A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Updated thoughts on Christianity and capitalism

    A while back I wrote a post called “What’s a Christian to do with capitalism?” in which I tried to outline some principles for a Christian approach to economics. I’ve since thought that those principles weren’t stated as clearly or exactly as they should have been, and I’ve updated the post to try and reflect this.

  • John Wesley on slavery and human rights

    I’ve been reading Theodore Runyon’s The New Creation: John Wesley’s Theology Today, which aims to offer a synoptic account of Wesley’s thought and its relevance for the contemporary church. As the title suggests, Runyon argues that the notion of the renewal of creation is key to understanding Wesley’s theology. Specifically, it refers to the renewal of the image of God in humanity through the power of divine grace. Runyon offers the analogy of a mirror to help understand Wesley’s account of the “image of God.” It doesn’t refer to some inherent capacity of human nature, such as reason or freedom, but is a relational notion: we receive the love of God and we reflect it back to the world around us. Wesley was a genuine “evangelical catholic” who combined the Reformation emphasis on justification by faith with an equally strong belief that God’s grace would transform human life and, ultimately, the entire creation.

    In the final chapter, “Wesley for Today,” Runyon discusses how Wesley’s theology might be applicable to some current pressing social and political issues. And in articulating Wesley’s approach to what we would now call human rights, Runyon draws extensively on Wesley’s ardent opposition to slavery, which I admit I wasn’t really aware of.

    Here’s a pamphlet Wesley published on the question of slavery. An excerpt with Wesley’s response to certain pro-slavery arguments:

    “But the furnishing us with slaves is necessary for the trade, and wealth, and glory of our nation” [says the defender of slavery]. Here are several mistakes. For, First, wealth is not necessary to the glory of any nation; but wisdom, virtue, justice, mercy, generosity, public spirit, love of our country. These are necessary to the real glory of a nation; but abundance of wealth is not. Men of understanding allow that the glory of England was full as high in Queen Elizabeth’s time as it is now; although our riches and trade were then as much smaller, as our virtue was greater. But, Secondly, it is not clear that we should have either less money or trade, (only less of that detestable trade of man-stealing,) if there was not a Negro in all our islands, or in all English America. It is demonstrable, white men, inured to it by degrees, can work as well as them; and they would do it, were Negroes out of the way, and proper encouragement given them. However, Thirdly, I come back to the same point: Better no trade, than trade procured by villany. It is far better to have no wealth, than to gain wealth at the expense of virtue. Better is honest poverty, than all the riches bought by the tears, and sweat, and blood, of our fellow-creatures.

    And here’s a letter–one of his last, written on his deathbed–to William Wilberforce, then a member of parliament:

    Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God before you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.

    Wesley, Runyon notes, is sometimes caricatured as a conservative, or even reactionary, “high-church Tory,” but according to Runyon this misunderstands his reasons for, e.g., supporting the monarchy. Wesley distrusted democracy precisely because he feard that it would ride roughshod over the liberty of the individual, particularly religious liberty. He had first-hand experience to draw on, as early Methodists were often attacked by angry mobs, sometimes whipped up by local authorities. Wesley saw “liberty under law” in the form of a constitutional monarchy as the best defense against mob rule. He also observed the hypocrisy of American colonists complaining about the “tyranny” of the crown while at the same time maintaining the institution of chattle-slavery. Had Wesley lived to see the establishment of genuine liberal democracy he might have changed his mind, but his opposition at the time was rooted in a concern for what we would today call human rights. And for Wesley, this inherent dignity was in turn based on the creative love of God.

  • From religious diversity to “confessional pluralism”

    In the final chapter of The Many Faces of Christology, Tyron Inbody looks at the issue of religious diversity. He considers the standard responses–exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism–but finds them wanting for familiar reasons. Exclusivism, in addition to resting on a questionable and selective interpretation of the biblical witness, greatly exacerbates the problem of evil by implying that the vast majority of the human race will be denied even the possibility of salvation. Inclusivism, while appearing to be more open-minded, is in the end a kinder, gentler form of Christian exclusivism, implying that the exclusive basis of salvation is still the Christian revelation. Finally, pluralism, in insisting on an essential similarity among religions, tends to smuggle in particularist assumptions. For instance, John Hick’s pluralism makes a number of assumptions that are really theistic in nature and not neutral between the various religious traditions.

    Instead of adopting one of the familiar perspectives, Inbody argues for what he calls “confessional pluralism.” This form of pluralism makes two key affirmations. First, it insists that all religious traditions are irreducibly contextual. That is to say, none can claim to have a neutral, “god’s-eye” view of things. It entails “a lack of finality and absoluteness” and an affirmation of “modesty about theological claims” (p. 209). In other words, we can only speak about other religions from the perspective of our own particular viewpoint; we should therefore not claim to possess a “view from nowhere.”

    Second, confessional pluralism, in its Christian form, affirms the universal significance of Christ and interprets the plurality of religions from an explicitly Christian point of view. For instance, Inbody suggest that, arguing analogously from the triune nature of God, we can posit plurality as an irreducible fact about the world. The world is characterized by pluralism–including religious pluralism–because unity-in-difference is the character of the divine life itself. God is the Creator of all, the Wisdom that can be manifested in a multiplicity of religious traditions, and the Spirit that is at work in the world and in all cultures to bring creation to fulfillment.

    This perspective strikes me as very similar to the one developed by Marjorie Suchocki in her Divinity and Diversity (which I blogged about here and here), as well as the “confessionalism” of H. Richard Niebuhr. Inbody is arguing for an appreciation of pluralism, not from purportedly “universal” premises, but from explicitly Christian ones. Confessionalism as Inbody understands it can be pluralist in affirming that no one tradition possesses the unvarnished and complete truth, but that all the “great ways” embody part of that truth; it can also be particularist in claiming universal significance for the revelation of God in Jesus.

    Perhaps a good way to think about it is offered by John V. Taylor, the Anglican bishop and theologian. In his book The Christlike God, Taylor writes the following:

    The different ‘faces’ of God which are set forth [in the various world religions] will seem in some respects to be mutually contradictory, and for a long time we may not be ready to guess how, if at all, they will be reconciled. I believe we can confidently leave that in the hands of the future if we will only persevere in the agenda for today. And for us who are Christians this is, quite simply, in reverent appreciation of the beliefs and prayers of others, to affirm that, whatever else he is, God is Christlike–humble and vulnerable in his love–and that we have found in that revelation the salvation that all peoples look for. (p. 5)

    This seems to strike the kind of balance Inbody is talking about–neither surrendering our loyalty to the revelation we have received nor presuming to be in possession of the entire truth.

  • “Are you the one who is to come?”

    Tyron Inbody has a very interesting chapter on Christianity and Judaism in his Many Faces of Christology. With “post-Holocaust” theologies, he notes that the contention between Judaism and Christianity isn’t over Jesus’s teachings–which scholars now believe fell largely within the parameters of 1st-century Pharisaic Judaism. Nor is it over his death–which was not the fault of “the Jews” but of the Jerusalem politico-religious establishment and the Roman occupying government. It’s not, he contends, even necessarily over Jesus’s resurrection–resurrection was a core belief of the Pharisees, and Inbody cites the contemporary Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapide, who actually accepts that Jesus was resurrected. While this is obviously a minority view, Inbody argues that it shows that the resurrection as such is not incompatible with Judaism.

    But this also highlights where the true point of contention lies–in the messiahship of Jesus. Inbody points out that the resurrection does not per se prove that Jesus was the Messiah. Jews can, in principle, accept the fact of the resurrection. What faithful Jews deny, however, is that the world has been redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. This isn’t, as Christians sometimes like to think, because Jews wanted a “political-military” Messiah and thus couldn’t accept a “spiritual,” nonviolent one. While this view is self-flattering for Christians, it misses the point. That is, for Jews, the advent of the Messiah is inextricably linked with the redemption of the world–that is, the end of violence and suffering and the establishment of God’s universal kingdom. 1st-century Judaism had a variety of concepts of what the Messiah would be like, and even varied on whether the Messiah should be indentified with a specific individual at all. But the consistent theme was that the messianic age would user in peace, justice, and wholeness for God’s creation. Jewish rejection of the messianic status of Jesus isn’t due to “stubbornness” or “blindness” as much Christian tradition has had it, but can in fact be seen as a faithful response to God’s promises as they were revealed through the Torah and Prophets.

    Inbody argues that Christians were able to identify Jesus as the Messiah only by reinterpreting the meaning of messiahship. Christians, if they’re being honest, must admit that the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus did not establish God’s kingdom. Rather, Jesus provides a “foretaste” of the kingdom, which will only be established in its fullness at the end of time. Somewhat paradoxically, this shows that Christians and Jews may be closer together than it at first seems. If Christians view Jesus’s messiahship in terms of prolepsis and promise, then they have much in common with Jews who still await the coming of the Messiah. Both are awaiting the same Kingdom–God’s universal reign of shalom. Whether or not Jesus is the one who will reign as Messiah in that kingdom is ultimately an eschatological question that we can’t definitively settle now–even if we agree that Jesus was resurrected!

  • Christology and worries about “theosis”

    I’m reading Tyron L. Inbody’s The Many Faces of Christology, and while this isn’t a direct comment on the book, it is inspired by something he writes about.

    In discussing the Christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries, Inbody emphasizes that these were about soteriology first and foremost. All the seemingly esoteric talk about substance, person, essence, etc. was, at bottom, aimed at safeguarding the Christian experience of salvation. In other words, what kind of being must Jesus be/have been in order to be the Savior?

    Inbody uses this soteriological lens to discuss the debate between Arius and Athanasius. For Arius (according to Inbody) salvation was primarily a moral matter, so the Savior had to be a creature–someone whose pattern of life it was possible for us to replicate in our own lives. By contrast, Athanasius viewed salvation as more of an ontological matter–the Logos must be divine because it was the unity of the divine and human natures that makes our own “deification” and salvation from death and corruption possible.

    What was interesting to me about this discussion was that it enabled me to sympathize with Arius more than I had before. On Inbody’s account, not only was Arius concerned to safeguard the unity of God, but he also thought it was important for the Savior to be like us if we were to share in the sonship of Jesus, where sonship is understood as a moral relationship to God.

    It also made clearer to me some of the issues I have with talk of salvation as “deification” or theosis. On Athanasius’ view, human mortality is a result of our separation from God. What’s needed in order for us to be saved from death is for humanity to be united to deity in an ontological or metaphysical fashion.

    I have a couple of worries about this. First, contemporary science doesn’t really permit us to see mortality as a result of some spiritual “fall” that happened once upon a time. If we are to live beyond death, it will have to be the result of some supernatural act on God’s part.

    Secondly, the language of theosis–at least as it is sometimes used–seems to present salvation as a “sub-personal” affair: we’re saved by having the right “stuff” (God stuff) injected into our humanity. I realize this is a crude characterization of at least some versions of this view, but I think ontological language does easily lend itself to this kind of misuse.

    It has long seemed to me, rather, that Christians should think of salvation in fundamentally relational terms. That is to say, salvation consists in having a right relationship to God restored (and, correspondingly, a right relationship to other people and to the rest of the created order). I think some of the church fathers (e.g., Irenaeus) got this–by seeing salvation more in terms of Jesus reorienting humanity toward God rather than as the mere fact of the divine/human union understood in a metaphysical, quasi-substantialist sense. In other words, Jesus “re-narrates” human life (“reacapitulates” in Irenaeus’s terms) so that its relationship to God is restored.

    This doesn’t mean that Jesus is simply a moral teacher, as some crude “moral exemplar” Atonement theories have it. (Or that “sonship” should be understood in narrowly moral terms.) And I would certainly want to affirm the intention behind the creedal affirmations that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. But to see this union primarily in metaphsical or ontological terms may not be helpful if the nature of sin and salvation is understood in terms of relationship.

  • 25 books every Christian should read(?)

    That is, according to a book recently published by Harper under the auspices of Renovare, the evangelical-ish spiritual renewal movement. (Actually, since this book has the list, aren’t there 26 books every Christian should read? Seems like some sort of paradox there…)

    In any event, here’s the list, with titles I’ve read in bold. An asterisk means I’ve read at least selections.

    1. On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius
    2. Confessions, St. Augustine
    3. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Various
    4. The Rule of St. Benedict, St. Benedict
    5. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri*
    6. The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
    7. Revelations of Divine Love (Showings), Julian of Norwich
    8. The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis
    9. The Philokalia, Various
    10. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin*
    11. The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila
    12. Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross
    13. Pensees, Blaise Pascal
    14. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
    15. The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence
    16. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, William Law
    17. The Way of a Pilgrim, Unknown Author
    18. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
    19. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
    20. The Poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins*
    21. The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    22. A Testament of Devotion, Thomas R. Kelly
    23. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
    24. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
    25. The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen

    Of the ones I haven’t read, I most feel like I should read Benedict and Julian. One glaring omission that jumps out at me is Martin Luther. If I were adding something it would probably be his On Christian Liberty.

    Anyone care to suggest other titles they’d add to (or subtract from) the list?

    UPDATE: Tony Jones offers an alternative list he and some friends came up with here. It includes some good additions like Origen, Anselm, Wesley, and Luther, as well as some worthy books from more recent times (Barth, Gutierrez).

  • Resurrection and Docetism

    People sometimes argue against “spiritual” interpretations of the Resurrection of Jesus on the grounds that they are “Docetic”–that is, they deny the full reality of the Incarnation after the fashion of the ancient heresy of Docetism, which said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Specifically, it held that Jesus’ body was an illusion and he was not really crucified.

    Interestingly, however, in a dialogue on the Resurrection between British theologians Geoffrey Lampe and Donald MacKinnon published in the 60s, Lampe makes precisely the reverse argument:

    He shared our human death; and I remain convinced that his entry into life beyond death was not dissimilar in its mode from ours. What may await us on the other side of death must not, if the Incarnation is real and Christ is the second Adam, be a room into which his presence has not preceded us. Unless we take an impossibly ‘spiritualist’ view of our human make-up, we cannot lightly contemplate the dissolution of the body without which we are unable, since we are physical beings, to conceive of a personality. Yet the dissolution of the body is most certainly part of the universal lot of man. I do not find it possible to believe that bodily corruption, that ultimate negation, as it seems, of all human endeavor, aspiration and hope, can be something from which the manhood of Christ was exempt. If God will raise us from death to a new life of fuller communion with himself then this will be sheer miracle: God’s re-creative Word affirming us in the moment of our utter nothingness. And if Christ is the firstfruits of the dead, his Resurrection cannot be of a different order from this. A Resurrection of his physical body, such as is implied by the empty tomb and by some of the stories in the Gospels of his appearances, would point towards a docetic Christ who does not fully share the lot of men; unless, indeed, bodily corruption were to be regarded as being bound up with the sinfulness of man which Christ did not share (but, unless we accept an impossibly literalistic interpretation of Genesis 3 as factual history, it is impossible to hold that physical dissolution is not part of the Creator’s original and constant intention for his creatures in this world). Such a Resurrection, moreover, would offer in itself no promise of risen life beyond death for those who have to face both death and corruption. The miracle which we need would never yet have taken place.

    Lampe’s argument seems to boil down to this:

    1. For Jesus’ Resurrection to be meaningful to us, it must be similar in kind to the resurrection we hope for for ourselves.

    2. But we cannot hope for a “fleshly” resurrection (Lampe writes that “we clearly cannot expect to be raised in our fleshly bodies”).

    3. Therefore, Jesus’ Resurrection must not have been “fleshly.”

    I think Lampe is at least partly right about this. Christians sometimes gloss over what it means to talk about the “resurrection of the body”, but whatever it means it presumably can’t be that we will be raised in the very same bodies we have now. This is because human bodies decay, get eaten, get blown to bits, etc., and the particles they comprise end up in other material objects (including other people’s bodies). So it’s hard, if not impossible, to conceive how we could all be raised in our selfsame physical bodies.

    What we have to suppose instead, I think, is that we will be raised in new bodies–“spiritual” bodies, to use St. Paul’s phrase. These will be bodies that are fitted to whatever environment in which we will exist (“heaven” or the “new heaven and new earth” or whatever one’s preferred symbol is). In short, Christian hope is that we will, after death, enjoy fellowship with God and the blessed company of heaven. This requires, presumably, some medium of self-expression and interaction–which is what the “spiritual body” provides.

    Now, I’m not as convinced that it follows from this that Jesus’ Resurrection didn’t include the raising of his physical body or that his tomb wasn’t empty. Certainly the appearance stories in the gospels suggest that the form taken by the risen Jesus transcended the usual limitations of physicality. But could it be that his physical body was transmuted into the substance of his “spiritual body”? Maybe this indicates–as John Polkinghorne and others have suggested–that the new heavens and new earth will be, in some mysterious way, composed of the “stuff” of this universe, but “transposed” into a spiritual key. On that view, we could still speak of a degree of continuity between this physical world and the world to come, even if there isn’t a direct continuity between our fleshly bodies and our spiritual ones.

    Addendum: This isn’t directly relevant to the main point of the post, but I also like Lampe’s way of describing how judgment and mercy are united on the Cross:

    I cannot set acceptance over against judgement as though there were any incompatibility between them. The Cross is a place of judgement and condemnation. Not of any judgement or condemnation of Jesus by God the Father. The judge is Jesus. Calvary is a place of execution, the execution of the Son of God by sinners, but by becoming this it is made to be Christ’s judgement seat. Man’s sin is disclosed there in its fullest odiousness. It is shown up and condemned by its encounter with steadfast love. Christ’s acceptance of sinners is no easy tolerance. He offers no sanction for that artificial, blindly uncritical, ‘Christian goodwill’ which sometimes does duty for true charity. The Cross itself is the measure of the cost of acceptance. The width of the gulf between heaven and hell is revealed there, where the greatest act of human sin is wrought out in a darkness that covered all the land. Acceptance at the hands of the victim of that sin is itself the judgement and condemnation of sin; for it is only when the sinner is accepted that the judgement of his sin becomes effective, and only divine love is able to condemn sin by accepting the sinner. It makes no compromise with sin, nor does it need to be safeguarded from contamination by sinners, for it has sovereign power to reclaim them in the act of accepting them. Acceptance and judgement do not have to be balanced against each other. At the Cross the divine mercy, justice and truth are united, for they are inseparable aspects of that definitive declaration of the ways of God to man. [Emphasis added–L.M.]

  • Participatory soteriology and the shape of Christian life together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pelagius for the rest of us?

    (I tweeted a bit about this earlier, but I thought I might as well write some thoughts into a proper blog post.)

    As if to confirm our most stereotypical expectations, a proposal is being put before a diocese of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta to “rehabilitate” Pelagius by reversing the Council of Carthage’s (5th century) condemnation of Pelagian teachings.

    Now, I’m willing to believe that Pelagius got a raw deal in being tarred as an arch-heretic. Given the dearth of extant writings, it’s quite possible that he was unfairly targeted by the ecclesiastical powers that be. And certainly modern mainstream Christianity is–for better or worse–more doctrinally latitudinarian than the early church was.

    Nevertheless, I can’t shake the impression that, possibly because of the lack of reliable primary sources, Pelagius has become a kind of cipher–a blank screen upon which modern liberal Christians like to project their idealized version of an optimistic, nature-loving, life-affirming Christianity. In other words, the opposite of everything they dislike about Augustinian Christianity (in what is usually caricatured form).

    This is similar and even related to the vogue for a vaguely mystical, eco-sensitive “Celtic Christianity” that, again, often bears little resemblance to the real historical deal. Pelagius is often upheld (by J. Philip Newell, for example) as the paragon and forefather of Celtic Christian spirituality.

    What ought to tip us off that something fishy is afoot here is that the popular version of Pelagian-Celtic Christianity is strikingly conformable to the concerns of comfortable, middle-class westerners: the affirmation of everyone’s inherent goodness, a rejection of the doctrine of original sin, a generalized eco-spirituality, and a belief in an immanent God that resembles a vague life-force more than the rather demanding God of the Bible.

    A good antidote to this whole line of thinking that still takes some of the underlying concerns seriously is Paul Santmire’s Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology. Santmire, a Lutheran eco-theologian, wants to recover theological themes that can support care for the environment, but he also departs from the Matthew Fox-neo-Pelagian crowd at a couple of key points.

    First, Santmire strongly affirms that eco-justice must go hand-in-hand with social justice. The slums of the globe’s vast mega-cities teem with millions of desperately poor people for whom the reality of injustice and radical evil are palpable everyday realities. From this, Santmire infers a need for a robust theology of sin and atonement:

    [A]lthough Fox talks regularly about “justice-making,” he chiefly seems to be thinking about a revolution of consciousness that is going to transform the world, not unlike the idea of “Consciousness III,” proposed by Charles Reich in The Greening of America during the heyday of the 1960s. In Fox’s major works, we encounter little attention to the often stalemated, anguished struggles of the oppressed, which sometimes can last for decades, even longer, and then, with some regularity, still be lost.

    The Christian masses throughout the ages have likewise lived and died with the bitter reality of struggle. Struggle against overwhelming odds has been their daily bread. This is why they have turned again and again to the figure of the crucified, and have struggled all the more desperately in this instance to make sense out of this apparently senseless but nevertheless redemptive death. (p. 22)

    A neo-Pelagian gospel of personal self-improvement and consciousness-raising may resonate with a certain small strata of the global elite, but what Santmire calls the “Christian masses” are all too aware that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot save ourselves.”

    Further, Santmire commends what he takes to be some of the authentic insights of Celtic Christian spirituality–but these differ rather starkly from the kind of feel-good New Agey themes often associated with that tradition. According to Santmire, the eco-sensitivity of Celtic Christians was rooted in orthodox Trinitarian and Christological affirmations, and these worked themselves out in a fairly severe spirituality that might make some contemporary devotees of “Celtic” Christianity blanch.

    Santmire isn’t blind to the flaws of traditional Augustinian Christianity–but he maintains that it preserves important truths and provides resources for a more cosmic and creation-friendly vision (as evidenced by the mature Augustine’s thought, as well as that of Irenaeus, Luther, Calvin, etc.). Traditional theology’s vision is of a creation (human and non-human) in bondage that can only be freed by God’s overflowing, unmerited grace. In Santmire’s view, this speaks much more profoundly and hopefully to our contemporary situation of mass poverty and ecological devastation.

  • More thoughts on Girard, Atonement, and Christology

    Thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the problem with Girard’s work–at least to the extent that I’m familiar with it–isn’t that his concept of Atonement is too “subjective” but that he’s not working with an adequate (or at least explicit) Christology. I once wrote of my “suspicion that bad atonement theories are often the result of defective Christologies.” Could that be what’s going on here?

    Consider William Placher’s objections again:

    But does Girard provide us with the kind of forgiveness that we really need? He assumes that once the Gospels have helped us see scapegoating for the fraud that it is we will never again participate in its rituals or believe in its myths. And he does not consider that we might retain some guilt and owe some penance for our evil past actions, even after we have turned away from scapegoating. He seems to assume that once we have understood the problem properly, it practically fixes itself.

    This seems right if the “Girardian” reading of the Gospels is simply to point out that the sacrificial victim is in fact innocent.

    However, what if we recall that for the New Testament it is God who is participating and present in the sufferings of this innocent man–this man whose life was ordered around a ministry to the outcast, the vulnerable, and the sinful?

    In other words, if God is the victim, isn’t that because God is also the forgiver? As Richard Beck recently argued, maybe Christ’s death is not necessary to secure God’s forgiveness, but enacts or expresses the cost of God’s forgiveness.

    This may be why those “Girardians” who have a more explicit Christology–such as James Alison and Mark Heim–seem to avoid some of these problems. Alison, for instance, is clear that it is God who is at work in Jesus reconciling us to Godself. The cross isn’t simply a lesson about social ethics, but a “liturgy” of God’s forgiveness.