A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Supersessionism and the flight from history

    R. Kendall Soulen brings the first, critical part of his God of Israel and Christian Theology to a close with two chapters on early modern and 20th-century theology, respectively.

    In chapter 3 he examines the thought of two influential thinkers who tried to reconcile the core of Christian belief with the worldview of the Englightenment–Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both of these thinkers, in Soulen’s evaluation, did this at the cost of severing Christianity more profoundly from its Jewish roots than the traditional canonical narrative they inherited. This is because both emphasized, in different ways, the universal, ahistorical “foreground” of the canonical narrative–the arc of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation–to such a degree that the Jewish matrix of Christian faith becomes something to discard. For Kant, religion is to be understood “within the limits of reason alone”–which for him means the demands of morality understood as a rational, universal law. Jesus is an exemplar of perfect humanity because of his moral perfection, not because of anything having to do with his role in the ongoing story of God’s history with Israel. Similarly, Schleiermacher sees religion as an expression of a universal human consciousness of dependence. Jesus is the redeemer because he had a perfect “God-consciousness” that is transmitted to others through the community he founded, the church.

    In both cases, Soulen argues, the drama of redemption has been removed from public history to inner realm of experience–whether it be moral experience or religious experience. The result is that both Kant and Schleiermacher view Christianity as the universal, “spiritual” alternative to the particularistic, “carnal” Judaism. (Schleiermacher even goes so far as to suggest that the OT be relegated to a “historical appendix” to the NT!) For Soulen, supersessionism goes hand in hand with a semi-gnostic “flight from history.” God’s action is not defined by what God does in historical relationship with particular people; rather it’s shaped by an ahistorical template of providing a solution to a universal human problem (moral frailty or lack of God-consciousness). By transposing the divine-human relationship to this inner, ashistorical realm, Kant and Schleiermacher pry open the fissure that already existed in the traditional narrative between the “foreground” of creation-fall-redemption-consummation and the “background” of God’s dealing with Israel. Their God is a “Christian divinity without Jewish flesh.”

    Soulen then turns in chapter 4 to the two great “Karls” of 20th-century theology: Barth and Rahner. In different ways both theologians worked to ground God’s acts of redemption and consummation more firmly in history (both were influenced by and reacting to Schleiermacher). For Barth, forming a covenant relationship with humanity just is the point of creation. And God’s covenant with Israel is part of his work to consummate this relationship with creation; thus God’s very being is, in a sense, shaped by history. Rahner takes a very different approach, but tries to arrive at a similar conclusion. God’s self-bestowal on creatures is the point of creation, but this takes place in and through the medium of what Rahner calls humanity’s “supernatural existential.” This refers to a certain inner dynamism toward relationship with God that is a universal–although contingent–feature of the human condition–it is bestowed by God’s grace, not an inherent feature of human nature as such. Thus history is for both Karls the medium of God’s consummating activity in a way that it wasn’t for Kant and Schleiermacher.

    However, Soulen sees in both Barth and Rahner problems that recapitulate the supersessionist tendencies of their predecessors. In Barth’s thought, he says, God’s history with Israel is “collapsed” into the person of Jesus Christ. This is part and parcel of Barth’s effort to retrieve the “ec-centric” or “extra nos” aspect of the Reformer’s thought–everything is accomplished in Jesus and we benefit from it in virtue of its universal efficacy. History effectively “ends” with the resurrection and thus the ongoing history of Israel has no particular significance as part of God’s consummating work. For Rahner, the problem is that while formally his “supernatural existential” is a historical phenomenon, in practice it is utterly detached from historical events. It serves as a clever solution to an intellectual problem of reconciling grace and nature, but Rahner doesn’t tie this abstract historicity to the concrete history of God’s dealings with Israel. In both cases, covenant history is collapsed to a single point (the person of Jesus or the dynamism of the human creature), relegating God’s covenant-history with Israel to insignificance. What’s needed instead, Soulen says, is a view that sees God’s work as Consummator engag[ing] creation in the total, open-ended, and still ongoing history that unfolds between the Lord, Israel, and the nations” (p. 106). Outlining such a view will be the task of the second part of the book.

    Previous posts on Soulen’s book:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

  • Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    I want to continue my summary of R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology (see previous post here). In chapter 2 Soulen looks at the traditional “canonical narrative” of Christian theology as it was formulated in the early centuries of the church and argues that it “inscribes the logic of supersessionism [i.e., replacement theology] into the deep grammar of Christian theology” (p. 49).

    Let’s recall that, for Soulen, a canonical narrative is a kind of high-order story that serves to construe the collection of books that make up the Bible as a single overarching narrative. Soulen examines the thought of two pivotal figures in the early church–Justin Martyr and Irenaeus–who were key in establishing the traditional narrative of Christian theology. In Soulen’s shorthand, the traditional canonical narrative is the story of “creation-for consummation, fall, redemption, and final consummation.”

    Justin Martyr, as an early Christian apologist, was eager to make the gospel intelligible for a largely pagan audience. Consequently, he emphasized the “cosmic” dimenions of the Christian story, portraying Jesus as the incarnate logos or wisdom of God. This “cosmic” version of the Christian story, however, has the unfortunate side-effect of “circumvent[ing] God’s identity as the God of Israel and God’s history with the Jewish people as related by the Hebrew Scriptures” (p. 36). For Justin, the Hebrew Scriptrues (which were, for him, simply the Scriptures since the NT canon hadn’t yet been established) are important primarily because they foretell the coming of Christ. He certainly saw the Christian God as the same as the Jewish God, but “God’s history with the carnal community of the Jews is merely a passing episode within God’s more encompassing purposes for creation, which are universal and spiritual in nature” (p. 37). The church–the “true,” “spiritual” Israel, replaces the “carnal” Israel in God’s plan for creation, and there is no positive religious significance to the ongoing history of the Jewish people.

    Irenaeus was the scourge of gnostics who probably deserves as much credit as anyone for firmly establishing the Jewish scriptures as part of the Christian canon. So you might expect that he’d take a more positive stance toward Judaism. However, Irenaeus vindicates his anti-gnostic argument “by building on Justin’s supersessionist reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, and indeed by extending it in order to provide a framework for reading the church’s twofold canon” (p. 41). Irenaeus follows Justin in organizing the Bible in light of four key events (creation-for-consummation, fall, redemption, and final consummation) and he also interprets the covenant with the Jews primarily as a perfiguration of redemption in Christ. According to Soulen, Irenaeus does modify Justin’s account of salvation history by making the election of the Jews more integral, but paradoxically inscribes supersessionism even deeper into the Christian story. For Irenaeus, the covenant with Israel is more central to salvation history than it is in Justin’s cosmic-logos account of redemption, and there is greater continuity in substance between the two “dispensations.” However, precisely because the covenant with Israel is a prefiguration or preparation, it is, by definition, obsolete when Christ comes on the scene. “The Old Covenant is fulfilled by the New Covenant according to its inner christological substance but superseded and displaced according to its outward and carnal form. Hence the whole economy of salvation is inwardly ordered to the eventual dissolution of Israel’s corporate life into the life of the church” (p. 47).

    The template established by Justin and Irenaeus went largely unquestioned for most of Christian history. The result, according to Soulen, is that the Christian tradition has downplayed or denied the significance of Israel and God’s history with Israel for shaping its theological commitments. In short, the Christian gospel as it is often presented is completely “detachable” from the Hebrew Scriptures and Israel. This leads to an ahistorical and individualistic reading of salvation that pays insufficient attention to public history and the “middle range” dimensions of life such as politics and economics, which are so important to the Hebrew Scriptures.

    One question in the back of my mind as I’m reading this (and this is only chapter 2) is how Soulen thinks we should hold together or relate the “particularist” and “universalist” poles of the Christian story. He is eager to recover the decisive role of God’s covenant with the particular people Israel for shaping Christian theology, but at the same time I take it that he still thinks Christianity has a universal and “cosmic” message that goes beyond the bounds of one people’s particular history. It’s not yet clear to me how you maintain particularism without sacrificing universal relevance. Hopefully he’ll address this at some point.

    UPDATE: Partly in response to Marvin’s comment, I wanted to add a little more about Soulen’s critique of Irenaeus, because it’s a somewhat subtle point that may not have come out clearly enough in my post. Here’s Soulen:

    In sum, Irenaeus sees God’s history with Israel as an episode within the larger story whereby God prepares a fallen humanity for the incarnation. Coming between Adam’s fall on one side and the incarnation on the other, Israel serves as a training ground for salvation.

    One of the most significan aspects of Irenaeus’ solution is the lucid account it permits of the Bible’s unity. On the one hand, a single economy of redemption underlies the biblical narrative as a whole from the fall to the end of time. On the other hand, this single economy is bodied forth in two asymmetrical forms, one temporary and prophetic, the other permanent and definitive. The Old and New Covenants … are one because they come from the same God and embody God’s one plan to redeem fallen humanity in Christ. They are distinct because they present the economy of salvation under different outward forms…. When the new comes, therefore, the old is done away with, not with respect to substance but with respect to outer form.

    […]

    Curiously, Irenaeus’ solution to the unity of the canon reinforces the logic of economic supersessionism at the same time that it underscores the continuity of divine purpose that unites Israel and the church, Old Covenant and New. Just as maturity is the goal of childhood training, so Christ and the church are the goals of Israel’s history from the beginning. The Old Covenant is fulfilled by the New Covenant according to its inner christological substance but superseded and displaced according to its outer carnal form. Hence the whole economy of salvation is inwardly ordered to the eventual dissolution of Israel’s corporate life into the life of the church. (pp. 46-47)

    Soulen refers to this as a double movement of “fulfillment and cancellation”: Israel is “obsolete” because its purpose was chiefly background preparation for redemption in Christ. The irony is that this obsolescence is a result of Irenaeus’ efforts to more deeply integrate Israel’s history into the Christian account of God’s plan of salvation.

  • God and the White Whale

    Brandon points to this interesting piece by Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul on Moby-Dick, which Sproul correctly notes is the greatest American novel.

    Sproul argues for a Christian reading of Melville’s work–seeing Ahab as man in rebellion against God (symbolized by the White Whale).

    Melville experts and scholars come to different conclusions about the meaning of the great white whale. Many see this brutish animal as evil because it had inflicted great personal damage on Ahab in an earlier encounter. Ahab lost his leg, which was replaced by the bone of a lesser whale. Some argue that Moby Dick is Melville’s symbol of the incarnation of evil itself. Certainly this is the view of the whale held by Captain Ahab himself. Ahab is driven by a monomaniacal hatred for this creature, this brute that left him permanently damaged both in body and soul. He cries out, “He heaps me,” indicating the depth of the hatred and fury he feels toward this beast. Some have accepted Ahab’s view that the whale is a monstrous evil as that of Melville himself. That the whale is not a symbol of evil but the symbol of God Himself. In this interpretation, Ahab’s pursuit of the whale is not a righteous pursuit of God but natural man’s futile attempt in his hatred of God to destroy the omnipotent deity.

    While I think there’s something to this, I also think it’s a bit too pat–and maybe too comforting to Christian sensibilities.

    The Whale certainly does symbolize transcendence, I think. Sproul points to the key chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” where the many facets and connotations of the property of whiteness evoke what we might, following Rudolph Otto, call the mysterium tremendum et fascians. I would go further and say that much of the book–such as the allegedly boring chapters on cetology, history, the details of whaling, etc.–are intended by Melville to create a mythology of sorts in which the whale (and by extension all of non-human nature) takes on a transcendent, larger-than-life quality.

    However, I think Sproul overlooks another key theme–the inscrutability of the Whale (and, by implication, ultimate reality). One of the things that makes Melville seem so contemporary is what we might call his “perspectivalism.” There is no single privileged perspective that can give us a “true” picture of reality. This comes out perhaps most clearly in “The Doubloon” where the crew members inspect the symbols on a gold doubloon Ahab has nailed to the ship’s mast, each one finding in them a radically different meaning. Each character’s understanding of reality is as much a product of himself as it is of the world. We can also cite the early chapters in which Ishmael, through his relationship with the “savage” Queequeg, comes to a rather “relativistic” view of religious and cultural pluralism.

    Indeed, this perspectivalism is inherent in the very structure of the novel–the shift from first- to third-person narrative, telling the story from the point of view of different characters, the mixing of genres (realistic novel, history, drama), and the general “unreliability” of Ishmael as a narrator. This structure destabilizes the reader by refusing to provide anything like the classic omniscient narrator to tell us how things really are.

    We also see this in the treatment of Ahab. Sproul seems to want to read him as more classically villainous–as man in revolt against God. But Ahab is closer to a Shakespearean tragic figure–someone who is admirable in many ways, but who is set, almost in spite of himself, on a path that can only end in his own destruction. By contrast, the more conventionally pious Starbuck, while perhaps morally in the right, is too weak-willed to prevent Ahab from carrying out his quest for revenge.

    If the White Whale is a symbol of ultimate reality for Melville, then it has to be said that he regarded that reality as deeply mysterious and ambiguous. The world can by turns appear beneficent, brutally cruel, and indifferent. And each character responds to that reality in a different way, none of them obviously “correct.” If we take Ishmael as Melville’s stand-in (a decidedly dicey proposition) we might, tentatively, characterize his response as something like “diffident awe.” But this is certainly far from Christian piety. You could well argue that the novel leaves us with a picture of reality as supremely indifferent to human affairs, with “the great shroud of the sea roll[ing] on as it rolled five thousand years ago” and Ishmael as “another orphan” on that sea.

  • A worry about open Communion

    I don’t have really strong feelings one way or the other about “open” Communion–i.e., communing the non-baptized. I can see arguments both for and against it. But I do have some questions about how I’ve seen it put into practice.

    At several churches I’ve been to that practice open Communion, there is little or no effort at instructing the congregation in the meaning of the sacrament. Which is odd since you’d think that if atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Jews, etc. are being invited to participate, they might be interested in knowing just what it is they’re being asked to participate in. Surely we can’t assume that everyone already knows what Communion is all about, can we?

    This raises the suspicion that open Communion–at least as it’s practiced in a lot of places–is really more about the appearance of inclusion for inclusion’s sake than about inviting people to partake of the Eucharist understood specifically as the sacrament of Christ’s presence. It also suggests that if you really want to invite people to participate in Communion with some meaningful understanding, something like catechesis is necessary. But doesn’t this just call the whole practice of open Communion into question? I’d be interested in hearing what others think about this, especially if they think they’ve seen it put into practice effectively.

  • Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    I’ve started reading R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology, which is an attempt to rethink the foundational narrative of Christianity within a “post-supersessionist” context. Christian theology has traditionally held that the church replaces Israel in God’s covenant. However, the realization, post-Holocaust, of how Christian theology has contributed to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews has led many Christian churches to renounce any supersessionist claims. While this is an important step, Soulen argues that simply renouncing supersessionism isn’t enough–we need to attend to the “deep grammar” in the traditional Christian story that makes supersessionism not only possible, but virtually inevitable.

    Soulen introduces the concept of a “canonical narrative” or “canonical construal” of scripture–the overarching story of how the diverse collection of texts that constitute the Bible “hangs together.” In particular, this narrative construal allows us to see how the Old and New Testaments (or, as Soulen sometimes refers to them, the Scriptures and the Apostolic Witness) constitute one canon. This provides a prism for reading the texts as a story about God’s relation to the world.

    In Soulen’s view, the traditional Christian narrative construal is one of “creation-for-consummation, fall, redemption in Christ, and final consummation” (p. 16). God creates humanity with intention of ultimately consummating human existence with eternal life. Tragically, because of the fall into sin, this project of consummation is derailed, and God must resort to “plan B.” This, of course, is the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ and his life, death, and resurrection. This redemptive act restores humanity and allows God’s plans for consummation to proceed.

    The problem with the standard view, from a post-supersessionist perspective, is that it views the role of Israel as temporary and inessential to God’s greater purposes. Or as Soulen puts it “it makes God’s identity as the God of Israel largely indecisive for shaping theological conclusions about God’s enduring purposes for creation” (p. 16). It allows God’s acts of salvation to be seen as individualistic and ahistorical–as dealing with the “universal” problem of sin rather than as part of the story of God binding Godself to one particular people. This is why the church has typically erased any religiously significant distinction between Jew and Gentile.

    What’s needed, Soulen argues, is a new narrative construal that sees the election of Israel of lasting significance. For such a construal to be faithful to the Christian gospel it must maintain the core evangelical conviction that the God of Israel has acted in Jesus Christ for all, to use Soulen’s summary. But it must do so without treating the election of Israel as a temporary detour in salvation history.

  • Is “Christocentrism” the proper alternative to “biblicism”?

    I’m against “biblicism” if by that we mean treating each and every passage of the Bible as equally inspired and authoritative. However, I’m not sure a “Christocentric” reading is a viable alternative if it means this:

    The Bible is about Jesus Christ, and the only way to read the Bible is read it from beginning to end to be about Jesus, and to read each passage as about Jesus Christ and to be unlocked only through the gospel about Jesus Christ.

    Two thoughts here. First, on a plain reading, every passage in the Bible just isn’t about Jesus, and trying to read it as if they were will probably result in bad readings. Second, such an approach seems to me to risk shortchanging the integrity of the Old Testament witness, ultimately re-inscribing a form of supersessionism.

    Now, perhaps there’s a way of re-stating this that avoids these problems. Jesus is, so Christians believe, the incarnate Word or Wisdom of God. So in that sense, it may be true to say that the Bible as a whole is about Christ–because the Bible is ultimately about God. Although, even this has to be qualified because I don’t think we can say that each and every passage in the Bible reflects the Wisdom of God. Some passages attribute qualities or actions to God that are unworthy of God as we have come to know him through the biblical witness.

    I would say that our Bible reading should be Christocentric in this sense: we believe that Jesus is the clearest expression of the nature and character of God. That means that this revelation should be the controlling image for how we read the Bible. When we come across a passage that seems to conflict with the divine nature as it has been disclosed in Jesus, we have to ask whether it is really a revelation of God, or a human projection. This is hardly a straightforward task, but some kind of “canon within a canon” does seem necessary if we’re going to avoid “flat” theories of biblical authority and inspiration (which I don’t think anyone consistently sticks to in practice anyway).

    This might seem like splitting hairs, but the difference is that this kind of “Christocentric” view would allow the biblical witness to speak in all its plurality, without trying to harmonize seemingly inconsistent passages by asserting that they’re “really” about Jesus. And yet Jesus remains the controlling image or icon of God for Christians–even while we recognize that the same Wisdom that was incarnate in Jesus was present to ancient Israel (and continues to be present in other traditions, including contemporary Judaism).

  • What mainliners can learn from evangelicals

    Mainliners can be awfully smug in their (our) attitude toward evangelicals. There is a certain “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other people” syndrome in the way mainliners view evangelicals. In some mainline churches I’ve been in, evangelicals are the perpetual “other” over against whom we define ourselves. We’re NOT conservative, NOT homophobic, NOT biblical literalists, etc.

    But in case you haven’t noticed, mainline churches aren’t doing all that great nowadays. And while evangelicalism certainly has its problems, mainliners would be foolish to think that there’s nothing they can learn from their evangelical co-religionists.

    This post from Frederick Schmidt highlights some things that evangelicals have but mainliners don’t, and I think it’s well worth considering:

    Evangelicals believe something. To name a few things: They believe in God, the Trinity, the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ, the Resurrection, and the authority of Scripture. These things define reality in a particular way for Evangelicals.

    […]

    Evangelicals are actively committed to what they believe. Both the Old and New Testaments connect what is known about God with living for God. The Book of Deuteronomy admonishes Israel to “Teach your children the Law and to do it.” The Epistle of James picks up on the same theme: “Faith without works is dead.” And Paul connects the facts of the faith with imperatives in his letters. To embrace truth, it must be lived.

    […]

    Evangelicals also think that thinking about what they believe is important. Stott and, before him, C.S. Lewis, gave their lives to the effort to be clear about what they believed and they engaged others in the effort. Being clear opened both of them to criticisms, of course, but nearly fifty years after his death Lewis is still widely read and continues to engage his readers in that conversation.

    As Schmidt points out, these things are “not unique to Evangelicalism [but] are as old Christianity itself—and present when and where it thrives.” I think we could quibble about the extent to which evangelicalism consistently manifests these qualities and the extent to which mainline churches lack them. But on the whole, the generalization strikes me as having a lot of truth to it.

    This is a drum I’ve beaten before. And there are no easy answers. For one thing, if mainline churches are committed to a critical approach to the Bible and church tradition (as I think they should be), it will always be harder for them to confidently say “This is what we believe.” But the alternative–watering down the faith to a vague, lowest common denominator–is just as bad. Somehow we have to learn to walk that tightrope of critical faithfulness.

  • God, hell, and the Euthyphro dilemma

    There’s a discussion over at Jesus Creed on a new book called Erasing Hell, which is, I take it, a response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins. I haven’t read either book, but the argument of Erasing Hell, as sketched by the author at Jesus Creed, calls for some comment. From the post:

    A central claim of [Erasing Hell authors] Chan and Sprinkle—which creates their foundation (and breathing room) for embracing the traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment—is the idea that whatever God chooses to do is, by definition, “right”. At the outset, the writers in defining the purpose of their book say,

    “This book is actually much more than a book on hell. It’s a book about embracing a God who isn’t always easy to understand, and whose ways are far beyond us; a God whose thoughts are much higher than our thoughts; a God who, as the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of all things, has the right to do, as the psalmist says, ‘whatever He pleases’ (Ps. 115:3). God has the right to do WHATEVER he pleases. If I’ve learned one thing from studying hell, it’s this last line. And whether or not you end up agreeing with everything I say about hell, you must agree with Psalm 115:3″ (p.17, emphasis theirs).

    Though the word “right” (which adds a moral element) does not appear in Psalm 115, this is a foundational idea at work in Erasing Hell. The writers fall back on this argument and use the language of God having the “right” to do whatever he wishes throughout the text, and from this argument they establish that, because God is supremely powerful and all-knowing, God has the moral authority to create a state of eternal conscious torment if he so desires.

    As noted in the post, this looks like a rather extreme example of the divine command theory of ethics. This view holds that right and wrong are dependent on the will of God. If God decides to torture people for eternity, then this is, by definition, the right thing to do. There are no “external” criteria by which we could judge such an action.

    I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t the view of mainstream Christian theology. The issue actually pre-dates Christianity and goes back to the famed dilemma proposed in Plato’s Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” The problem is that embracing the first horn of the dilemma seems to set up a standard of right and wrong which is independent of the divine, while the other makes right and wrong a matter of seemingly arbitrary choice. Christian theology has, I think wisely, tried to sidestep the dilemma by proposing that the nature of good flows from (or is identical with) the divine nature, thus making good neither independent of God nor simply a result of a choice that could’ve just as easily been otherwise.

    C.S. Lewis summarizes the traditional view in his essay “The Poison of Subjectivism” (found in the collection Christian Reflections):

    God neither obeys nor creates the moral law. The good is uncreated; it never could have been otherwise; it has in it no shadow of contingency; it lies, as Plato said, on the other side of existence. It is the Rita of the Hindus by which the gods themselves are divine, the Tao of the Chinese from which all realities proceed. But we, favoured beyond the wisest pagans, know what lies beyond existence, what admits no contingency, what lends divinity to all else, what is the ground of all existence, is not simply a law but also a begetting love, a love begotten, and the love which, being these two, is also imminent in all those who are caught up to share the unity of their self-caused life. God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

    Consequently, Christians can say that God is the supreme reality, but also that God is good. This isn’t to deny that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. Our apprehension of the good is always fragmentary and tainted by self-interest. But we do genuinely apprehend it. Just as there is a minority report in Christendom that holds that right is just whatever God happens to will, so there is a sub-tradition that holds that human reason is so damaged by the Fall that we are unable to perceive goodness. But again, the mainstream tradition has wisely steered a middle course, holding that human reason is capable of attaining to a genuine knowledge of good and evil. “Natural law” theory in its many variations is one expression of this basic conviction.

    This by itself doesn’t show that hell can’t exist. But it does call into question the strategy of defending the idea of hell by appealing to a God who is, in effect, beyond good and evil.

  • What does Oxford have to do with Jerusalem?

    I’m reading Keith Ward’s More than Matter? and found it interesting to learn that two of Ward’s teachers were the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer. Ryle was famous for characterizing Cartesian dualism as “the ghost in the machine,” and Ayer was the famed proponent of logical positivism. Ward says that he came to believe that neither Ryle’s quasi-behaviorist “ordinary language” philosophy nor Ayer’s logical positivism provided a satisfying explanation of the nature of the human person. (Or, by extension, the nature of reality more generally.) The book goes on to defend a version of idealism–the view, broadly speaking, that mind or spirit is the most fundamental reality upon which everything else depends.

    Here’s Ward discussing his move from atheism to Christianity and the celebrity culture surrounding the debates over the new atheism:

  • New atheism as 19th-century positivism redux

    This article puts its finger on one of the problems I’ve long had with the so-called new atheism:

    [I]n its basic outlines [A.C.] Grayling’s humanism is that of the nineteenth-century positivists, who built a philosophy around their belief in the perfectability of human nature. For Grayling, and for the other New Atheists, reason doesn’t just answer questions about our origins and our ethics; it moves us toward that city on a hill where, [Grayling’s] The Good Book promises, “the best future might inhabit, and the true promise of humanity be realized at last.”

    Meanwhile, this article published in the Nation a few months ago makes a similar point, and also notes how positivism can be yoked to a reactionary political agenda (such as Christopher Hitchens’ and Sam Harris’s embrace of the “war on terror” as an Enlightenment crusade against religion).

    What’s striking about all this is that you still have, in the 21st century, people claiming with a straight face that science and reason are the royal roads to absolute truth and moral and political progress. At one time it had become something of a truism that the 20th century, with its world wars, revolutions, and genocide, had put paid to 19th-century optimism on behalf of capital-R Reason and capital-P Progress. And the gas chambers and the atomic bomb were thought to have demonstrated pretty definitively that scientific, technocratic reason could be neatly yoked to the most abominable moral and political goals imaginable.

    Both religious and atheistic thought responded to this sense of disillusionment. Christian theology rediscovered its doctrines of human brokenness and original sin; atheism, in the form of existentialism and Freudianism, honed in on the irrational impulses and drives that actually govern much of our lives. Neither was much inclined any longer to speak blithely about the omni-competence of reason or the inevitability of progress. Moreover, both were willing to attend to sources of insight that fell outside of the scientific, narrowly construed. 20th century thought, across a wide swath of disciplines, came to see reason, understood solely as discursive or deductive thought, and empiricism, understood in the manner of logical positivists and their verifiability criterion, as only a part of how we experience and make sense of the world. By contrast, the neo-positivism of the new atheists looks downright old-fashioned.

    I certainly don’t think Christians should despise the Enlightenment, as has now become fashionable in some theological circles. At the same time, the version of the Enlightenment embodied by positivism invariably ends in reductionism and scientism. This in turn produces a very narrow understanding of what “reason” is and a correspondingly constricted view of truth, morality, and human experience generally. Religion and humanism alike should oppose it.