A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • 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.

  • A side of Calvin we don’t often hear about

    From an interview with novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson:

    [Calvin] writes very beautifully about the notion that any encounter with another human being is an encounter with an image of God.

    If it’s someone offending against you, it is someone that God is waiting to forgive for his offense. And so it’s a sort of triangulation where you’re not in the trenches at war with some other person.

    You are thinking, “This person is sacred to God. What is God asking of me in my encounter with him or her?”

    Calvin does insist that when you see a human being, you are seeing an image of God. He says that the beauty of the image should override everything and leave you with only the will to embrace that person and help them to the fullest extent of one’s means.

    The idea of a human adversary is something that he virtually eliminates as a concept that is possible to a Christian person.

    And when you consider that he himself was under threat of death or his whole city was under the threat of death for decades and decades and decades, he was not speaking loosely. He was talking about a time when the Inquisition was very active all around them.

    So for him to say you cannot legitimately call another human being your adversary is a very, very major statement.

    I don’t know how accurate this is as exegesis of Calvin, but imagine how our interactions (politics–church or secular; online conversation) would change if we took this seriously.

  • Placher on Girard on Atonement

    When it comes to re-thinking the doctrine of the Atonement, many contemporary Christians are attracted to the work of literary theorist Rene Girard and his account of the “scapegoat mechanism.” In Girard’s telling, what the crucifixion narratives in the gospels do is reveal this mechanism whereby we kill the innocent to create social peace as the basis of much of our religion and culture. This unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism allows us to perceive the innocence of victims and to put an end to scapegoating. Part of what appeals about Girard’s account is that it seems to offer a way of thinking about the cross that avoids the implication that God in any sense required the sacrifice of Jesus.

    However, the late William Placher, in an important article on the Atonement, offered some criticisms of Girard that still seem pretty telling to me:

    Christians will naturally find such a brilliant scholar’s admiration of the gospel flattering, and Girard gets much right from a Christian point of view, from his insistence on the innocence of ritual victims to his call for a new kind of society based on mutual forgiveness. Yet he also breaks radically with most Christian interpretations. He repeatedly insists that nothing in the Gospels or Paul permits us to think of Christ as a sacrifice. The letter to the Hebrews, he believes, began the tragic wrong turn of Christian theology, for it falls back into thinking that it was somehow a good thing that Christ died, that the sacrifice of one victim really can redeem others—-just the kind of thinking whose fraudulence the gospel ought to have exposed once and for all. As a result, Girard thinks, Christians have continued the kind of society in which social cohesion is based on finding scapegoats—most notably and tragically of all singling out Jews as “Christ killers.”

    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.

    The dominant Christian tradition has been less optimistic. At least since Augustine, Christian theologians have insisted that recognizing sin’s evil does not necessarily end its seductiveness; sometimes it can even increase it. Moreover, even if we do not continue making scapegoats and sacrificing victims, we have all, as Girard himself emphasizes, been complicit in such practices for much of our lives. Culture and religion in all previous forms rest upon them. Is it enough to say, “Oh, now I get it, and I won’t do it any more,” and go our way? Perhaps we can forgive other victimizers, and for the sake of breaking the cycle of violence we should forgive them. But can we simply declare ourselves to be innocent? Whatever its problems, the language of sacrifice which so disturbs Girard does speak to the condition of people who find themselves still falling into sin, and sense the depths of their need of forgiveness. Perhaps it deserves a closer look.

    I think a lot of the truth in traditional theories of atonement–however much we may want to qualify or reinterpret them–is that there is a profound alienation between humanity and God and that simply revealing the fact of sin is insufficient to overcome it. This has always been the most potent criticism of “moral example” theories of atonement, and Girard’s theory as it stands looks like a more sophisticated version of this type of theory. For the other dominant tradition in atonement theory–that of “satisfaction” or “vicarious atonement”–the alienation between humanity and God (and its attendant guilt) is not something that we can repair on our own, even once we see what the problem is. This is why it requires God to step into the breach. But because it is a problem of human alienation from God, it is something that must be healed through human nature. Hence, following St. Anselm’s logic, the need for the God-man.

  • Communicating the gospel after Christendom

    I urge everyone who cares about these things to read these two posts from bls at The Topmost Apple on how the church is dealing (or not) with our current “post-Christendom” situation. She makes two main points: first, the church often acts like it has nothing very interesting to communicate, and, second, what it does communicate is too often encased in impenetrable religious jargon that is meaningless to a lot of people. She thinks that the gospel carries the explosive truth about the human situation, but the churches are afraid, unwilling, or unable to offer that to people:

    I think the Gospels – and Paul – are making some really convincing claims about the facts of the world and the human condition – and that A.A. has (re-?)discovered some of these things almost by accident. I think Luther was really onto something in his parsing of “Law” and “Gospel”; it has taken me a couple of years to come to understand more about this-but it’s real. It’s true-and it’s actually backed up by quite a lot of real-world evidence. This kind of thinking really does change your point of view – and it’s philosophy as much as religion, really. It’s got legs.

    We need to be able to say these things to people who do not know our language already – and we need to offer people who do know the language a way for the faith to remain vital and alive – to continue to offer sustenance and excitement – in and for them, too. We need to make a case. “Mystery” and “mystification” are two completely different things; we really can retain the former and eliminate the latter, I believe. It’s clear to me from years of discussions about these things that many people are interested in religion – but just can’t get with some of its manifestations (mentioned above). And of course, we have the problem of some of the …. erm ….. more extravagant claims of the Christian faith (sometimes called “believing six impossible things before breakfast”). So I do not believe we can count anymore, my friends, on Christianity being “believed in” as it’s been “believed in” in the past. We are going to have to assume that many (most?) people will not be convinced about these “impossible things” much anymore – and we’re going to have to depend far more on Christianity’s fascinating unveiling of counterintuitive ideas and mystical insights.

    In a related vein, Ben Myers at Faith and Theology writes on the limitations of preaching from the lectionary:

    There’s a lot to be said for the use of a lectionary cycle. But the lectionary tends to presuppose, rather than to foster, a broad understanding of the biblical story. Lectionaries were designed for use in societies that were already implicitly Christian – societies in which the rhythms of the liturgical year, and the broad sweep of the biblical narrative, could be more or less taken for granted. In the Revised Common Lectionary (which my own church follows), just look at the theological subtlety with which the OT and NT readings are often connected: a subtlety that is quite lost on anybody without a good working knowledge of scripture and liturgical tradition. And preachers only exacerbate the problem when they take these subtle liturgico-theological connections as the theme of their proclamation, instead of preaching from the texts themselves. (Preachers, please note: the content of your proclamation is not the liturgical calendar, but the Word of God!)

    I think most churches–primarily in the U.S. and European context–have still not come to grips with the fact that a large number of people no longer consider religion particularly important or interesting. Not that they necessarily reject it passionately like the new atheists; they just don’t see why they should be much concerned about it at all. Moreover, they don’t necessarily have the background familiarity with the Bible, the church, and Christian claims that might once have been taken for granted. Those of us who take a special interest in theology and religion, either as professionals or amateurs, tend to become embedded in the language, history, and arcana of the church. As a result, we lose sight of what all this must look like to someone on the outside. If we believe that the gospel offers people something decisive and meaningful for their lives that they can’t get (or maybe more modestly aren’t getting) elsewhere, we have to find ways to communicate it. In a way, this is just a recapitulation of the insight of theologians like Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: we have cordoned off matters of faith to a special “religious” sphere; but if the gospel is true, its truth is for our “secular,” ordinary, quotidian lives.

  • Structural sin and the ways of death-dealing

    Christianity Today ran a rather silly article trying to undercut the claims of the Occupy Wall Street protesters:

    Occupy Wall Street protest signs seek to ignite a revolution of the 99 percent against the (richest) 1 percent, who are responsible for our troubles. Christians of course are forbidden from supporting this kind of worldview. The dissipation that exists in our country, unfortunately, has not been confined to 1 percent of the population. Christianity teaches us that all of us stand as imperfect, self-absorbed, broken people, each of us a contributor to the problems of the world in our own, creative way.

    Political action has often served in our country as a lazy shortcut around the harder work of evangelization. If we are unconvincing in changing people’s thinking, we attempt to control their behavior through the political process.

    What this misses, of course, is what both Catholic and Protestant theology refer to as “structural” or “social” sin. That is, there are institutional structures–economic, political, etc.–that create and reinforce unjust social arrangements. Simply calling people to individual conversion is insufficient to deal with these larger social forces.

    Clark Williamson has a useful discussion of social sin and what he calls “the ways of death-dealing” in his systematic theology Way of Blessing, Way of Life:

    A premise of all theologies that stand in the tradition of the social gospel, of the contemporary liberation theologies and of recent Roman Catholic social teaching is that existing forms of government, economy, and society “are neither divinely ordained nor naturally given but are historical products of the decisions of men and women in times past as to how their lives should be governed.” What human beings have created, human beings can change.

    […]

    As long as we understand sin in ways that privatize it, hold to a view of salvation that reduces it to an individualistic or otherworldly matter (ultimate or “otherworldly” salvation should undergird and empower Christians in their this-worldly tasks), and regard social transformation as occurring in some miraculous manner, thinking that if only individuals change, the social context will take care of itself, the church will fail to address “the weightier matters of the law” (Mt. 23:23) in our time. (p. 38)

    Williamson goes on to provide concrete examples of these unjust or sinful structures, or death-dealing ways: the unjust exploitation of nature, the unjust distribution of goods and services, sexism, racism, and militarism.

    The point is that these sins are not exclusively the result of individuals making bad choices. They are the outworking of social structures functioning according to the way they’ve been set up. And the only way to remedy them is by changing or reforming those structures, which requires, yes, political action. This isn’t a substitute for individual conversion, but a necessary complement.

  • The God of Israel and the King Jesus gospel

    Scot McKnight of Jesus Creed (the book and the blog) has a new book out called The King Jesus Gospel, which purports to recover the “original good news.” What does this mean? I haven’t read the book, but on his blog, McKnight says that the way we typically think about the gospel–as a scheme for individual salvation–is unfaithful to the witness of the New Testament. He calls this the “soterian” gospel. But the gospel as presented in the earliest preaching of the church is a “story gospel”:

    The soterian gospel and the apostolic gospel are framed differently; the soterian gospel frames everything by elements by elements in the doctrine of salvation. The apostolic gospel frames the gospel as Israel’s Story coming to fulfillment in Jesus as King (Messiah) and Lord who saves. Hence, one frames things as the plan for personal salvation; the other frames things as a Story come to its completion/fulfillment in Jesus who saves.

    The soterian gospel says that Jesus is fundamentally about how individuals “get right with God.” By contrast, the story gospel (which McKnight maintains is the original, apostolic gospel) is a more communal-corporate story about God’s plans for creation and how they’re fulfilled through the story of Israel; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; and the calling of the church as a corporate body to witness to God’s kingdom.

    What strikes me here is the similarity between what McKnight is trying to do and R. Kendall Soulen’s reconstruction of the Bible’s “canonical narrative” in The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Like McKnight, Soulen is trying to re-frame the gospel as a story about God’s program of blessing-in-difference for all creation–a story in which individual sin and redemption play a subordinate role. And both shift emphasis from a supposedly “universal” scheme of human sinfulness and the need for redemption to the particular history of God’s covenant with creation and specifically with the people Israel as the means through which God’s purposes are realized. I’d be interested to see if there are further parallels or if McKnight is explicitly influenced by Soulen’s work here.

  • God of Israel and Christian Theology: Wrap up

    Soulen is, in my view, largely persuasive in recasting of the scriptual meta-narrative as one of blessing and consummation, wherein sin and redemption plays a subordinate, though still important, role. Further, I think he’s right to avoid a certain kind of “Christocentric” reading of the Bible. If the churches are serious about overcoming supersessionism, then something like Soulen’s project seems to be necessary. He has demonstrated, to my satisfaction, that supersessionism isn’t simply an appendage that can easily be lopped off the main body of Christian tradition, but is more like a structural flaw in the foundation of the mainstream theological tradition. Of course, I’d already been largely convinced of that by Clark Williamson and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Soulen’s perspective also seems consistent with other recent trends in theology that have tried to emphasize God’s work as consummator of all creation and only secondarily God’s redemptive work. (I’m thinking of eco-theologies and some feminist theology.)

    Supersessionist readings of the Bible are deeply entrenched in the church, though, even among those who consciously reject supersessionism. It will take a good bit of detailed exegetical work, I think, to flesh this alternative narrative out and make it compelling. For instance, it requires a virtual paradigm shift in how churches have historically, and in many cases still do, read Paul on the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. (Although, if I’m not mistaken, some of themes of the “new perspective” on Paul seem like they might provide support to this kind of project.)

    More challengingly, perhaps, I wonder whether Soulen’s proposed reading of the canon is consistent with the church’s christological and trinitarian dogmas, at least as those have been classicly expressed. Does the canonical narrative as Soulen has presented it demand a “high” Christology in the way that the traditional sin-redemption schema seemed to? I gather that this may be addressed in his new book, but I think it presents a potentially thorny issue for any Christian theology that seeks to be “post-supersessionist.” In what sense is Jesus unique and uniquely indispensable to God’s economy of blessing? Can Christians affirm Jesus’ unique role in God’s plan of consummation-salvation without, implicitly at least, courting supersessionism and exclusivism?

    This brings me to another point. I wonder if the theme of mutual blessing-in-difference is portrayed too one-sidedly here? Although Soulen emphasizes that the blessing between Israel and the nations is mutual, his narrative assigns the Gentiles to a distinctly secondary role, religiously speaking. They seem to be little more than second-hand beneficiaries of God’s revelation to and covenant with Israel. But if God really creates for mutual blessing, might gentile religious wisdom not also contribute to the faith of Israel? In fact, historically we know that wisdom from Greek and other cultures was assimilated into biblical religion. This opens the possibility of a greater appreciation of broader religious pluralism. (I’m thinking along the lines proposed by Marjorie Suchocki.) An appreciation of pluralism need not entail a naively “universalist” standpoint but can be rooted in an affirmation of particularity.

    As far as church practice goes, it’s hard to imagine what a church that was open to Jews as Jews would look like in the 21st century. Even granting that most Jews will continue to decline the Christian invitation to join the church, how would church life be affected if we took seriously Soulen’s contention that Jews could (should?) continue to observe the tenets of Judaism as members of the church? There are “messianic” Jews who to do this, but this seems like something that would make most mainline churches deeply uncomfortable. And should churches require continued Torah-observance of prospective Jewish members or simply permit it? What would that look like? How might such a “mixed” congregation be reflected in worship? The concept of a truly mixed Gentile-Jewish congregation raises a host of interesting and potentially difficult issues, I think.

    All that notwithstanding, Soulen has written a fascinating and important book. Hopefully more Christians will start to grapple with these issues.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

    Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

    “There is neither Jew nor Greek…”