A Thinking Reed

Category: Religion and society

  • Jesus Freaks and CCM

    This Slate article examines the connections between the at times far out lives and music of the 60s “Jesus People” and contemporary Christian Rock.

    The Christian embrace of hip youth scenes can be traced, like so much, to the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Given that we are all weathering a Summer of Love flashback, it might spice up the tired images of the Haight Ashbury rebels to realize that a few of them were Christians. These mystic hippies sparked the mass Jesus People movement, which injected a distinctly Christian feeling for love and apocalypse into a counterculture already up to its mala beads in love and apocalypse. By the early 1970s, a new Jesus had hit the American mind—communal, earthy, spontaneous, anti-establishment. And this Jesus continued to transform American worship long after the patchouli wore off, inspiring a more informal and contemporary style of communion and celebration that, while holding true to core principles, unbuckled the Bible Belt from American Christian life.

    It goes on to discuss some of the figures in the Jesus People music scene, including some truly bizarre ones.

    Also see this recent First Things article on the Jesus Movement.

  • Evangelicals for Palestine

    This seems like a heartening sign: Coalition of Evangelicals Voices Support for Palestinian State. Of course, most of the signatories to the letter to the President mentioned in the article are the usual suspects of the evangelical left (Tony Campolo, Ron Sider), but others like Richard Mouw and David Neff of Christianity Today seem indicitave of a broader spectrum of support.

    On a side note, I caught a few minutes of a broadcast of some far-out Christian Zionist guy the other day and he referred to God “smiting the Muslim hordes” in Ezekiel! Now I’m no biblical scholar, but I think his chronology’s off by a thousand years or so, give or take a few centuries.

  • July reading notes

    I recently finished a book called Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine by Vincent Brummer. Brummer is a Dutch philosopher of religion in the Reformed tradition and this book is an attempt to give an account of these central doctrines of Christian belief. Brummer starts from the premise that loving fellowship with God is our greatest possible good and that we have nevertheless become estranged from God. He then analyzes the Atonement as the way God effects reconciliation. The subsequent chapters on Christology and the Trinity tease out the implications of this view.

    Brummer heavily emphasizes the existential, personal, and relational aspects of Christianity, such that certain accounts of the Atonement (such as penal substitution) are ruled out as inadequate. This is because they don’t show how genuine reconciliation and restoration of fellowship is made possible by the Cross, but focus on things like paying off debts or removing guilt. It relies on a model of relationships couched in terms of rights and obligations rather than one of loving fellowship.

    In Brummer’s view, the Atonement is God’s act to remove obstacles that prevent us from being reconciled to Him. These obstacles include our ignorance of our own predicament, our ignorance of the divine love and will, our impotance to align our will with God’s will, and our lack of love and delight in the divine will. Brummer relates his discussion of soteriology to all three persons of the Trinity, arguing that they work to restore our lost fellowship with God.

    There’s also an interesting discussion of “social” vs. “Latin” models of the Trinity. Brummer critiques recent social trinitarians for lapsing into de facto tri-theism and says that any form of social trinitarianism that abandons the Platonic assumptions of, e.g. the Cappadocians is prone to this error. He then attempts to defend “Latin” trinitarianism against charges of modalism. My takeaway was that neither of these models is fully satisfactory.

    Currently I’m in the middle of Ronald Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, a little paperback I picked up at a used bookstore in Georgetown. This is a series of biographical studies from the Reformation and early modern periods of persecutors, heretics, and those who remonstrated for religious liberty, essentially tracing the period from the Spanish Inquisition to the British Act of Toleration. Bainton is probably better known for his book on Luther and his study of Christian attitudes toward war. But this is a little gem, full of fascinating historical detail and theological insights.

    On deck is Keith Ward’s new book Re-Thinking Christianity. This is billed as a sequel of sorts to his Pascal’s Fire (see here for more) and promises to examine the way that Christian theology has changed in significant ways over the centuries in response to different contexts. Part of his agenda, I think, is to construct what you might call a “liberal orthodox” theology, or a theology that is faithful to the central claims of Christianity while being open to insights from secular learning and culture as well as other faiths.

  • Tammy Faye Messner (Bakker), RIP

    Tammy Faye, one of the symbols of the corruption of American televangelism lost her battle with cancer.

    A few months ago my wife and I watched the documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I have to say that I came away from that much more sympathetically disposed to her. Obviously the kind of fundraising she and her husband engaged in was inherently dubious, but it really did seem that to a great extent she got caught up in events beyond her knowledge and control. And the machinations of Jerry Falwell in taking over their network come across as extremely cynical.

    I also was impressed with what seemed as far as I could tell to be a very deep and genuine Christian faith. And her outreach to gays and lesbians in contravention of all the norms of that community was genuinely touching and seemed to be rooted in sincere Christian love. For all her troubles she certainly seems to have touched a lot of people’s lives in a good way. R.I.P.

  • The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society 3: The Christian revolution

    (See previous posts here and here.)

    In chapter 8 Jardine discusses what he calls the cosmological and anthropological revolution wrought by Christianity and why it holds the key to facing the dilemma of the technological society. That dilemma, recall, is that we human beings have found ourselves with the capacity to radically alter our environment but without a moral understanding adequate to direct us in using that power. Traditional moral theories, such as those inherited from Greek philosophy, have assumed a static order both in the natural world and in human nature. Consequently, natural law theories don’t provide guidance in how we should use our ability to alter what was previously thought to be an unchanging order.

    Furthermore, Jardine thinks, liberalism doesn’t provide an answer to this dilemma either. This is because of its inbuilt tendency toward nihilism. While liberalism recognizes the human capacity for altering the environment, in seeking a “neutral” ethic that prescinds from making judgments about the good it fails to set direction or limits to that capacity. Thus, he thinks, individual preference becomes the sole source of value in a liberal society.

    Despite the fact that Christianity would seem to be one of the main foundations of Western civilization, Jardine thinks that we haven’t sufficiently assimilated its cosmological and anthropoligical outlook. Unlike either ancient paganism or Greek rationalism, Christianity is characterized by two distinct tenets that can help re-orient our technological society. First, Christianity recognizes that human beings, while creatures, have a share in God’s creative power. We are co-creators in a sense. Secondly, the Bible views the universe as a dynamic expression of the divine being. In “the word” we find the key metaphor for understanding the biblical view of the universe.

    God, Genesis tells us, speaks the world into existence. Unlike ancient paganism which viewed the gods as capricious, the biblical God is trustworthy and faithful. Thus his creation will display a certain order and reliability. But unlike Greek rationalism, which saw the world’s order as unchanging, the biblical God is dynamic and involved in history. History becomes a key concept for understanding the creation: it is more like an ongoing process with new potentialities unfolding over time. This dual view of humans as co-creators and the universe as an orderly but dynamic process, Jardine thinks, is much more in tune with the world revealed by our technological capcities and scientific knowledge.

    And this view provides the foundation for an ethic that can grapple with the problems of being co-creators in such a world. Just as God speaks the world into being, humans can think of themselves as speakers before God. Speech is key because, in a sense, speech is what allows us to create new worlds of possibility and thus is at the root of our creative capacities. “Using language in certain ways creates human capacities that could not exist otherwise” (p. 175). Our creative powers are real, though limited.

    The proper response of such creatures, living in a dynamically ordered world created by a good God, is to try to be “faithful speakers before God.” Jardine provides an illuminating interpretation of the story of the Fall. The human situation is that we seek to transgress the limits of our knowledge and creative powers in order to be like God:

    We are creators, but we are also creatures. As such, there are limits to our creative capacities, and limits to our knowledge. But because we are creators, we will have a powerful tendency to forget, or willfull ignore, the fact that we are creatures, and we will frequently try to be only creators–that is, to be God. This behavior is what is meant by the term sin, and its paradigm is attempting to claim absolute knowledge, which of course only God can have.

    The reason people sin is precisely because of our ambiguous situation as creators and creatures. As creatures we are limited beings, but as creators we can imagine ourselves as unlimited beings, and thus we will tend to attempt to cast off all limitations–or, in theological terms, we will be tempted to be like God. Or, putting this in terms of our model of creating a world through speech, sin is the attempt to become creators only, instead of cocreators, and to create our own little world. This is precisely what one does when one lies; one attempts to replace the world created by God and the speech of other humans with a world created only by oneself. More generally, all attempts to dominate other people are cases of trying to create one’s own world by force. Similarly, the delight that humans sometimes–indeed, rather often–take in acts of destruction can be understood as another attempt to create one’s own world by force. Stating the idea of sin in these terms makes it clear that fundamentally, sin comes from a lack of faith, that is, a lack of trust, in God and his created world; it is an attempt to replace God’s creation with our own. Sin means essentially unfaithful human acts.(pp. 186-7)

    If sin is essentially unfaithfulness, then faithfulness will be embodied in an ethic of unconditional love. Since human beings are co-creators with the capacity to create their own “worlds” plurality is an essential feature of the human condition. You and I may well disagree about how we should live together, or how our powers of creativity should be used. Jardine defines unconditional love as the persistent attempt to understand and empathize with those whose perspective differs from our own. Concretely, this means practicing forgiveness and mutual correction. These balance each other because while we must stop the person who is sinning, a recognition of the limits of our knowledge highlights the importance of forgiveness.

    Jardine goes on to distinguish this Christian ethic from that of liberalism. Unconditional love is not the same thing as liberal tolerance. Tolerance implies a kind of indifference to what others are doing so long as they harm no one but themselves. But unconditional love corrects and forgives out of a concern for the well-being of the other. “From the standpoint of an ethic of unconditoinal love, liberal tolerance is, for the most part, indifference, and fails to help or correct people unless their actions affect others in a direct, blatant way” (p. 189).

    Indeed, Jardine goes on to argue that “[g]enerally speaking, liberalism is best understood as a distortion of–or better yet, a reductionisitc version of–Christiainity, or more specifically of the Christian ethic of unconditional love” (p. 189). Liberalism enjoins toelrance and avoiding persecution rather than the deeply involved personal love commanded by the Christian ethic. Christianity may have inspired the idea that all people are fundamentally equal and thus one could engage in productive exchanges with those outside of one’s family, clan, or culture, but liberalism goes too far in reducing all social relationships to market exchanges. The Christian ethic of unconditional love provides the foundation for faithful speaking before God and communal deliberation about the good.

    I think this would be a good point to ask some critical questions. Jardine has argued that liberalism leads to nihilism and that only Christianity can provide the means for a fruitful deliberation about the good, providing some guidance in the use of our powers as cocreators in a dynamic and creative, but ordered and reliable universe. He maintains that liberalism is a reduction of the Christian idea of equality and unconditional love to a bland tolerance. However, does he grapple sufficiently with what gave rise to liberal tolerance in the first place? As good as mutual correction and forgiveness sounds, it’s very difficult to see how this would apply to society as a whole, rather than to close-knit Christian communities. Liberalism flourished initially in part because the churches were being rather too zealous in the cause of fraternal correction. In other words, “mere” tolerance is no mean accomplishment and not something to be dismissed lightly. In a vast society tolerance may be the best thing we can give to a lot of our fellow citizens. Mutual correction requires a degree of intimacy and trust that isn’t easily attained. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, the modern nation-state may well be incapable of being a genuine community in the sense of providing an arena for communal deliberation about the good.

    Secondly, Jardine seems to conflate political liberalism, understood as a regime that refrains from enforcing a particular vision of the good, with liberalism as a way of life. The latter takes human autonomy as the highest good and is in that sense itself a comprehensive philosophy of life. But not all political liberals are liberals in this sense. In his book Two Faces of Liberalism the political philosopher John Gray distinguishes between liberalism understood as a way of life and liberalism understood as a kind of modus vivendi that allows different ways of life to peacefully co-exist. A modus vivendi liberalism isn’t necessarily committed to enforcing liberalism as a way of life, the kind of philosophy of life that may well lead to nihilism as Jardine fears.

    It might be worth pointing out that most people in modern Western liberal societies are not in fact nihilists. And this may be because they have adopted more of a modus vivendi style of liberalism that allows different ways of life to co-exist. This doesn’t mean that every person in a liberal society suddenly becomes an atomized individual unattached to any larger context for making sense of her life. Granted that liberalism as a way of life has certainly made inroads in these societies, it doesn’t seem to follow, either empirically or as a matter of logic, that it must overwhelm all more communitarian or traditional ways of life.

    And this brings me to one more point. Jardine, like some writers in the Radical Orthodoxy school of thought, holds that liberalism necessarily leads to nihilism and that only Christianity provides a viable alternative to liberalism. But I think we’re well beyond the point where Christian thinkers can ignore the plurality of other points of view in the world and treat secular liberalism as though it were the only serious rival to Christianity. The irreducible fact of pluralism – of a diverse array of religious and philosophical ways of life – is, in my view, precisely the best argument for some variety of modus vivendi liberalism. This would be an order that allows people to live in relative peace without denuding themselves of their particular religious, cultural, and other kinds of identity.

    That said, Jardine’s re-interpretation of the story of the fall and its relation to our technological capacities is suggestive, and something I think Christians would do well to bring to the debate on how those capacities should be used. They might well find common ground here with believers from other traditions. In the next (and probably final) post in this series I’ll talk a little about Jardine’s concrete proposals for social change in light of the discussion so far.

  • Does God want us to be free?

    (Switching gears here; we’re talking about political freedom now, not the metaphysical variety.)

    There’s been an interesting debate recently, swirling around some of President Bush’s more exuberant comments about political freedom being a “gift from the Almighty.” The reference comes from a recent David Brooks column (not accessible to us proles who don’t subscribe to the Times), the implication being that Bush’s confidence in the policies he’s pursued is rooted in a conviction that a providentially-ordered history is on his side.

    This belief has met with a storm of criticism from some of the more thoughtful conservative pundits and bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher), with Ramesh Ponnuru offering something of a defense.

    The issue I take it has two parts. Bush, allegedly, believes that there is something of an innate telos toward freedom in the created order in virtue of God’s creative and providential care. The second part is that his policies have a good long-run chance of success precisely because they are aligned with the “grain of the universe” so to speak. It might be helpful to point out that these two claims are detachable. Even if there is an inherent tendency toward freedom in human nature, it doesn’t follow that the best way to promote that tendency is the way Bush has chosen. In fact, it seems to me that there are good reasons to think otherwise, since going to war with and invading other countries requires coercion on a massive scale.

    But regarding the first claim – whether political liberty is part of what God wills for his creatures – I come at this from a slightly different angle. My take is that political liberty follows from human fallenness. Precisely because human beings are frail, selfish, limited in knowledge, prone to self-assertion, and vulnerable, liberty is necessary to create a sphere within which people are protected from the impositions of others. As fallen creatures we are prone to mistake our partial visions of the good with the Good itself and to be insufficiently modest in trying to get our fellow creatures to go along with them. If people weren’t sinners, political liberty as we know it would be superfluous because everybody would spontaneously do the right thing. Because our own knowledge is limited and our motives are suspect, the political order should limit the extent to which we can enforce our preferences on others. So, I guess I’m something of a post-lapsarian about freedom.

    It should be obvious that this is a more modest version of liberalism than the kind of progressive optimistic Whiggery criticized by some of the conservatives cited above. In fact, Christopher Insole, whose book on theology and political liberalism helped me clarify some of these ideas, expressly distinguishes a liberalism of human frailty from what he calls “crusading liberalism.” This is Whiggish liberalism that identifies the triumph of freedom with a single kind of political and economic order that will spread by means of inevitable historical progress.

    So you might say that the institutions that foster political liberty are a means of protecting vulnerable human selves from each other. This view doesn’t identify liberalism with any kind of utopia or “end of history,” and it recognizes that liberty can be embodied in a diversity of forms. It is also respectful of historically developed institutions that have acheived a measure of freedom and stability and would be wary of rashly overturning them in the name of some revolutionary project. Certainly I think any Christian would say that God wills the flourishing of human beings in this good but fallen world, and to the extent that the institutions of liberty contribute to that by creating spaces for human flourishing we can indeed say that God wants us to be free.

  • Rudy as Nixon and the varieties of conservatism

    Evangelical Christian and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who left his job at the White House, writes in today’s Washington Post that Rudy Giuliani is more of a Nixonian conservative than a religious one:

    In his elections, Nixon appealed to conservatives and the country as a culture warrior who was not a moral or religious conservative. “Permissiveness,” he told key aides, “is the key theme,” and Nixon pressed that theme against hippie protesters, tenured radicals and liberals who bad-mouthed America. This kind of secular, tough-on-crime, tough-on-communism conservatism gathered a “silent majority” that loved Nixon for the enemies he made.

    By this standard, Giuliani is a Nixon Republican. He is perhaps the most publicly secular major candidate of either party — his conflicts with Roman Catholic teaching make him more reticent on religion than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But as a prosecutor and mayor of New York, he won conservative respect for making all the right enemies: the ACLU, advocates of blasphemous art, purveyors of racial politics, Islamist mass murderers, mob bosses and the New York Times editorial page.

    Gerson goes on to point out that Giuliani is nevertheless at odds with his Church and its “consistent ethic of life” on nearly all issues:

    Giuliani is not only pro-choice. He has supported embryonic stem cell research and public funding for abortion. He supports the death penalty. He supports “waterboarding” of terror suspects and seems convinced that the conduct of the war on terrorism has been too constrained. Individually, these issues are debatable. Taken together, they are the exact opposite of Catholic teaching, which calls for a “consistent ethic of life” rather than its consistent devaluation. No one inspired by the social priorities of Pope John Paul II can be encouraged by the political views of Rudy Giuliani.

    What I think is interesting and significant here is the prying apart of Nixon-style social conservatism from a more religiously-inspired moral traditionalism. The former emphasizes law and order, patriotism, and a strong foreign policy, whereas the latter is more concerned with transcendent moral issues surrounding the dignity of the human person (Gerson might have added that the Vatican has frowned on preventive war too). These two types of “conservatism” have been contingently linked in the broader conservative coalition and blurred together under the rubric of “cultural conservatism,” but there’s no necessary connection between them, and I think Gerson’s right that in Giuliani we see how they can actually be at odds.

  • Justification and liberation

    Since the previous post on Braaten’s soteriology made it sound like he had a completely negative view of Liberation Theology, I thought I’d try to set out the position he sketches in his chapter on the Two Kingdoms principle, which tries to put liberation in the context of eschatology and the coming Kingdom of God.

    The “Two Kingdoms” view has pretty bad press outside (and even within) Lutheran circles. In distorted forms it seems to bifurcate life into a purely secular realm of politics, economics, and society and a “spiritual” realm of faith. This has led some to charge the Two Kingdoms view with lending support to political quietism in the face of tyranny and oppression.

    Such a perspective seems hard to square with the life of Luther, who had no compunctions against holding political rulers accountable to the standards of God’s justice (obviously Luther’s judgment wasn’t always spot on in this area, but he certainly didn’t take the view that “religion” had no right to influence political life). However, some later Lutherans do seem to have adopted the kind of political quietism or support of the status quo in the name of the “Two Kingdoms” doctrine.

    Braaten’s goal isn’t to defend everything that has sailed under the Two Kingdoms flag, but to identify the permanent insight expressed by this concept. This has two essential parts. The first is that there are two powers at work in the world, God and Satan. Luther’s theology was very dualistic in the sense that he saw the world as the theater of the great struggle between God and the Devil, even though there was never any doubt about the ultimate outcome. “The broad backdrop of the gospel picture of Jesus as the Christ features the power of God against the powers of evil at work in the whole of creation. Jesus brings the power of God’s rule into history, confronts the demonic forces, and wins a victory which spells ultimate freedom for human beings” (p. 133).

    So, God is at work in the world to overcome all the powers of darkness that threaten human beings. However, there is another distinction to be made in the way that God is at work in the world. Luther used the expression of the “two hands” of God to point to these two ways in which God works in the world for the good of human creatures:

    The “left hand of God” is a formula meaning that God is universally at work in human life through structures and principles commonly operative in political, economic, and cultural institutions that affect the life of all. The struggle for human rights occurs within this realm of divine activity. (pp. 133-34)

    The “Right hand of God,” however, refers to the work of the Gospel properly speaking:

    [N]o matter how much peace and justice and liberty are experienced in these common structures of life, they do not mediate “the one thing needful.” This is the function of the gospel of God in Jesus Christ, the work of the “right hand of God.” The scandal of the gospel is that salvation is a sheer gift of grace, given freely by God for Christ’s sake and received through faith alone. It is meritorious for a society to grant and guarantee to all its citizens the basic human rights, but high marks in this area do not translate into the righteousness that counts before God in the absolute dimension. (p. 134)

    The point here isn’t that there are two spheres of life somehow cut off from one another, but that there are two dimensions to God’s work:

    Historical liberation and eternal salvation are not one and the same thing. They should not be equated. The gospel is not one of the truths we hold to be self-evident; it is not an inalienable right which the best government in the world can do anything about. There are many people fighting valiantly on the frontline of legitimate liberation movements who are not in the least animated by the gospel. The hope for liberation is burning in the hearts of millions of little people struggling to free themselves from conditions of poverty and tyranny. When they win this freedom, should they be so fortunate, they have not automatically therewith gained the freedom for which Christ has set us free (Gal. 5:1). This is the barest minimum of what we intend to convey by the two-kingdoms perspective. (pp. 134-5)

    The point here is simple: political liberation, freedom from oppression and poverty, and more just social structures are all things that the Spirit of God is at work to bring about, but they aren’t the whole content of what we mean by the gospel. Even if a perfectly just society were to be realized, human beings would still be oppressed by sin, guilt, anxiety, disease, old age, and death. The gospel is the power to defeat these “last enemies.” I don’t know enough about Liberation Theology to know if it’s accurate to say that some liberation theologians have tended to reduce the gospel to political liberation only. However, it does seem to me that such a reduction has been a temptation of liberal Protestant theology in North America.

    But it still may seem like this account of God’s work in the world is excessively dualistic. Is there some principle that unites both dimensions of the divine work? Braaten thinks that such a principle is found in the “eschatological horizon” of God’s coming kingdom:

    The realm of creation and the realm of redemption share the same eschatological future horizon. The doctrines of creation and law are linked to the eschatological goal of the world to which the church points in its message of the coming kingdom. The theme of eschatology relates not only to the order of salvation (ordo salutis) but also to the fact and future of ongoing creation. The orders of creation are not autonomous; there is an eschatological consummation (apokatastasis ton panton) of all things previewed and preenacted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ of God. (p. 135)

    The order of creation and the order of redemption are thus united in the single future they share as aspects of the coming kingdom:

    The church’s eschatological message thus combines the two dimensions of hope: hope for the poor and hope for sinners. The poor clamor for justice and sinners cry for justification. It is intolerable for the church to separate these concerns. The church is to take the message of the kingdom into the real world where the demons are running riot and where the hand of God is stirring the cauldron of secular existence in all its political, economic, and social dimensions. We must strive for a comprehensive understanding of the kingdom of God which embraces two dimensions at the same time. The vertical dimension of the gospel mediates an encounter with the absolute transcendence of God; the horizontal dimension of the coming kingdom speaks of the encounter with Christ in the person of our needy neighbor. The depth dimension reveals our human condition of sin and estrangement; the breadth dimension tangles with the powers of evil on the plane of everyday historical existence. The personal dimension lifts up each individual as infinitely valuable in the sight of God; the political dimension looks to the quality of justice and liberty that prevails in the land. The symbol of the kingdom of God is multidimensional, uniting these vertical and personal dimensions with horizontal and political dimensions of the coming kingdom. (pp. 135-6)

    Because liberation and justification are two aspects of the same coming kingdom, it’s imperative for Christians to bring the gospel to bear on the struggle for greater justice between people:

    The love of God for Christ’s sake and the commitment to human rights for the sake of humanity are joined in the picture of what God is doing for the world in the history of Jesus Christ. The one God involved in the struggle for human liberation from hunger, misery, oppression, ignorance, and all the powers of sin and evil is none other than the Father of Jesus Christ who is reconciling the whole world to himself. The signs of liberation are anticipations of the total salvation the world is promised in Christ. (p. 137)

    While Braaten clearly wants to keep God’s work of justification as the center of the gospel from which all else radiates, political liberation finds its place as a way in which we anticipate God’s coming kingdom and participate in God’s work of releasing human beings from the powers that oppress them. I think this is definitely a strength of Braaten’s position that it maintains the distinction between these two dimensions while keeping them related to God’s future for the world. What do readers think?

  • Jardine’s Making and Unmaking of Technological Society

    One of the pleasures of moving is that in going through all your earthly possessions you rediscover books that you either hadn’t read or hadn’t fully digested. One such book of mine is Murray Jardine’s The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society. I think I may have blogged about it a bit a few years ago, but I thought I might revisit parts of it.

    Jardine’s central argument is that the moral malaise of modern Western society is the result of the fact that we have acquired massive new powers to alter the natural and human environment but lack a corresponding moral framework for guiding our choices about how to use that power.

    The reason for this is that traditional moral theoires assumed a relatively static view of the natural and social orders and therefore have a difficult time providing guidance to us once we’ve acquired the ability to radically alter those orders. One proposed solution is that offered by liberalism: the proper moral order for society is the one which maximizes individual choice so long as those choices don’t harm others and so long as people don’t impose their values on others.

    However, Jardine makes the now-familiar criticism of liberalism that, since it lacks a substantive concept of the good life, it is unable to give a coherent account of why the non-imposition of values should trump all other values or what constitutes harm to others. Abortion provides an excellent example: all parties to the debate agree that it’s wrong to harm the innocent, but they disagree about whether abortion counts as a case of such harm. Ultimately, Jardine argues, liberalism results in nihilism since it can provide no solid foundation for moral values, and thus doesn’t provide a workable alternative to traditional natural law theories of morality.

    What’s needed, Jardine says, is a moral framework that provides guidance for our choices while recognizing the changeability of the natural and social orders. His view is that recovering a geniunely biblical idea of morality can provide such a framework because it explicitly recognizes human beings as co- or sub-creators, creatures who have a share in the Creator’s power to shape reality.

    I’ll try to post more thoughts on what Jardine takes to be the Christian alternative for grappling with our technological power soon.

  • Who is my neighbor?

    *Christopher has posted the text of a talk he recently gave on Christianity and the environment. It’s terrific stuff, with a very Lutheran and Benedictine flavor.

    I think that rooting our ethics (including our environmental ethics) in our response to what God has first done for us is exactly right and it’s one of the insights of Reformational Christianity that I resonate the most with.

    Andrew Linzey has written that one of the things that Christians can contribute to the movements for animal and environmental well-being is a sense of our solidarity in sin and our dependence upon grace. This can provide a powerful counterweight to temptations toward self-righteousness, as well as a motivation for doing good without falling into despair or utopianism.