A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Jews, Christians, and a “two-poled” eschatology

    I’ve read more than one work of theology that attempted to explain the rejection of Jesus’ messiah-hood by the majority of Jews like this: Jews expectated the messiah to be a nationalist–even military–leader who would liberate them from Roman oppression, but Jesus was a different kind of messiah, a “spiritual” one who came to liberate us from our guilt and sin.* One problem with this account is that it reinforces stereotypes about “carnal” Jews and “spiritual” Christians. In the chapter on eschatology in his Way of Blessing, Way of Life, Clark Williamson proposes that it’s more illumaniting to see Jewish rejection of Jesus in a different light: it was because Jesus’ ministry clearly didn’t usher in the “days of the messiah,” the age where oppression, injustice, war, and hunger (for everyone, not just Jews) would be things of the past. By this reckoning, Jews were well-justified in not accepting the claims made on Jesus’ behalf!

    Williamson says that the early Christians maintained the same kind of messianic expectation, at least for a while, with the teaching that Jesus would return soon to usher in the messianic age. But as that hope of an imminent return faded, the church pushed its eschatological hope off into the afterlife and/or identified the “kingdom of God” that Jesus proclaimed with the spread of the church. Thus it became possible for Christians to see Jews as stubbornly refusing to accept what should’ve been obvious to them–that the Messiah had come. Along the way, Christians lost their sense of the eschatological tension between what had already been accomplished in Jesus and what was yet to be accomplished.

    As Christian eschatology has become increasingly otherworldly and privatized, we need, Williamson argues, to recover a more “Jewish” emphasis on this-worldly liberation as one pole of our eschatological hope. God wants the world to display relations of justice and peace. On the other hand, even the most just society would contain suffering, disease, sin, oppression, and death. These are constituent elements of our present condition that can’t be done away with by any program of this-worldly liberation. Moreover, if we restrict our hope to establishing a just society in this world, what about all the people who have died, many of them under conditions of terrible oppression and injustice? That’s why the other pole of our eschatology must remain our ultimate hope in God’s promise to save us, even beyond the horizon of death.
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    *I recognize that it’s far from certain that Jesus, in fact, claimed to be the Jewish messiah in any straightforward way.

  • A God of life

    The God of the Bible creates, re-creates, and ultimately redeems life. This God, whatever the other so-called “gods” might be like, loves life, rejoices in it, is concerned about it, not only creates it for the purpose of blessing it, but saves it, and in between discloses to God’s covenanted people the way of life that they are to follow as an alternative to the death-dealing ways so prevalent in the world. (Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life, p. 99)

    For Williamson, too much traditional theology has painted a picture of God that is at odds with this central biblical affirmation. He criticizes the view that God is “impassible”–unaffected by anything that happens in the world. While he affirms God’s “necessity” in two senses–God exists necessarily, and God necessarily has a particular character–he also predicates “contingency” of God. That is, God is affected by what happens in the world, by how the life that God has created fares. God is genuinely related to us.

    Following process thought, Williamson proposes that in place of a static, substance-attribute metaphysics, we’re better off using our experience as living selves to model the nature of God. For example, we shouldn’t think of God as fundamentally a-temporal (unrelated to time and change) but as eternally faithful through time. “If we develop a model of God from this basic awareness of the self, then God would be genuinely social and temporal, affected by others as well as effecting (creating) them…” (p. 105). Just as human selves are relational and social through and through, God is intimately related to all existing things.

    Williamson departs from some versions of process theology by affirming creation ex nihilo. “God’s creativity is not simply a once-upon-a-time creation, but an ongoing creativity that calls every moment of the life of the world into being” (p. 107). Further, God “created the world in order to share with it the blessing of God’s fullness of all possible good and beauty, to bring the world to well-being that the world might thereby glorify God” (p. 110). God wants to be in relation to creatures, a desire that manifests itself in God’s history of covenant-making.

    However, it’s precisely because of the relational nature of all existence that God cannot be said to be omnipotent, if by that we mean that God unilaterally determines the outcome of events. If reality is relational through and through, then power is essentially shared power. “What guarantees that evil will not finally triumph is God’s covenantal faithfulness and the faithfulness of God’s covenant partners in the task of actualizing God’s purposes in the world” (p. 128). We cannot, Williamson argues, divorce God’s power from God’s love; God’s power is at work in the world is through love. God’s will opposes the evil that exists in the world, but that doesn’t mean God can simply destroy evil through coercive power. The cross of Jesus is the clearest picture of how God’s love is manifested in the world. God’s love is the power whereby God blesses, redeems, and reconciles all life.

    This view has two main implications for ethics: (1) what we do matters to God (because God is affected by everything that happens) and (2) since God is not one finite agent among others, we are responsible for doing the sorts of things that it is appropriate for finite agents to do (things like concretely meeting the needs of our neighbors). A life-centered ethic is the proper response to the blessing of life we receive from God.

  • A story of blessing

    Clark Williamson’s systematic theology Way of Blessing, Way of Life is less focused on Jewish-Christian relations than his earlier work A Guest in the House of Israel (which I blogged about previously), but the project of re-connecting Christianity to its Jewish roots is still a major concern. One point Williamson makes is that the way Christians frequently tell their story tends to leave out the history of Israel. The arc of “creation-fall-redemption” that forms the backbone of much Christian theology, preaching, liturgy, and spirituality all too readily allows us to jump from the first three chapters of Genesis to the New Testament.

    By contrast, Williamson argues, we need to attend more to the “Old” Testament (he recommends we just refer to “the Scriptures”) to discern the identity of God and God’s purpose for humanity and the rest of creation:

    No story is more pivotal to Judaism than that of Exodus and Sinai. Nor should any book be more crucial to how Christians understand themselves. Exodus, says David Tracy, “provides a proper context for understanding the great Christian paradigm of the life-ministry-death-and-resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Christianity misunderstands itself whenever it wallows in a privatized, depoliticized, and de-historicized faith. Exodus requires “a resolutely this-worldly spirituality as it demands a historical and political, not a private or individualist, understanding of Christian salvation-as-total-liberation.” (p. 74)

    Williamson thinks that the Exodus story can help correct the Christian tendency to think of salvation in a narrowly individualistic way that emphasizes an otherworldly heaven. Following Methodist theologian R. Kendall Soulen, Williamson suggests that, more basic and inclusive than the creation-fall-redemption story is one of “an economy of consummation based on the Lord’s blessing”:

    God promises well-being that includes all of life (peace, economic sufficiency, health, safety, fertility, God’s loving presence) and makes for the fullness of human life. The fullness of human life is a gift from the fullness of God’s life. (p. 84)

    Becuase God’s blessings are freely shared with us, we should freely share those blessings with the other, those who are different. This “blessing-in-difference” characterizes God’s blessing of creation, human beings’ mutual self-giving, and Israel’s mission to be a blessing to “the nations.” Clearly, God’s purpose of blessing all creation has not yet been realized in its fullness, but awaits God’s eschatological consummation. And part of that ultimate consummation is our learning to share more widely the blessings we have received with each other and the rest of God’s creation.

  • Clark Williamson on revelation

    God is the proper subject of revelation, God’s self in God’s being and works. In revelation, God reveals God’s self and we are dependent on God’s revelation of God’s self for our knowledge of God. All human efforts to gain knowledge of God by independent inquiry are fruitless (1 Cor. 1:21: “The world did not know God through wisdom”); such pretend knowledge of God is to God’s own self-disclosure as chaff to the wheat (Jer. 23:28). God is not an object accessible to our observation in the world. God is not an in-the-world being, who exists alongside other beings and is perceptibly distinguishable from them as they are from one another. God is the One in whom the world has its being, the One from whom all things come and to whom all things return, the Alpha and the Omega. The knowledge of God must be granted us by God.

    – Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life: A Christian Theology, pp. 46-47

    Revelation, according to Williamson, is always particular, not revelation “in general”; it occurs by means of particular media (e.g., historical events) through which God’s identity is disclosed. The content of revelation is primarily personal–God’s nature, will, and purpose–rather than a set of propositions or doctrines to be believed. Thus, the proper faith-response is primarily trust–trust in God’s promise and God’s command–rather than assent to a set of statements. Revelation is better thought of on the model of personal disclosure than the revelation of propositional truths. Revelation has both an “objective” and a “subjective” pole–the revelatory event and the human reception (and interpretation) of it. There is no revelation without interpretation. For an event to be a purported case of revelation is for it already to have undergone interpretation. (This also opens the door to an ongoing revisiting and refinement of our understanding of revleation.)

    Further, Williamson doesn’t deny that revelation occurs outside the boundaries of Christianity. “God reveals God’s self freely and to whom God pleases” (p. 46), and other religions can be media of revelation. But that doesn’t mean that Christians can never criticize other traditions (even as they should enter into conversation with and learn from them). Ultimately, the criteria of revelation, for Christians, is “the love of God freely offered to God’s people and the command of God that they in turn love God and one another” (p. 60). This provides a guide for interacting with people of other faiths (or no faith): because revelation is fundamentally about love, it does not impose itself on others. “Definitive revelation does not impose itself in an authoritarian, oppressive way on anyone” (p. 67).

  • CotC on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood

    Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator seems poised to return to at least semi-regular blogging (or so we can hope!). The other day he had a good post on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the second book in what I believe is supposed to be a projected trilogy about a world of bioengineering and environmental degradation have run amok. I recently read both YOTF and its predecessor Oryx and Crake and enjoyed them both immensely. As Elliot points out, Atwood deals with some very interesting religious and philoosphical issues in these books, including putting the story of a sect of radical eco-Christians at the center of the second book.

  • An example of the wrong approach to other religions

    I don’t mean to pick on this blog in particular, but this post exemplifies an all-too-common tendency of Christians to put an apologetic slant on their approach to non-Christian religions. The post purports to offer five reasons why “a thoughtful person would start their religious quest with Christianity,” and in a relatively short space it manages to pack in quite a few straw men, mischaracterizations, and omissions with regard to other traditions:

    – “There might be glimmers of grace in Hinduism and Buddhism, but every other major world religion is about doing stuff that is going to please some deity.”

    – “Most eastern religions portray evil, pain and suffering as ‘illusion’ that you need to overcome and transcend. Christianity takes evil, pain and suffering seriously.”

    – “In Christianity, we get to use our minds in our worship … In eastern traditions (those religions that most often make the claim of being holistic), your reason might actually be an impediment in your religious progress.”

    – “Jesus is the universal religious figure that every major religion wants to co-opt.”

    The overarching approach here is to put the best possible spin on Christianity (because, hey, Christianity has never been legalistic or anti-intellectual, right?) and to offer little more than caricatures of other traditions. By contrast, I think that before we even get to the point of critiquing non-Christian religions, we need to do our very best to understand them on their own terms and see how and why they make sense to their own adherents.

  • Dog bites man, John Milbank stirs up controversy

    John Milbank of “Radical Orthodoxy” fame always seems able to stir up controversy in the theo-blogosphere. The latest hullabaloo stems from an essay Milbank wrote for an Australian website that seems to endorse a romantic nostalgia for western colonialism (or as he puts it, “the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires”). That, and the fact that Milbank draws on the right-wing American Enterprise Institute’s favorite apostate Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali for much of his essay’s treatment of Islam, seems to have confirmed for many that there’s little that’s radical about Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy and much that is an apology for old-fasioned Christian imperialism and exclusivism. (Milbank’s flirtation with David Cameron’s Tory party in the UK is, for many, another data point.) Milbank’s essay has generated several responses: at An und für sich, Religion Bulletin, and Inhabitatio Dei, among other usual suspects.

    I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I can’t help but notice that Milbank, as in other of his writings, has a highly idealized view of Christian history, which allows him to play a tolerant, reasonable, even feminist Christianity off of a historically intolerant, irrational, and repressive Islam. While Milbank generously allows that there is more potential for Islam to change than does Ali, the fact that he sets up the opposition the way he does loads the dice from the outset. Essentially, Milbank’s “solution” for Islamic reform is for Islam to become more like Christianity. I’m also puzzled because Milbank says that Islam should become more “ecclesial,” more “mystical,” and less “political,” but I was under the impression that Radical Orthodoxy saw the church as the “political” entity par excellence.

  • Holy faith and holy disbelief

    I stand in awe before the memory of the K’doshim [holy ones] who walked into the gas chambers with the Ani Ma’amin–I believe–on their lips. How dare I question, if they did not question? I believe because they believed. And I stand in awe before the K’doshim, before the memory of the untold suffering of innocent human beings who walked to the gas chambers without faith, because what was imposed upon them was more than faith can endure…

    The faith is holy; but so are the disbelief and the religious rebellion of the concentration camps holy. The disbelief was not intellectual, but faith crushed, shattered, pulverized. And faith murdered a millionfold is holy disbelief. Those who were not there, and yet readily accept the Holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered. And those who were not there and yet join with self-assurance the rank of the disbelievers desecrate the holy faith of the believers.

    — Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkowits, quoted in Jonathan Magonet, The Explorer’s Guide to Judaism, pp. 289-90.

  • Social justice and Christianity are inseparable

    I’ve honestly not paid much attention to Glenn Beck–I’ve never even seen a clip of his show, and most of what I know about him comes from blogs and other media reports. This past weekend’s “Beckfest” on the Mall, though, significantly raised his profile. It’s even being suggested that he’s now the head of a new religious movement.

    It seems that one of Beck’s signature themes is that Christians should have nothing to do with “social justice”–apparently he even told his viewers to leave their churches(!) if their pastors advocated social justice. Social justice has long been a bogey of the political Right–in the view of many conservatives it stands for an attempt to engineer socio-economic outcomes rather than leaving those outcomes to the workings of the free market. Libertarian thinker F. A. Hayek even claimed to find the phrase “social justice” vacuous.

    The inconvenient fact, though, is that Christianity is inseparable from the quest for social justice. We could define social justice, in a rough and ready way, as social institutions oriented toward the common good and the flourishing of all people. The key point here is the attention to institutions. “Changes of heart” where people become more generous, loving, etc. are perhaps a necessary but not a sufficient condition for social justice. The structures of society (e.g., law, economy, or government) result from human decisions, and when they are unjust, humans are responsible for changing them. The idea of individual improvement divorced from efforts at social reform is a peculiarly American heresy.

    This is not some fringe, lefty view of the matter. Everwhere Christianity has garnered significant influence, that influence has spilled over into attempts to reform social institutions (for both good and ill, it should be admitted–viz. prohibition). Christianity has always been a significant impetus for social reform, including playing a role the creation of a welfare and regulatory state to provide a safety net and rein in the excesses of the market.

    In contrast to the majority Christian tradition, the knee-jerk vulgar libertarianism of Beck seems to oppose any efforts on the part of the government to temper the workings of the market to ensure, for instance, that no one goes without basic necessities of life or the goods they need to flourish as human persons (goods like health care, education, and a clean and healthy environment). But mainstream Christian social thought doesn’t recognize an absolute “right” to unlimited accumulation of private property severed from an orientation to the common good, and its ideal is not a government that is studiously “neutral” with respect to the outcomes of markets or other social structures. For instance, as I’ve pointed out before, the general consensus of the tradition has been that the poor are entitled, by right, to the excess wealth of the rich, so long as they lack basic necessities.

    Justice, it has been said, is simply the social form of love. Clearly there’s room for reasonable disagreement about what the best means are for reforming social institutions to bring about greater justice. But it has to be said: the idea of a totally hands-off government indifferent to institutional outcomes is, at best, a minority position within Christian social thought.

  • Guest in the House wrap-up

    Readers may have noticed that my posts on Williamson’s book haven’t been very critical. That’s in part because I think he’s right about a lot of things. But it has more to do with the fact that I was mainly trying to get clear in my own mind about what he’s saying.

    I think a large part of the value I got out of reading this book is analogous to what I got from reading Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is last year. (See post here, here, here, and here.) Just as I was familiar with the concerns raised by feminists about traditional theology, I was aware, in a general sort of way, that anti-Judaism was part of the baggage of the church. But I had never thought about its pervasive effect on theology and what it would take to fix it in any deep or systematic way. And just as I came away from Johnson’s book convinced that incorporating feminist insights and addressing feminist concerns was a critical task for theology (even as I didn’t necessarily agree with all of Johnson’s specific positions), Williamson has convinced me that the same is true for Christianity’s legacy of anti-Judaism.