A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Francis Spufford’s speech to religion’s cultured despisers

    This essay from Francis Spufford has been getting flagged quite a bit in my little corner of the Internet. Spufford is an English author who writes mostly non-fiction (his recent book Red Plenty was the subject of a book event at Crooked Timber this summer). Spufford’s essay seems to be a summary of his new book Unapologetic, a defense of Christian faith that carries ths subtitle “Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.”

    Since I’ve been deep in Schleiermacher recently, this set off some bells for me, and indeed Spufford’s argument, at least based on the article, does seem like a sort of updating of Schleiermacher’s argument for thinking of religion as an essential aspect of human nature which is rooted in a particular kind of feeling.

    Spufford writes:

    The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.

    As Scheleirmacher said in his Speeches, religion is a “taste for the infinite,” and in The Christian Faith he defined it as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Doctrine, for Schleiermacher, is an elaboration of this feeling, but the feeling–piety–comes first and is more basic. Theology takes this as its starting point–it doesn’t try to “prove” God’s existence. (Schleiermacher does allow that philosophy may construct arguments for God’s existence on its own terms, but this has little to do with the life of living faith.) Like Spufford, Schleiermacher didn’t deny that religion makes truth-claims, but its living heart is feeling.

  • Schleiermacher vs. theistic evolutionism

    So-called theistic evolutionists sometimes distinguish themselves from creationists by saying that God used evolution to creation life on earth, rather than creating it directly through a special divine act. I’m generally sympathetic to this view, at least in the sense that I’m a theist who believes that evolution is the best account going of how life developed on earth.

    However, after reading Schleiermacher, I’m having second thoughts about theistic evolution, or at least how it’s frequently explained. This isn’t because Schleiermacher was a “creationist”–at least not in the sense that we would think of that term. He certainly didn’t take the biblical creation stories to be offering historical or scientific accounts of how God made the world.

    What he did think was that everything that exists is an expression of the divine creativity. Schleiermacher has an austerely non-anthropomorphic view of God: it’s a mistake, he argues, to think of God as one cause among other finite cause, or as one agent among others. There are not divine actions, but a single, eternal divine activity that expresses itself temporally in the unfolding of the created universe. God doesn’t act in response to events in the world on an ad hoc basis; everything that happens, happens because it is part of the whole created order which is willed by God. Science is capable, in principle, of giving a fully adequate account of the interconnections between events in the world; at the same time, though, the entire created order is grounded in the single divine creative act.

    This implies, according to Schleiermacher, that for God there is no distinction between means and ends. Thus, to talk about God using evolution as a means of bringing about some other good (e.g., the existence of human beings) is to lapse back into the very anthropomorphic language he criticizes. Everything that exists is inextricably bound up with everything else, and we are in no position to suss out what is an end and what is a means. Or more accurately, everything is both end and means  because everything that exists is interdependent. Regarding the divine wisdom, he says this: “There is nothing outside the world which could be used as means; all things within it, rather, are so ordered that viewed in connexion with one another they each stand related as parts to the whole; while every particular in itself is so entirely both things–means and end–that each of these categories is constantly abrogating itself and passing over into the other” (The Christian Faith, § 168).

    So I think Schleiermacher would say that “theistic evolutionism,” at least in some forms, is guilty of errors similar to those of “vulgar” creationism. That is, to the extent that it tries to identify certain natural processes as means that God uses to achieve a particular end, it is still thinking of God as a finite, personal agent. He would deny, I think, that Christians have any particular stake in the theological significance of evolution. Christian faith is grounded in our experience of redemption in Christ, and this transfigures our view of creation, allowing us to see it, in its entirety, as a gift of God’s good pleasure.

  • How “liberal” is Schleiermacher?

    Before I started reading him, I had some preconceptions about Schleiermacher, owing in large part to his reputation as the father of “liberal” theology. But the more I read him, the more convinced I am that those preconceptions were wrong.

    First, I had assumed that Schleiermacher built his theology on the foundation of a “generic,” supposedly universal human religious experience. Yet he’s quite explicit that Christian dogmatics is essentially a reflection on the specifically Christian experience of being redeemed by Christ. The famous “feeling of absolute dependence” is, it seems, an explication of this experience, not a more foundational concept from which it is derived. It does seem that Schleiermacher regarded human beings as having an innate capacity for religious experience, but the content of Christian religious experience is not derivable from this.

    Second, I was under the impression that Schleiermacher regarded doctrines as mere “expressions” of subjective religious experience without cognitive purchase on reality. This now seems completely wrong to me. It’s true that he says that dogmatics is an elaboration of Christian religious experience, but this seems to mean that dogmatic theology should make statements that, ultimately, derive their authority from Christians’ experience of redemption in Christ. We might put it this way: Christian dogmatic theology is the collection of statements about God and the world that must be true if Christian religious experience is valid or veridical. This method actually seems quite similar to the one used by many of the early church fathers–the debates over, for instance, the two natures of Christ were driven by considering what must be the case for Christ to be our redeemer. This is not “subjectivism” in some pernicious sense; rather, it roots theological reflection in the Christian experience of being saved by Jesus.

    Both of these points seem closely related to the overall purpose of Schleiermacher’s dogmatics: he’s writing theology for the church, not as an exercise in free-floating speculation. In many ways, he seems close to some of the “post-liberals” who have so stridently criticized the liberalism Schleiermacher is said to have inaugurated. That said, I’m only through the first volume of The Christian Faith, and I’m not at all confident that I’ve fully grasped what Schleiermacher is doing. So consider these some provisional thoughts.

  • Barth on universalism and the fear of antinomianism

    One question should for a moment be asked, in view of the “danger” with which one may see this concept [i.e., universalism] gradually surrounded. What of the “danger” of the eternally skeptical-critical theologian who is ever and again suspiciously questioning, because fundamentally always legalistic and therefore in the main morosely gloomy? Is not his presence among us currently more threatening than that of the unbecomingly cheerful indifferentism or even antinomianism, to which one with a certain understanding of universalism could in fact deliver himself? This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.

    –Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, p. 62

  • Speaking of equality…

    From this really interesting interview with philosopher Elizabeth Anderson:

    The idea that human beings are fundamentally equals from a moral point of view is ancient. I suspect it can be traced all the way back to the origins of monotheism, in the idea that we are all equally creatures of God, all made in God’s image, all in principle equally eligible for salvation. However for most of history most monotheistic churches have promised equality only in the next life; in this one a thousand reasons were invented to uphold various forms of social, political, and religious hierarchy.

    I also recommend Anderson’s paper “What is the point of equality?” (PDF), though it’s a bit philosophically dense.

  • A quick note on sexual equality in the church

    Those who follow such things know that there’s an ongoing debate in the evangelical world between “egalitarians” and “complementarians.” As you might guess, the former believe that men and women are equal–at least in the sense relevant to things like church leadership, while the latter maintain that men and women have “complementary” roles–with women playing the subordinate one. Recently, blogger Rachel Held Evans got into it with some guys associated with something called “The Gospel Coalition” over a rather provocative (to put it mildly) excerpt they posted from a book by Reformed pastor and noted crank Douglas Wilson. This led to quite the donnybrook in the evangelical blog-world.

    As a non-evangelical I don’t have a dog in this fight per se. But witnessing it makes me grateful to belong to a church tradition where women’s leadership is taken for granted. This isn’t to say that mainline Protestant churches aren’t still infected by subtle and not-so-subtle forms of sexism, but they are by and large institutionally committed to the full equality of women at all levels of leadership. I consider this issue to lie very close to the heart of the Gospel. If men and women stand before God on no other ground than his creative and redeeming grace, and if, as the Reformation taught, all baptized Christians are ministers of Christ, then what is the justification for gender hierarchy? The prevalent ones seem to boil down to a holdover from pre-modern social norms, a literalistic reading of a handful of biblical passages, or a dubious metaphysics of the human person.

  • Miracles according to Schleiermacher

    Schleiermacher treats miracles in part 1, section 1 of The Christian Faith under the more general heading of God’s creation and preservation of the world. He argues that the “interdependence” of finite beings in the world is fully compatible with each thing’s dependence on God at each moment of its existence. God is not one finite cause among others, but of an entirely different order of causality. God undergirds the entire order of nature, but does not appear within that order as one cause interacting with others. This seems similar to the traditional Thomistic distinction between “primary” and “secondary” causes.

    He then goes on to argue against the conception of miracles as events that violate, interrupt, or overturn the causal order of finite beings (or what he often calls the “interrelatedness of nature”). That is, he denies that a miracle is a direct act of God that bypasses or dispenses with finite causality. Rather, God acts in and through finite things. Schleiermacher makes the familiar argument that if God had to intervene in nature to achieve the divine purposes, it would be a sign of a defect in God’s ordering of the world. “It follows from this that the most perfect representation of omnipotence would be a view of the world which made no use of such an idea” (47.1). He also maintains that such events would “destroy the whole system of nature” (47.2) in that they would break the link between past and future events. For Schleiermacher, such a view of miracles undermines the feeling of absolute dependence of every thing on God because it shows that the order of nature does not reflect God’s will–since God, by hypothesis, has to intervene in order to make the order of the world conform to his will. Moreover, Schleiermacher points out, we have no way of knowing that any purported miraculous event doesn’t have some deeper natural explanation that we’re simply not aware of.

    “In this way,” he concludes,

    everything–even the most wonderful thing that happens or has happened–is a problem for scientific research; but, at the same time, when it in any way stimulates the pious feeling, whether through its purpose or in some other way, that is not in the lest prejudiced by the conceivable possibility of its being understood in the future. Moreover, we free ourselves entirely from a difficult and highly precarious task with which Dogmatics has so long laboured in vain, i.e. the discovery of definite signs which shall enable us to distinguish the false and diabolical miracle and the divine and true. (47.3)

    Schleiermacher’s view strikes me as very Reformed (not surprising, consider that he was a Reformed churchman). After all, if God orders everything that happens, why would God need to act outside of ordinary means to bring about his purposes? But it also makes me wonder how much the “feeling of absolute dependence” is itself filled with content that is specific to Reformed Christianity. Suppose instead we took the signature Christian religious experience to be something like “a feeling of being absolutely valued, or loved”: would that, using Schleiermacher’s method, yield a different understanding of God’s omnipotence (and thus also of miracles)?

    Even still, I think Schleiermacher’s argument has merit. For example, many miracle stories in the Bible don’t seem to require us to view them as all-out suspensions or violations of the causal order. Often they seem to involve God working through created means (such as the faith that is deemed to be required to make some of Jesus’ healings efficacious). Schleiermacher also seems correct that an event can have religious significance without us being able to say definitively that it occurred “outside” the causal nexus. In fact, it’s not at all clear how we’d ever be in a position to make that judgment definitively.

  • Schleiermacher’s “natural heresies”

    For reasons that aren’t entirely clear even to me, I started reading Friedrich Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith recently. And the weird thing is, I’m really enjoying it. Schleiermacher is (in)famous as the “father of modern theology” or sometimes “the father of liberal theology”: he tried to re-establish Christian faith on a basis that took into account Enlightenment critics but also went beyond the narrow and sterile rationalist constraints that some Enlightenment thinkers tried to place on religion. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, is not based in thought (philosophy) or action (ethics), but a kind of experience, which he famously described as a “feeling of absolute dependence.” As I read him, this isn’t a purely subjective experience, but a clue to or an apprehension of an objectively existing relationship between the world and God, albeit one that we only become aware of in relation to ourselves. This experience is both the “datum” of religion and something which it is the goal of the religious life to cultivate.

    This root religious experience, however, never comes to us “pure” so to speak. It always appears in a concrete form, which is conditioned by social, cultural, and historical factors, among other things. So, for Christians, the core religious experience is the experience of Jesus as our Redeemer. Everything in Christian theology flows from this. (This experience is always received within a “communion,” or church. Schleiermacher was no religious individualist.) According to Schleiermacher, Jesus possessed a perfect “God-consciousness”–which for him seems to mean something like an unwavering experience of this absolute dependence on the source of being. As Christians, we “catch” this God-consciousness from Jesus by being part of the church, and gradually we come to share in it more and more fully. (I’ve only just finished the–128 page!–introduction to The Christian Faith, so a lot of the details haven’t been worked out yet. But I think this is the general gist.)

    One interesting thing that falls out of this account of the “essence” of Christianity is that Schleiermacher is able to explain what he calls the four “natural heresies” that tend to arise throughout Christian history. If the core of Christian experience is that of Jesus as our Redeemer, then this implies that (1) we are in need of redemption, (2) we can be redeemed, (3) Jesus is sufficiently unlike us that he can be our Redeemer, and (4) Jesus is sufficiently like us that he can be our Redeemer. So, according to Schleiermacher, your four modal heresies are those that deny one of these four propositions:

    –“Pelagianism”–we don’t need redemption as such, though we may need someone who can show us how to be a little better.

    –“Manicheism”–creation is so corrupted/wicked that it is essentially irredeemable.

    –“Nazaritism” or “Ebionitism”–Jesus is just a human like us, so does not posses any special quality that can redeem us.

    –“Docetism”–Jesus only appeared to be fully human, and so is too unlike us to provide the kind of redemption we need.

    Schleiermacher is careful to point out that these are idealized types, and may not be perfectly instantiated in history. But he thinks that identifying them can help further clarify what the essence of Christianity consists in. In any event, I found the discussion enlightening.

  • A few points on “liberal Christianity”

    The events at the recent general convention of the Episcopal Church have generated a wave of the usual outrage/concern-trolling/Schadenfreude over the supposed demise of liberal/mainline Christianity. Conservatives have been riding this hobby horse for years, arguing that while churches that espouse more liberal theological or social positions have seen declines in membership, more conservative churches have been growing (or at least declining at a slower rate). The lesson–sometimes explicit but more often implicit–is supposed to be that embracing conservatism is the key to growth (which is in turn understood as virtually synonymous with success).

    As is so often the case, the reality is a bit more complicated than this narrative suggests. Certainly all is not well in the mainline, but there are a few things we should keep in mind:

    –Most major church bodies in the U.S. are experiencing some degree of decline, including the Roman Catholic Church and the famously conservative Southern Baptists.

    –Churches labeled “conservative” aren’t necessarily growing because of their emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy; many of them downplay theology in favor of various self-help, personal growth techniques; “prosperity” preaching; or right-wing politics that have little to do with the historic Christian faith.

    –Churches that take “liberal” stances on political or social issues aren’t necessarily “liberal” on theology or liturgy. Liberal or progressive social positions can be based on “conservative” theology, and many mainline churches are quite traditional in their liturgy and approach to worship.

    –Mainline denominations are actually not as liberal as people think but contain a wide range of theological and political views. For instance, in 2008, Barack Obama got only 44 percent of the white mainline Protestant vote (see, e.g., this study). Similarly, a review of official church statements on issues like marriage and abortion would show that mainline churches have hardly bought into “sexual liberation” hook, line, and sinker.

    –Liberals are often accused of “capitulating to the culture,” but many positions espoused by liberal churches (on the economy, war, or immigration, for example) are actually “countercultural” with respect to the dominant American culture.

    None of this shows that liberal Christianity has a bright future–or that mainline denominations don’t have major institutional problems that need to be addressed. But I’m not convinced that “liberalism” explains these churches’ problems or that being less liberal is a panacea for what ails them.

  • Getting Anselm right

    I’m reading Robert Sherman’s King, Priest, and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of the Atonement, and I may provide a more complete summary of the book later. But for now I just wanted to highlight Sherman’s spirited defense of St. Anselm’s theory of the Atonement against some of its sloppier critics.

    Longtime readers may know that this is a pet peeve of mine: people who use Anselm as the whipping boy for everything that’s wrong with Western understandings of Christ’s work on the cross. For instance, Anselm is routinely accused of holding to the crudest form of penal substitution when, in fact, he explicitly denies penal substitution!

    Sherman takes aim at those critics who say that Anselm’s God is modeled on a petty feudal lord who must extract his pound of flesh to assuage his wounded honor. He notes that this manages to get Anselm wrong in a couple of fundamental ways. First, he points out that it totally misunderstands Anselm’s conception of God’s “honor.” Honor in Anselm’s scheme refers to the beauty and order of creation: sin can’t “hurt” God, but it can mar God’s good creation, which disrupts the divine intentions for that creation. And this is not some esoteric interpretation of Anselm; he’s very clear about it, as Sherman points out:

    As far as God himself is concerned, nothing can be added to his honor or subtracted from it…. But when the particular creature, either by nature or reason, keeps the order that belongs to it and is, as it were, assigned to it, it is said to obey God and to honor him…. But when it does not will what it ought, it dishonors God, as far as it is concerned, since it does not readily submit itself to his direction, but disturbs the order and beauty of the universe, as far as lies in it, although of course it cannot injure or stain the power and dignity of God. (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?, quoted by Sherman, p. 189)

    The “order and beauty” of the universe is “disturbed,” for instance, when God’s creatures are victimized and abused, or when the natural environment is despoiled. Human sin has real effects–but for Anselm these are not effects on God’s being per se.

    In fact, it literally makes no sense on Anselm’s understanding of God to suggest–as some critics do–that God’s pride is hurt by sin, and that he demands a blood-sacrifice to restore his honor. This is because, for Anselm, God is impassible–i.e., not subject to change–so nothing creatures can do can affect God’s blessedness. This doesn’t mean that sin isn’t serious–the disruption and defacement of creation threatens to undo God’s purposes. For this reason, God can’t simply “overlook” sin. (Sherman has an interesting discussion here of why simply appealing to the parable of the prodigal son isn’t sufficient to show that the Atonement doesn’t involve reparation for sin; since other creatures are affected by sin, more than simply forgiveness is needed.)

    For Anselm, Christ’s sacrifice is not done to appease God’s wounded pride, but to restore the damage done to creation by human sin. The beauty of Christ’s self-giving, even unto death on the cross, “blots out” the ugliness of sin. As Sherman points out, Anselm’s conception of justice is more aesthetic than strictly retributive (Christ’s sacrifice is “a gift exceeding every debt” as David Bentley Hart has put it). Moreover, Christ’s sacrifice is not just to “cover” human sin, but to restore humanity to its proper end. In Jesus a new humanity is created–one in which we can participate. This restorative function is a key part of how Anselm understands the Atonement.

    None of this is to suggest that Anselm is immune to criticism. But we should criticize what he actually said, not what we might imagine he said.