A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Whose Jesus? Which eschatology?

    (With apologies to Alasdair MacIntyre.)

    I’m still reading Marcus Borg’s Jesus. In the scholarly arena, Borg is probably best known as a proponent of the “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic” Jesus, and he addresses this controversy in chapter 9 of this book.

    In Jesus, Borg offers a refinement of terminology. Instead of “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic,” he now prefers to talk about “imminent eschatology” versus “participatory eschatology.”

    Imminent eschatology refers to the perspective–pioneered by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer in the 20th century and long considered orthodoxy in Jesus studies–that Jesus’ central message was one of apocalyptic expectation. That is, he believed that God was about to act decisively to usher in the Kingdom in its fullness by means of a supernatural intervention (with Jesus himself as, in some sense, God’s instrument). The unavoidable implication of this view is that Jesus was wrong, since the Kingdom manifestly didn’t appear in 33 A.D.

    Borg, in contrast, argues for participatory eschatology. That is, the Kingdom is what the world would look like if God’s will really had its way–the poor would be fed, the naked would be clothed, nation would no longer war against nation, and people’s hearts would be centered on God.

    [The Kingdom] is God’s dream, God’s passion, God’s will, God’s promise, God’s intention for the earth. God’s utopia–the blessed place, the ideal state of affairs. (p. 252)

    In Borg’s view, for Jesus the Kingdom was something that people were to participate in here and now by turning to God and being converted to the ways of compassion and resistance to injustice–ways that are at odds with much of the conventional wisdom of the world. “Participatory eschatology…means that Jesus called people to respond and participate in the coming of the kingdom” (p. 259). Applying the categories of Calvinist-Arminian debate, we might say that Borg’s view is a synergistic one, as opposed to the monergistic one of the apocalyptic school. Borg sees the Kingdom as a reality that is, in some sense, already present and which we are invited to participate in.

    Borg’s main argument for this position has both a negative and a positive aspect:

    – First, he doubts that the more apocalyptic statements attributed to Jesus actually go back to him; instead he thinks it more likely that they refer to the early church’s expectation of Jesus’ second coming–expectations that were stoked by the Resurrection.

    – Second, he argues that a participatory eschatology makes better sense of a larger swath of the gospel material; specifically, much of what Borg characterizes as Jesus’ “wisdom teaching” seems irrelevant if he thought the end was imminent.

    Obviously I’m in no position to judge the details of the historical argument–which Borg only summarizes in any event. However, I do wonder if there is a religious reason for preferring one view over the other.

    On the one hand, many Christians would be uncomfortable with the idea that Jesus was mistaken about the coming of the Kingdom–particularly if it was as central to his vision and mission as the proponents of imminent eschatology would have it. Orthodoxy can live with a fallible Jesus (he is fully human, after all), but can it live with a Jesus who fundamentally missed the boat with regard to the central theme of his ministry?

    On the other hand, a view like Borg’s implies–at least to the extent that the early church entertained apocalyptic expectations–that the early Christian community was mistaken about what Jesus meant. This implication can maybe be softened a bit by arguing (as Borg does) that it was the Resurrection experiences that created, or at least intensified, this expectation (not unreasonably if the general resurrection was associated with “end-times” thinking in Judaism). Nevertheless, there is a potentially embarassing Jesus-versus-the-church conclusion looming at the end of this train of thought.

    I guess to the extent that we think the “historical Jesus” is important for the life of faith–and not all Christians are agreed about this–Borg’s Jesus and his participatory eschatology seems to have the greater relevance. However, I’m also left less than fully satisfied by his sketch of eschatology. While he insists that it is God’s dream for the earth that human beings participate in or collaborate with, he doesn’t seem to leave much room for God’s action outside of human effort. In particular, the Kingdom of God has usually been taken to entail not just a perfectly just society, but a transformed created order where not only injustice, but suffering, sickness, and death are no more. Can Borg’s participatory model make sense of this?

    UPDATE: This post seems relevant.

  • I want to be a Pentecostal too

    Marvin offers a review of Allan Anderson’s book on global pentecostalism that really makes me want to read it. The essence of charismatic Christianity, according to Anderson (according to Marvin) isn’t speaking in tongues or some of the other trappings usually associated with pentecostalism, but rather “A shared conviction that the Holy Spirit can and should be experienced immediately and powerfully.”

    I’ve often complained that mainline Protestant Christianity lacks an emphasis on “transcendence” or the direct experience of the Spirit. The usual reasons offered are that mainliners have accepted the worldview of modernity, which doesn’t leave much room for direct experience of the supernatural, and are overly focused on social and political change at the expense of experiential religion. There do seem to be some signs of change here. For instance, in The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg writes about his own mystical experiences and about the importance of spiritual practices and the “thin places” where the Spirit seems to pierce the veil of natural causality. And in his view, this isn’t opposed to, but goes hand-in-hand with, a focus on social justice.

    Overall though, it does seem that, for mainliners, direct experience of the Spirit, whether in its more charismatic or mystical forms, isn’t something we’re comfortable talking about, much less encouraging. How would we go about changing that?

    (See also my earlier post on Krister Stendahl and speaking in tongues.)

  • Brian McLaren on the atonement

    I like this way of putting it:

    When people ask me about atonement these days, here’s what I often ask in reply: where do you primarily locate God on Good Friday? Is God primarily located with the Romans who are crucifying Jesus, or is God primarily located in the man on the cross, suffering at the hands of sinners? Many atonement theories locate God in and with the Romans, and I think, frankly, this is a serious mistake. When you locate God not in or with the ones torturing and killing, but in and with the one being tortured and killed, everything changes.

    From here.

  • Faith and factuality revisited

    When I was reading Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity, I expressed some dissatisfaction with his treatment of the Bible. I felt like he wasn’t clear enough about the relationship between the meaning of the text and the question of its historical truth.

    Recently I picked up Borg’s newer book on Jesus, and I’m happier with his treatment of the issue there. Maybe this is because he’s focusing on the gospels rather than talking about the Bible in general, which allows him to be more specific and concrete.

    Borg makes it clear that the gospels contain memory–that is, remembered events, words, etc. in the career of Jesus–but that these are typically overlaid or interpreted with a particular meaning. For example, Mark’s account of Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem isn’t just about Jesus going to Jerusalem; it’s also about the path of following Jesus.

    Moreover, Borg says, there are other stories in the gospels that are probably sheer metaphorical narrative (Borg uses “metaphor” broadly to mean the more-than-factual meaning of a text) whose purpose is to comment on the significance of Jesus. Examples include, in Borg’s judgment, the wedding at Cana and the story of Jesus walking on the water. They also include the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, which Borg shows (convincingly, to me) provide a kind of “counter-imperial” theology that contrasts the claims made on behalf of Jesus with those made on behalf of the Roman emperor. (This is also a major theme in Borg and Crossan’s book on Paul.)

    Borg’s point is this: whatever we say about the factuality of some of these stories, we can always (and should always) go on to ask about their meaning. The meaning is the testimony or witness of the early Christians to the significance of who Jesus was (and is).

    I take it that the upshot of this view is that there is a historical “core” to the gospels, and this matters: if Jesus never lived, or wasn’t, broadly, the kind of person portrayed in the gospels, then Christianity would be based on a mistake. However, the meaning of historical events isn’t something that can simply be “read off” them. The New Testament is primarily about the meaning or significance of what theologians sometimes call the “Christ-event” (i.e., the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus). If we insist that the most important question about any particular story is “Did this really happen?” we often lose sight of the meaning the story is meant to convey.

  • Chimps, morals, and God

    This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out.

    De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon. I think posing the issue as “morals (with or) without God” is misleading, though. I don’t see why a theist (Christian or otherwise) should have a problem with the idea that morality is “natural.”

    On the contrary, it makes good sense to me, theologically speaking, to say that the potential for morailty would be natural to human beings. God–so the Christian tradition says–wants us to live lives characterized by mutal care and support. This kind of life-in-community is what we were made for.* This is directly contrary to the idea that morality is some kind of divine “add-on” to the human condition. I see de Waal’s proposals as something like an updating of Aristotelian-Thomist ethics in light of current knowledge. Morality is basically about those rules, practices, character traits, and so on that are conducive to human flourishing.

    The other question that comes up is that of sanctions. Will people be moral if they aren’t afraid God will punish them? I think that, one, it’s just an observable fact that a lot of people behave perfectly decently without worrying about divine punishment (including many religious people), and, two, basing morality on the fear of divine punishment is bad theology. Paul’s letters in particular make it clear that a Christian’s motive for morality should come from a freely given response to the love God has shown us, a response empowered by the free gift of God’s Spirit.

    Where we might see a distinctive human quality here (and I realize that arguing for “unique” human capabilities is risky) is in our capacity to take a “God’s-eye” perspective on morality. What I mean by that is that we can grasp a moral vision that goes beyond our immediate kin group, beyond our friends, beyond our religious and national ties, even beyond our species, to encompass all God’s creatures. An example is the imaginative depictions of God’s eschatological peace in the Hebrew prophets. This is consistent with some recent theology, which has located the “divine image” precisely in our function as God’s stewards of creation. On this view, our “dominion” is properly aimed at facilitating the widest possible flourishing of God’s creation.
    ——————————————————-
    *Talking about “what we’re made for” obviously means something different in an evolutionary picutre of the world than one in which humans are understood to be a direct, special creation of God, but I think we can say that God intended to bring about creatures like us through the evolutionary process, in addition to whatever other divine goals that process serves.

    UPDATE: In retrospect, “Monkeys, Morals, and God” seems like the obviously superior title for this post. I’m really terrible at coming up with catchy blog post titles.

  • The thorn in the flesh and the “weakness gospel”

    I’m reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The First Paul, and it’s really good so far. I may have more to blog about the overall themes later, but for now I just wanted to note one interesting tidbit.

    There has been a lot of speculation about the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul said afflicted him and from which he prayed to God to be delivered (unsuccessfully). (See 2 Corinthians, 12:7-10.) I’ve seen theories as to what exactly this was ranging from epilepsy to homosexuality.

    Borg and Crossan speculate–and they’re clear that this is conjecture–that Paul may have been afflicted by bouts of malaria. First, they point out that Tarsus, Paul’s hometown, had an environment conducive to malaria:

    Think for a moment…about that Cilician plain locked between the mountains and the sea. Think of its rich fertility and agricultural prosperity fed by three rivers that annually drained the melting snows of the Taurus range. Despite the best Roman drainage engineering, that environment also meant marshes, mosquitoes, and malaria. (The First Paul, p. 62)

    Second, they suggest that Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” refers to the same “physical infirmity” Paul mentions in his letter to the Galatians when he writes that “You know that it was because of a physical infirmity that I first announced the gospel to you; though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me, but welcomed me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 4:13-15)

    They propose that a chronic malaria fever, which would be associated with, in the words of Pauline scholar William Mitchell Ramsay, “very distressing and prostrating paroxysms” wherein “the suffering can only lie and feel himself a shaking and helpless weakling” (quoted on p. 64). If this is what Paul was experiencing when he was among the Galatians, we can see how it might’ve “put [them] to the test.”

    Krister Stendahl, in Paul among Jews and Gentiles, has some interesting things to say about Paul’s “infirmity” and his theology of weakness. This humbling weakness, Stendahl argues, would have, in the ancient world, looked like evidence against the truth of Paul’s gospel, since salvation was closely associated with supernatural healing and immortality. However, for Paul, this “weakness” reflected the truth that God’s power is revealed in weakness:

    [Paul] finds his weakness one of those things which makes him one with the Lord, and which makes his ministry a true ministry of Jesus Christ who was crucified in weakness…. In this weakness, the power of Christ’s resurrection spreads through the missionary message to the church and manifests itself. Paul’s sickness is a little–and perhaps not so little–Golgotha, a Calvary of his own. (Paul among Jews and Gentiles, p. 44)

    Stendahl goes on to argue that, for Paul, this gospel of weakness resonates with what Luther called the theology of the cross–an anti-triumphalist message. “The theology of the cross,” Stendahl writes, “the theology of weakness, is really part and parcel of Paul’s deepest religious experience in a ministry related to his own weakness” (p. 47).

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine

    – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction

    – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government

    – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape

    – On not really believing in heaven

    – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them

    – Soldiers against torture

    – A rabbi writes about speaking out against anti-gay prejudice

    – A review of Wesley Smith’s anti-animal-rights book

  • “God loves you beyond your wildest imagining”

    This video from Bishop Gene Robinson has been making the rounds as part of the “It Gets Better” campaign:

    Bishop Robinson doesn’t tap-dance around anything. He simply says that those who tell gay kids that they’re “intrinsically disordered” or “an abomination” are “flat-out wrong.” I wonder how many young gay or lesbian people have never heard a religious leader speak like this?

  • The historical Jesus as a norm of Christology

    Over the weekend I read A. Roy Eckardt’s Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today. The book is more interesting than the title suggests; Eckardt writes in conversation not only with “historical Jesus” studies, but also with feminist theology, theology of religions, liberation theology, and particularly “post-Shoah” theology. His stated goal is to develop a Christology that maintains the distinctiveness of Christianity without adopting a triumphalist or supersessionist stance toward other traditions (preeminently Judaism).

    In Eckardt’s view, the historical Jesus is indispensable for any viable Christology. This doesn’t mean that the content of Christology can be completely determined by historical study. Rather, Eckardt adopts what he calls a “Lockean” view of the matter, based on an analogy with John Locke’s position on the relationship between faith and reason. Locke’s view was that religious truth can be based on reason or go “beyond” reason, but it can’t contradict reason. Likewise, Eckardt says, theological truth can be based on history, or go “beyond” history, but it can’t contradict history.

    What’s the practical upshot of this? Well, here’s a pertinent example. Since we know that the historical Jesus was a faithful Jew who never broke with the tradition of his ancestors, any Christology that would imply that God’s covenant with Israel has been nullified or superseded would be automatically suspect. The Jesus of history, in this view, provides a kind of negative criteria for judging theological constructions.

  • Toward a renewed Christian social democracy

    I enjoyed this article by historian-theologian Gary Dorrien on the prospects for a Christian version of social and economic democracy. According to Dorrien, while the dreams of a radical transformation of the economic system seem more distant than ever, they are still incredibly urgent, particularly in the wake of the financial collapse and the looming environmental crisis.

    Dorrien provides an overview of American Protestant thinking on capitalism and socialism during the 20th century. Interestingly, proponents of the Social Gospel, in his accounting, come out looking better than some of their self-styled “realist” critics, including a young Reinhold Niebuhr:

    One of the ironies of modern theology is that the American Social Gospelers of the 1930s and 1940s are nearly always treated as naive idealists, because many of them were pacifists, while Niebuhr is treated as the hero of the story. Yet Niebuhr was wrong about the New Deal, and the Social Gospel progressives were right. The Social Gospelers supported the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, which allowed the new Reconstruction Finance Corporation to buy bank equity. Over the next year, the RFC bought more than $1 billion of bank stock, about one-third of the capital invested in U.S. banks. The Social Gospel progressives, speaking through the Federal Council of Churches, called for “subordination of speculation and the profit motive to the creative and cooperative spirit” and “social planning and control of the credit and monetary systems for the common good.” They supported mortgage restructuring, social security, public works employment, and selective nationalization, while Niebuhr replied that these were mere Band-Aids to make middle-class moralists feel better, and that the New Deal was a form of quackery.

    The Social Gospelers told a story about the necessity of gradually democratizing society; Niebuhr told a more dramatic story, that history would either move forward to socialism or move backward to barbarism. There was no third way. Radical socialism, communism, and fascism were supposedly more realistic than the tame progressivism of the social democratic, Social Gospel, and New Deal movements. But the radical alternatives crashed and burned, and afterward Niebuhr retreated to welfare state reformism and the liberal Democratic mainstream.

    The end of the cold war and the rise of right-wing “Niebuhrian” apologists for unregulated capitalism like Michael Novak, Dorrien argues, shouldn’t be taken to mean that Christians no longer need to think about alternatives to actually existing capitalism. What Christians need instead is a pragmatic, non-dogmatic form of socialism or social democracy that appreciates both the virtues and limits of markets and can come up with context-specific ways for making the economic system more democratic, decentralized, and participatory. For inspiration, he looks not only to the Social Gospel movement, but also to the Anglican tradition of Christian socialism represented by figures like William Temple, Charles Raven, R. H. Tawney, and Charles Gore. He also cites Paul Tillich as sharing “the Christian socialist aversion to state collectivism.”

    The social vision of economic democracy cannot be imposed or transplanted. It can only take shape over the course of decades, as hard-won social gains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the groundwork for a better society. Such a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particular economic model. It does not rest upon illusions about human nature. It does not envision or require a transformed humanity. Reinhold Niebuhr’s epigrammatic justification of democracy suffices for economic democracy: The human capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but the human inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

    Dorrien’s article draws on material from his upcoming book, Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice.

    p.s. See also Dorrien’s lecture, “A Case for Economic Democracy.”