarnation, and the relation of Christianity to other religions under the rubric of ways that God acts in the world.

Also currently working on Wandering Home by Bill McKibben, which narrates his hike from the Champlain river valley in Vermont into the Adiorondacks in New York. Along the way McKibben encounters various friends and acquaintances trying to find new ways of living sustainably, from localist vinters making wine for the region to an Earth First!-er living in an electricity- and plumbing-free shack in the woods. All of this provides much fodder for McKibben’s ruminations on possibilities of treading more lightly on the earth.

On deck is James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. I blogged about Alison’s Raising Abel a bit here. Although impressed by the way Alison’s Girard-inspired exegesis sheds new light on the biblical texts, I expressed some skepticism about aspects of his project. But, inspired in part by this review of Alison’s work from Charles Hefling that Christopher tipped me off to, I decided it was worth delving in more deeply.

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.

By faith, not by sight

Atheists sometimes describe faith as “believing something without evidence.” But is this the way religious believers understand faith? I don’t think so, but I do think that there’s a kernel of truth here and that it’s important to distinguish between faith and knowledge.

First it should be noted that there often lurks a polemical and tendentious understanding of “evidence” behind this definition. The kind of evidence being appealed to is usually the sort of measurable, repeatable evidence appropriate to a scientific experiment (and, it has been well-argued that the scientific enterprise itself rests on a certain kind of faith). But much of our life proceeds on “evidence” in a much wider sense, and there’s no a priori reason to allow this kind of methodological imperialism to go unopposed.

But there is a legitimate point poking out of this straw-man definition. We do distinguish between faith and knowledge, say. Kierkegaard described faith as “the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty” That’s a bit more paradoxical than I’d want to put it, skating toward Tertullian’s “I believe because it is absurd,” but it nicely illustrates the point that faith and knowledge are, in some respects, mutually exclusive. If we knew, we wouldn’t need faith.

In the Bible, faith has little to do with belief in God’s existence. Mostly it involves trusting God’s promises, believing that God will be faithful and that he will be vindicated and his purposes fulfilled. Abraham is the archetype of faith because he believed God’s promise that he would be the father of a great nation and acted accordingly.

Often, though, faith involves trusting in God even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Confining ourselves just to the Psalms we often see lamenting that God’s will doesn’t seem to be done on earth: the wicked prosper, the poor and orphaned are oppressed, and God’s people are dragged into exile. And Abraham believed in God’s promise, despite his and his wife’s advanced ages.

So, in the biblical sense there is a distinction between faith and “sight.” We don’t see Gods’ purposes unambiguously realized in the world, but we trust that they will be, even if we can’t see how. Hebrews says that faith is “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” and St. Paul says that we walk by faith and not sight. But this doesn’t mean that we have no reason for our faith, rather it means that the world doesn’t yet reflect the presence of God in such a way as these things would be obvious to anyone. That state of affairs is associated with the end.

And I do think that this tension between faith and sight can apply to the question of God’s existence. Some people claim that God’s existence can be proved (or disproved), but, whatever their merits, these arguments have failed to achieve universal assent, even among well-informed disputants. However, I think many people would agree that our experience of the world is religiously ambiguous.

By this I mean that neither God’s existence nor nonexistence is overwhelmingly obvious. There are certain philosophical considerations that can point to the question of God, such as the sheer existence and order of the universe. There are also, to steal a term from Peter Berger, “signals of transcendence.” I would include here moral, aesthetic, and religious experience of various kinds. But, at least in most cases, these aren’t absolutely compelling on pain of irrationality.

In other words, it’s possible to interpret the totality of our experience in a theistic or non-theistic way. And I think that in this ambiguous situation we find ourselves in it’s possible for reasonable people to differ on the best interpretation. Faith, in this aspect, is trust that there is a God, not in the absence of evidence, but in the face of evidence that is partial and ambiguous. Like the Psalmist who continues to trust in God even in the midst of the exile, the modern believer trusts in God in her exile in this world.

Also, faith isn’t just a set of beliefs about the world, but a commitment to a way of life. It does have an essentially “practical” aspect. And, it can, I think, be reasonable to stick to this commitment even during those periods where the beliefs that undergird it seem doubtful (at least I hope so!). In fact, one strain of the Christian tradition has it that following the path of faith will lead to experiences of “sight” which partly confirm the direction that one is traveling in.

I think that the justification of religious belief ends up being quite agent-relative. There is no algorithm for interpreting the totality of our experience, and each of us will have different particular experiences that we weigh differently, and not in some value-neutral way. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be reasonable debate between adherents of different perspectives, but faith remains (in the words of Keith Ward) “a practical commitment beyond what the evidence would compel any reasonable person to believe” (Pascal’s Fire, p. 223).

God and the evolving universe

I’m glad to see that First Things made Avery Dulles’ article on God and evolution available as this month’s free article.

Dulles distinguishes three (non-creationist) approaches to evolution: theistic evolutionism which sees the process of evolution as the outworking of inherent properties of the universe established by God, Intelligent design, which claims that certain particular facets of the evolutionary process are inexplicable without reference to a divine intelligence, and what we might call “holism” which maintains that the behavior of higher existents (such as organisms) isn’t reducible to or fully explicable by the laws governing lower ones (such as the laws of chemistry or physics).

Dulles cites John Polkinghorne as an example of someone in this third school of thought. In his recent book Exploring Reality Polkinghorne makes that interesting suggestion that the human mind’s access to a realm of intelligible universals such as mathematics and logic, goodness and beauty, could itself be a factor in human evolution. That is, he wants to expand the relevant sense of “environment” to include the non-physical “environment” of the intelligible world.

Polkinghorne writes:

Once one accepts the enrichment beyond the merely material of the context within which human life is lived, one is no longer restricted to the notion of Darwinian survival necessity as providing the sole engine driving hominid development. In these noetic realms of rational skill, moral imperative, and aesthetic delight–of encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful–other forces are at work to draw out and enhance distinctive human potentialities. (p. 56)

Obviously Polkinghorne isn’t suggesting that our cognitive access to the non-material intelligible realm alters the individual genetic structure that is passed on to one’s descendants. Rather, it creates

a language-based Lamarckian ability to transfer information from one generation to the next through a process whose efficiency vastly exceeded the slow and uncertain Darwinian method of differential propagation. It is in these ways that a recognition of the many-layered character of reality, and the variety of modes of response to it, make intelligible the rapid development of the remarkable distinctiveness of human nature. (p. 57)

The idea here is that human development is explained, at least in part, by the responses we make to this more comprehensive “environment” that includes the realm of intelligible truth, goodness, and beauty and thus isn’t reducible to more materialistic accounts.

Dulles cautions against the “God of the gaps” thinking that seems to characterize the Intelligent Design school, but he also warns that “Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic colleagues.”

They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this fashion.

The kind of holism championed by thinkers like Polkinghorne (I’d also place Keith Ward somewhere in this school) seeks to show how God can influence the process of evolution without resorting to the kind of tinkering that ID theorists seem to imply. Some process thinkers, for instance, describe God as “luring” creation toward certain states of being. Polkinghorne (as well as Ward, I think) wants to say that God intervenes in more direct ways too. But I have to say that I find Polkinghorne’s concept of “downward” causation as the input of information by which he tries to explain God’s action in the world pretty darn obscure, at least as it pertains to action on non-living/non-intelligent things.*

What Polkinghorne, et al. are up to here, it seems to me, is trying to thread a third way between the deism of the theistic evolution crowd and the God-of-the-gaps tinkering of the ID crowd. They base this partly on the idea that modern science has shown the physical universe to have a “looser” causal structure than that imagined by classic Newtonian physics (and more to the point its philosophical popularizers). If physical events are underdetermined by preceding ones, then there appears to be room for God to exert some kind of influence without “violating” the laws of nature. The trick, or so it seems, is to give some account of how God exerts that influence without conceiving of it in some kind of quasi-physical infusion of energy. That’s what I take Polkinghorne to be getting at in talking about causation by means of “information.”
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*I note that next month the Templeton Foundation Press is reissuing Ward’s Divine Action which seeks to address these questions. That’s one that’s probably worth checking out.

August reading notes

Some highlights from the past month:

I blogged a bit about Keith Ward’s latest, Re-Thinking Christianity here, here and here. Ward continues his streak of intelligent, accessible theology that straddles the popular and the academic. The takeaway lesson from RC is that there isn’t exactly an unchanging core of doctrine, but that Christianity has changed throughout its history, sometimes in quite radical ways. And yet, Ward doesn’t draw the conclusion that therefore Christianity is a sham; he maintains that the history of Christianity is properly seen as an ongoing response to the God disclosed and incarnate in Jesus.

Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals is an earlier work (published in the late 80s) that anticipates many of the themes in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel, but it delves more into the underlying assumptions of his theology: creation as gift with intrinsic value, God as fellow-sufferer and redeemer of all creation, animals as bearers of “theos-rights.” As such it’s a bit more systematic and synoptic, while being a relatively easy read. A good place to start for someone looking for an “animal-friendly” take on Christianity, though the conclusions Linzey draws are quite radical.

I’m still working my way through George Monbiot’s Heat. Monbiot is both extremely pessimistic about the dangers of climate change and optimistic that it’s possible to actually cut our carbon emissions by the requisite 90% or so while still retaining something like a modern industrial economy. Monbiot is a very engaging writer, willing to admit when he’s not sure about something, unafraid to take on shibboleths, including those of environmentalists, and passionate about his cause. I may post some more about this in the near future.

Re-thinking Hegel

In the second half (or maybe last third) of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity he discusses some of the post-Enlightenment developments of Christian thought and the prospects for a 21st century liberal-yet-orthodox Christianity.

Interestingly, Ward attempts a partial rehabilitation of one of the currently most unfashionable theological thinkers of the post-Enlightenment era: Hegel. Since at least Kierkegaard Hegel has been the poster boy for hubristic metaphysical system-building and the attempt to reduce Christian particularity to philosophical generality. But Ward thinks that Hegel still has valuable contributions to make to Christian theology.

Ward concedes that Hegel overreached in identifying the progress of history with the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, and in his confidence in speculative reason. However, he argues that Christianity necessarily involves doing metaphysics and the strictures against “Hellenism” by German liberal theologians like Harnack, et al. aren’t sustainable. On the positive side Hegel contributed a new understanding of God that departed from the static deity of classical Greek philosophy and is more congenial to the biblical picture of God as deeply involved in history. Thus a “chastened” Hegelianism that properly qualifies Hegel’s historical optimism and his inattention to the particularity and importance of Jesus, can still be of some use:

For Hegel, history both expresses and changes God, as it realises aspects of the divine that would otherwise have remained potential in the divine being, and as God truly relates to these aspects in new and creative ways. It is compatible with this view to say that God also has a proper divine actuality even without creation, and certainly without this specific universe. So we may not wish to say that this universe is necessary if God is to be conscious of the divine nature. However, there is a great deal of force in the thought that, if God is to realise the divine nature as love — in the sense of relation to truly free personal agents — then the creation of some universe in which true freedom is possible will be needed.

The sort of love that obtains between God and created persons — a kenotic love that enters into humility and suffering, that seeks those who are lost and reconciles those who are estranged — is not possible solely within the being of God itself. Because of that, the creation of a universe is the necessary condition of the actualisation of kenotic love in God. A stronger stress on the value of personal relationships leads to involving God more in time and change than classical theologians like Aquinas thought. We may not want to follow Hegel in the detail of his philosophy, but this is a move that he was the first major philosopher to make. (p. 156)

This sort of thing is apt to make more traditional thinkers nervous. It seems to imply that the divine being in itself is somehow incomplete and requires the creation of something in addition to God in order for the divine potentiality to be actualized.

There’s a connection here to the doctrine of the Trinity: Ward is suspicious of more “social” versions of the Trinity that emphasize the fully personal existence of each trinitarian person. These models see the “inner” life of the Trinity as a fully complete interchange of self-giving love; consequently, there is no need for creation to actualize God’s nature as love.

Ward writes, in criticism of this kind of view:

In any case, it is hard to see what sort of love could exist between persons who are all parts of the same being. It is as if different parts of a human being with three different personalities could all be said to love one another. That would be a very peculiar, even pathological, sort of love.

[…]

If the love of Jesus is our model for the love of God, then God, as love, must go out to persons who are other than God, who are capable of rejecting God, but who can be healed by divine love and united to the divine life by compassion nad co-operation. This is not a love of one hypostasis of God for another hypostasis of God. It is a love for what is other than God but can be united to the life of God in fellowship. It is a love that requires a created other, perhaps, but not a love that can be operative within the divine being itself, where there is no possible scope for rejection, compassion, healing or a real autonomy of the other. (pp. 76-77)

This is an interesting argument because it suggests that the intra-trinitarian divine love is in some sense inferior to the extra-trinitarian reconciling love that seeks the lost. In some sense I can see the force of this: it does seem that a love where there is literally no possibility of the beloved not reciprocating is somehow diminished in that there is no risk or vulnerability involved.

On the other hand, it is somewhat worrisome to say that God must create a world in which there is a risk of rejection and estrangement in order to actualize this aspect of the divine love. For one thing, this seems to suggest that evil is necessary for God’s being to be fully actualized: for a world in which rejection and estrangement are a live possibility is one that would seem to (necessarily?) contain suffering. This is the same worry I have about Robert Jenson’s theology, that God’s self-determination is so bound up with the historical process that evil becomes part of the very being of God.

Maybe there can be a mediating position: perhaps it’s possible (at least logically) for God to create creatures who are capable of estrangement without necessarily falling into it. In other words, the kind of risky love demonstrated in God’s decision to create free creatures who may fail to respond to the divine love does differ from God’s self-love, and is thus something good to be actualized, but it doesn’t necessarily entail the existence of evil.

Regardless of what we want to say about this, I do think Ward is right to distinguish between the kind of love we might imagine between the persons of the Trinity and the kind of love that exists between God and finite persons, or between finite persons themselves. Some theologians have taken to seeing the relationship between the persons of the Trinity as a model for human community, but this seems like a bad idea for a couple of reasons.

First, a lot of the descriptions of the nature of the love between the Persons is, let’s face it, rank speculation. And using fancy Greek terms like “perichoresis” doesn’t really change the fact that we have only the dimmest idea of what the “inner” life of God is like, much less does it provide some kind of blueprint for human relationships.

Secondly, the life of the Trinity, we’re told, instantiates a perfect union of wills, a unity of wills in fact. The three Persons will all and only the same things. But this is a very bad model of human relationships. There is never perfect agreement of will in human communities, and to try and ensure such unity would be a recipe for tyranny. Conflict is an essential part of human living, due both to our differing interests and limited knowledge about what is good. Human beings are different from each other in a way that the Persons of the Trinity aren’t. So, it is, I would suggest, an inadequate model for human relationships to say the least.

Only a suffering God can help(?)

In an earlier post I mentioned that Keith Ward, unlike many contemporary theologians, has a generally positive view of the influence of Greek philosophy and thought-forms on the development of Christian theology. In his view Hellenistic thought allowed the early Christian theologians to deepen their understanding of Jesus as not only the Son of God but the cosmic Word who holds all things together.

However, in agreement with many contemporary theologians, Ward thinks that the influence of certain forms of Platonism resulted in a mistaken affirmation of the impassibility of God:

One of the chief influences of Platonism was that God, the Supreme Good, was generally conceived as immutable and impassible. Being perfect, God could not change, and divine perfection could not be affected by the sufferings and imperfections of the world. This creates major difficulties for any doctrine of incarnation, and especially for a doctrine that holds the eternal Word to be the only true subject of Jesus’ acts and experiences. (Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 69)

How, Ward asks, can we conceive of a genuine union between a being that is unchangeable and a changeable and changing human being? Moreover, is this view of divine impassibility and immutability “adequate to belief in an incarnate and suffering God”?

Nicea and Chalcedon produced statements about the person of Christ that most (not all) subsequent Christians have found ot define the limits of an adequate idea of the incarnation of God in Jesus. But many more recent theologians have thought that the Platonic idea of a totally changeless God is not really adequate to the Christian perception of a God who becomes incarnate and who suffers for the sake of humanity. A process of further re-thinking about God is positively mandated by the puzzles the ecumenical councils leave unresolved. (p. 70)

Ward seems here to be taking sides in the debate over divine impassibility. Many recent theologians of a variety of perspectives and confessions have been willing to throw divine impassibility overboard, to the point where in an article from back in 1986 Ronald Goetz writing in the Christian Century was able to call the idea of a suffering God “the new orthodoxy.”

Apart from the question of making sense of the union of the divine and human natures in Jesus, much of the value of the idea of a God who suffers has been taken to reside in its effects on the problem of evil and the doctrine of the Atonement. It’s been suggested that theodicy requires God to be the “fellow-sufferer who understands” (in A.N. Whitehead’s phrase), a perspective frequently emphasized by process theologians.

Regarding the cross, instead of being the place where satisfaction is made, or Jesus is punished in our stead, it’s taken to reveal the solidarity of God with all who suffer. The atonement becomes more of a response to human pain than to human sin, and God is revealed supremely as a God of compassion (“suffering-with”).

Now, I think this may be good as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it goes far enough. Leaving aside whether or not we can meaningfully speak of God suffering in the divine nature (and I’m not sure we can), it’s not clear to me that the value of a suffering God, morally and religiously, is as great as some have claimed.

There’s no doubt that sharing in someone else’s suffering can have value, but I think one should be careful about ascribing too much value to suffering as such. Ironically, this is what critics of more traditional atonement theories often argue: that they valorize suffering and are complicit in oppression. But whatever else we might say about those traditional models, suffering is usually seen as instrumentally, not intrinsically, valuable. The sufferings of Christ are praiseworthy because they make possible forgiveness and liberation from sin.

I worry that to focus too much on the suffering of God can actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem of evil. Is it really better if God is trapped in the web of suffering too? Doesn’t that actually just make things worse? Some process theologians compound the problem by denying the actuality of personal immortality, thus rendering God impotent to redeem suffering, except insofar as it is somehow incorporated into the divine being as a necessary part of realizing certain values.

In other words, even if we want to affirm that God shares our suffering, the Christian hope has traditionally been one of victory over and liberation from suffering. Again, just as traditional atonement theories are criticized for focusing on the death of Christ to the exclusion of his earthly ministry on the one hand and his resurrection and ascension on the other, the “suffering God” motif can become excessively cross-centered while downplaying the victory over death and suffering that Jesus won and has promised to share with us.

To his credit Ward doesn’t really do this. He sees the suffering of God as the price that had to be paid to unite humanity to divinity, to take the life of a human being irrevocably into the Godhead, which in turn makes possible our participation in the life of God.

Recent theology has, probably rightly, been wary of “triumphalism,” but Jesus’ triumph over sin and death is the cornerstone of Christian faith. Certainly God identifies with the victims of injustice, violence, and sin, but he does so in order to lift them to new life.

Christianity, it seems to me, is ambiguous about power: Jesus relinquishes all earthly power to the point where he becomes a passive object, beaten, tortured, spat upon and finally crucified. But the power of the divine life is such that the bonds of death are unable to contain it. God triumphs over the powers of evil, and ultimately this victory will be consummated when the entire creation is freed from bondage and reconciled with God. So suffering and victimization are just one part of the story, however important. The ultimate promise isn’t simply that God shares our tears but that he will wipe them away:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4)

Connecting this back to the work of Christ, it seems to me that suffering with us is at best part of the story. Christ comes to be God with us (Emmanuel) in order to share our condition, but also to transform it. He comes to be in the place of sin and suffering with us, but in doing so he changes the character of that “place.” Not in the sense that we no longer have to suffer or die, but that the character of that suffering, and of our own deaths, is changed. This might be expressed in the Eastern idea of theosis – that God became human so that humans could participate in the divine life.

In his book Jesus Our Redeemer, the Australian Jesuit Gerald O’Collins writes:

Simply by itself the suffering which Jesus endured out of love did not bring about redemption. To be sure, many people have found comfort through seeing the crucified Jesus as their fellow-sufferer. He did not suffer on the cross alone but between two others who underwent the same death by slow torture (all four Gospels) and with his mother standing near to him (the Gospel of John). That scene has been applied and appreciated down through the centuries. Like many other soldiers who fought in France and Belgium during the First World War, my own father found himself in a terrain of wayside shrines, representations of Christ on the cross with the Virgin Mary keeping lonely vigil at the feet of her crucified Son. Often scarred and badly damaged by shells and bullets, those shrines gave soldiers on both sides the feeling of Jesus as their brother in the terrible pain and suffering they faced. Jesus had drawn close to them and they knew his presence in their terrifying situation. (p. 192)

However, O’Collins goes on to emphasize that it is the divine love, not suffering as such, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that has value and the power to redeem us. The love poured out through these events has the power to heal us and unite us to the divine life. The divine self-manifestation is itself redemptive, even though in a fallen world it necessarily has a cruciform shape.

One way of understanding this is suggested by Paul’s dictum that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In Jesus God has entered into the human experience so thoroughly with his forgiving, healing love that there is no “place” we can occupy where God’s love is absent. Not the place of suffering, of guilt, or of death. Hans ur von Balthasar, as is well known, daringly suggested that this extended to the depths of Hell itself. God’s love in Jesus permeates everything such that we can’t separate ourselves from it by anything we do or suffer.

A 21st century latitudinarianism

I’m traveling for work, currently staying at a resort in Florida for a company meeting. There’s a reason people don’t vacation in Florida in August it turns out. Though it may actually be more pleasant here than it was in DC when I left…

Anyhoo, my flight was delayed for three hours, which gave me time to make it through a big chunk of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity. This has been billed as a sequel of sorts to Pascal’s Fire, and the themes will be familiar to anyone who’s read much of Ward’s other work.

Ward is an anomaly in some ways. He’s liberal in certain respects, wanting to subject Christianity to critical scrutiny (the book jacket has blurbs from Hans Kung and John Shelby Spong), but he’s also a staunch defender of theological realism and natural theology against the attacks both of its atheistic despisers like Richard Dawkins and non-realist religious thinkers like Don Cupitt. Ward also affirms the Resurrection, the possibility of miracles, and the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, though sometimes in ways that might make those of a more traditionalist bent somewhat uneasy.

The main thrust of Re-Thinking Christianity is to argue for a more pluralist and generous Christian theology in part by appealing to the history of, well, rethinking Christian beliefs. This process of rethinking, Ward argues, didn’t begin with the modern period, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. If a certain theological revisionism is part of the warp and woof of Christian theology, then further development can’t be ruled out a priori.

Ward contends that this process is discernible in the New Testament itself, where we see a variety of theological perspectives existing side-by-side and can trace some evidence of development. For instance, it seems that at least some early Christians expected an imminent parousia followed by the restoration of Israel with Jesus and the Apostles ruling an earthly kingdom. In time this Jewish messianic gospel came to be eclipsed by John’s logos theology and Paul’s drama of death-and-resurrection. Even Paul himself seems to have moved from an early belief that the Lord would return soon to a longer time horizon for his eschatology.

Ward’s aim isn’t to debunk later developments by pointing out their divergence from some early pristine Jewish gospel. Quite the opposite in some ways. He sees the process of re-thinking as drawing out the implications of the Christian response to God as disclosed in Jesus when this conviction is set in different contexts.

Unlike some 19th and 20th century liberal theologians (and some more recent neo-orthodox ones), Ward isn’t interested in purging the “simple message of Jesus” from alleged Hellenistic accretions. In his discussion of the early centuries of the Church during which the great ecumenical creeds were hammered out he affirms the value of using the tools and concepts of Greek philosophy to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the universal divine wisdom, as the logos theology of some of the early Fathers did. This was both a salutary response to the intellectual and cultural context in which they found themselves and a creative use of ideas that would’ve been foreign to Jesus and the Apostles to deepen their apprehension of the divine mystery.

Ward also points out that recognizing the process of rethinking that has gone on over the centuries makes it more difficult to ascribe a sacrosanct status to particular expressions of the faith. For instance, medieval conceptualizations of the Atonement or purgatory can rightly be seen as innovations that have to be judged on their merits rather than simply accepted as “the traditional view.” Old innovations aren’t necessarily more correct than more recent ones.

The Reformation, Ward thinks, elevated the principles of pluralism and re-thinking even if in some cases it was against the intentions of the Reformers themselves. Replacing the Pope with the Bible as the supreme religious authority may not in theory demand a proliferation of interpretations of the Christian faith, but this is what happened as a consequence of the inability of all parties to agree on the correct interpretation of the Bible. But rather than lament this fact, he sees it as a step toward recognizing that the things of God will always yield divergent interpretations and thinks that Christians should accept this as a fact of life rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of their interpretation (or that of their church, sect, pastor, favorite theologian, etc.).

If the Reformation yielded at lest a de facto more pluralistic Christianity, the Enlightenment and succeeding centurie pushed this principle even further. The critical approach to the Bible and church history, the revolution in the understanding of the natural world, and radical changes in social affairs all helped to undermine the certainties of Christendom. The appeal to authority and tradition largely ceased to carry the weight that it had even for many of the Reformers. The new knowledge yielded by science and critical historical investigation haven’t yet, Ward thinks, been fully assimilated into Christianity. They call for re-thinking many of the traditional expressions and conceptualizations of things like original sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos.

On the whole Ward thinks that this can be an enrichment of Christian thought and faith. For instance, a cosmos as vast and intricate as the one revealed to us by modern astronomy and physics, perhaps populated with many species of intelligent life, can give us a greatly expanded vision of God’s power and providence as well as a richer and more diverse vision of God’s kingdom.

Ward examines one particular tradition that has tried to assimilate the findings of science and critical history into Christian faith, the German liberal tradition associated with Harnack, Ritsschl, and Troeltsch. While Ward admires the way in which they tried to focus on the ethical core of Christianity, their distrust of metaphysics, de-Judaized Jesus, and radical skepticism about the reliability of the Gospels leave us with a seriously impoverished faith. He argues that the principles undergirding such skepticism beg major metaphysical questions and that it’s possible to affirm Jesus as the Incarnation of God in history even while accepting the principles of historical criticism and the findings of modern science. Neither history nor science commit us to the kind of metaphysical reductionism that is often passed off in their names.

Ultimately what Ward thinks we should take away from this history of re-thinking Christianity is not that it’s impossible or unreasonable to affirm traditional Christian beliefs such as the Resurrection or divinity of Jesus. It’s that we can no longer take for granted that the way in which we formulate those truths is final and adequate to reality. Ward doesn’t put it this way, but you might call this an “eschatological reservation” about all our theological claims. Since in this world we see through a glass darkly all of our ideas about God and attempts to describe the divine reality will fall short. Consequently, we should maintain a sense of humility about our beliefs, especially those that lie away from the center of core Christian commitments or are the result of fine philosophical distinctions and abstract argument (he uses the example of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity).

If there’s one place where I might quibble it’s that Ward doesn’t seem to have a very strong sense of the consensus of the Church as at least having a significant presumption in its favor. Granted that re-thinking has always occurred, doesn’t the burden of proof lie on the innovator? It’s hard to say exactly what this burden consists in or what kinds of considerations merit overturning a settled conviction, but it seems to me that if we affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, then we will be inclined to think that she has gotten at least many of the important things rigit over the long haul. I’m not sure Ward would deny this, but he does say things that seem to suggest that more traditional beliefs don’t enjoy special privileges here, whereas I’d want to say that beliefs which have stood the test of time shouldn’t be lightly cast aside.

What Ward seems to me to be defending is in many ways a kind of old-fashioned Anglican latitudinarianism. This was the view that required agreement on essentials but allowed diversity on inessentials, with “essentials” being defined rather narrowly. Thus debates about the precise nature of the Trinity, free will and predestination, and other thorny theological issues, disputes over which had led to bloodshed, could be left as matters over which people of good will could disagree. In our time we might add debates about various ethical issues which threaten to split the churches. Clearly the challenge is walking the line between latitudinarianism and indifferentism, but that might be something worth doing in a time when dogmatism seems nearly as prevalent as ever.

In a follow-up post I’ll talk a little about the balance of the book where Ward discusses re-thinking Christianity in the thought of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Christianity in a global context, and the relationship between liberalism of the kind he’s been defending and liberation.

Category: Keith Ward

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