A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Mid-week links

    – 2010’s was the hottest June on record in Washington, D.C. (I believe it!)

    – Glenn Beck pulicizes liberation theology.

    – On the authority of the Bible. (And more.)

    – Is Amazon killing the publishing business?

    – Keith Ward argues that there are things science can’t explain.

    – The ideology of marriage.

    – I heartily concur with this review of the new Soilwork album. I’ve been listening to it nonstop for the last two weeks.

    – The hyphen is your friend.

    – Against new-book hype.

    – God is a materialist.

  • On the righteousness of Jesus

    From Michael Ramsey’s God, Christ, and the World (p. 85):

    So the righteousness of Jesus is the righteousness of a Godward relationship of trust, dependence, receptivity. It is a terribly hard kind of righteousness. It is sometimes hard because it involves the calls of sacrifice and self-renunciation which Jesus gives. But it is more often hard because of the shattering generosity of God, demanding an utterly childlike receptivity. To receive like a little child an unmerited gift and to be humbled in the receiving time and time again: such is the righteousness of the kingdom. It follows that in Christian ethics humility has a continuing place which throughout history secular forms of ethics find very hard to understand. It also follows that St Paul’s teaching about justification by faith, the doctrine of being right with God on the basis of God’s own gift, is in a true line with the ethics of Jesus.

  • On “existential” Christianity

    One of the chapters of God, Christ and the World is a critical appreciation of the thought of Rudolf Bultmann. (The earlier quote on demythologization was taken from the same chapter.)

    Bultmann’s project of demythologization was tied to his desire to unearth the essential message – the kerygma – of Christian faith. He reinterpreted the language of the New Testament so that it could be seen to be about effecting a transformation of human existence. In part, this was because he believed that modern science excluded the possibility of divine action in the field of nature; divine action has to do, at least so far as we can know, exclusively with God’s relation to humanity. Drawing on Heidegger’s existentialism, Bultmann interpreted the symbols of the Bible as making it possible for us to move from inauthentic to authentic existence. It is not Jesus the man who provides a pattern for us to emulate, or the Atonement and Resurrection as cosmic events that make possible forgiveness and new life, but the proclamation of the possibility of authentic existence, realized in Christ.

    Here Ramsey questions whether Bultmann’s “existentialist” interpretation of Christianity is adequate:

    …while the existential element in the New Testament has, as we saw, an important place, so that an existential theology today is able to recapture it, there is also an ontological element in the New Testament as utterly essential for New Testament Christianity. In the experience of salvation existentialism may seem to suffice, for the Saviour is definable as ‘what he means to me’. But in the experience of worship the Christian was and is concerned with One who is. The worshipper forgets his own being and experiences in the adoration of One who is, and the ‘isness’ of deity is there, behind and before, now and for ever. The ‘isness’ of deity–prominent in the Old Testament–is reaffirmed when it is revealed that Jesus shares in it. St John shows that the glory of Jesus which men encountered in his life and death is the glory of deity in eternity. Is it that an exclusively Protestant view of Christianity as the religion of the Word, which misses the deep emphasis of Catholic Christianity upon adoration, causes Bultmann to suppose that an existentialist concept can convey the whole meaning of Christianity? Ontology, ‘isness’, ‘being’ is ineradicable from the Christianity of the New Testament. (pp. 56-7)

    In retrospect, what seems to me most dated about existentialism–and existentialist interpretations of Christianity–is its excessive anthropocentrism. At the time, existentialism seemed like it offered an end run around the “scientific” worldview that seemed to preclude divine action in the world and to deny the possibility of human freedom. But the price paid was to erect a wall between humanity and nature which later thought has shown to be untenable. The human-divine encounter occurred only in the depths of the self and its transition from “inauthentic” to “authentic” existence. There was no room left for divine revelation through nature, or for the idea that nature might have its own inherent value or meaning. This dovetails to some extent with Ramsey’s concern that “existentialist” Christiantiy talks about God only as the power of salvation for human beings; this risks turning into an instrumentalist view of God and the death of true worship. A better cosmology and theology would allow that 1. human beings are fundamentally part of nature, 2. that God is revealed through all parts of the created order, and 3. that God’s purposes encompass more than human salvation.

    See here for a summary of Bultmann’s thought.

  • Ramsey on the Resurrection

    More from Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s God, Christ and the World (p. 78):

    The Resurrection is something which ‘happened’ a few days after the death of Jesus. The apostles became convinced that Jesus was alive and that God had raised him to life. It is not historically scientific to say only that the apostles came to realize the divine meaning of the Crucifixion for them or that the person of Jesus now became contagious to them. Something happened so as to vindicate for them the meaning of the Cross, and to make the person of Jesus contagious to them. The evidence for a stupendous happening, which the New Testament writers mention, was the survival of the Church, the appearances of Jesus in a visible and audible impact on the apostles, and the discovery that the tomb was empty. The several elements in this threefold evidence no doubt had different degrees of evidential weight for different people, and they have such varying degrees still. As to significance, if it were the existential encounter of Jesus which alone mattered, then the empty tomb would have little or no significance. If, however, Jesus has a cosmic meaning with cosmic effects then the empty tomb has great significance, akin to the significance of the Incarnation itself.

  • Michael Ramsey on “demythologizing” the Bible

    From Ramsey’s* God, Christ, and the World (pp. 48-49):

    Demythologizing was taking place in the apostolic age. In the teaching of Jesus there were pictures of a future coming of the Son of Man on the clouds and of the establishment of a divine kingdom described in vivid apocalyptic imagery with the details of a final judgment. In some of the sayings of Jesus these things were to happen within the lifetime of the disciples. But was it possible to expect things to happen on the scene of history just like that? Or were there underlying realities which the imagery conveyed to people in a certain setting of thought and culture in Palestine and which other imagery would have to convey to people in another setting of thought and culture? The teaching of the Fourth Gospel about the return of Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and about the realization of eternal life and divine judgment by the Christian in the here and now, may fairly be called a ‘demythologizing’ of the earlier imagery. Again, the spatial imagery of a local heaven to which Jesus was exalted at the Ascension was seen to convey realities altogether beyond space–the sovereignty and omnipresence of Jesus. It would be quite untrue to say that a single mythological frame dominated the thinking and teaching of the apostolic age. The records contain varieties of myth and varieties of demythologizing at work. Factual records, myths, demythologizing propositions and sometimes–as in the Apocalypse–‘remythologizing’ processes all had their part in the apostolic thinking, teaching and writing about Jesus Christ.

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    *Ramsey was the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, serving from 1961 to 1974. See here for more.

  • Heart of Christianity 5 – Jesus

    Marcus Borg made his name as a scholar (and popularizer) of the “historical Jesus,” so it’s not surprising that his chapter on Jesus has some rich material. (His book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time is well worth reading, though hardly the last word on the topic.)

    One common way to talk about the relationship between Jesus as a historical figure and as the object of the church’s confession has been to talk about the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” Borg prefers to talk about the “pre-Easter” and “post-Easter” Jesus.

    The pre-Easter Jesus is the man of Nazareth who lived, preached, healed, and taught in 1st-century Palestine; the post-Easter Jesus is Jesus as he has been experienced by Christians for the last 2,000 years–as the one who mediates the presence and Spirit of God.

    Borg says–and here I have a hard time disagreeing with him–that the church’s Christology has tended to obscure the humanity of Jesus. This is despite the fact that in its creedal confessions the church affirms his true humanity along with his true divinity.

    The problem, Borg argues, is that our picture of Jesus has been over-formed by a particular theological narrative: Jesus is the Son of God who came down from heaven, chiefly to die for our sins so that we could “go to heaven” after we die. When this is taken to be the sum, or at least the essence, of the gospel, the man Jesus and the life he actually lived tend to recede from view.

    Part of the reason this happens, he says, is that we have over-literalized our Christological metaphors, particularly “Son of God.”

    But “Son of God” is a metaphor like the rest [e.g., lamb, door, light, word, wisdom]. It affirms that Jesus’ relationship to God is intimate, like that of child to parent. To echo language from John’s gospel: the son knows the father, and the father knows the son, and son is the father’s beloved. This relational understanding of “son of God” is found in the Jewish world of Jesus. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel is called son of God, as are the kings of Israel and Judah. Closer to the time of Jesus, Jewish mystics who were healers were sometimes referred to as God’s son. And “son” resonates with agency as well; in his world, a son could represent a father and speak with the authority of the father. To call Jesus “Son of God” means all of this. (pp. 87-88)

    In essence, says Borg,

    Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. (p. 88)

    So, what kind of life was that? What kind of man was Jesus? Borg sketches a portrait based on his work, which naturally will be at least somewhat contentious. In brief outline, Jesus was

    – a Jewish mystic,
    – a healer,
    – a teacher of wisdom,
    – a social prophet, and
    – an initiator of a movement.

    Most contentious in Borg’s portrait of Jesus is that he denies that Jesus thought of himself in any conscious way as “the Messiah.” I also wonder how essential the “Jewish” part of “Jewish mystic” is for Borg–is it an accidental feature, or does it condition Jesus’ mysticism in an essential way?

    The larger point Borg wants to make, though, is that in over-emphasizing Jesus’ divinity–seeing him as a kind of Clark Kent figure who is really Superman underneath his disguise–we lose sight of what a remarkable man he actually was. In traditional language, his experience of God, his acts of healing, his teaching, and his passion for social justice–those things that captivated (or alarmed) his contemporaries–are properties of his humanity.

    It has to be said that Borg has a “lower” Christology than a lot of us are comfortable with. But–this chapter helped clarify for me the value of his work. I see him as providing an entry point into the Christian tradition for people who can’t currently (and may never) accept all the metaphysical baggage associated with the creeds and confessions of the church (at least as articulated by a lot of theology). And, speaking personally, that includes me, at least part of the time.

    After all, what more do we really want to require to be a Christian than to confess that Jesus is the revelation of God and to commit (in the same stumbling and halting way that we all do) to following him? I’ll give Borg the last word:

    I do not think the church’s extravagant devotion to Jesus is a mistake, for the purpose of the church, of Christology, of the creed is to point us to Jesus. And then Jesus says, “It’s not about me.” He points beyond himself to God–to God’s character and passion. This is the meaning of our christological language and our creedal affirmations about Jesus: in this person we see the revelation of God, the heart of God. He is both metaphor and sacrament of God. (pp. 98-99)

  • Heart of Christianity 4 – God

    In chapter 4, “God: The Heart of Reality,” Borg continues his now tried-and-true approach of contrasting aspects of the earlier paradigm and the emerging paradigm. Here he discusses the nature and character of God.

    Borg calls the earlier paradigm’s concept of God supernatural theism. This concept identifies God as a transcendent, personal being who created the universe and may occassionally intervene within it to engineer certain outcomes.

    By contrast, the emergent paradigm embraces panentheism, a notion that has received a fair bit of attention in contemporary theology, from such diverse quarters as Jurgen Moltmann, thinkers associated with the science-and-religion dialogue, and process theology. In supposed contrast to supernatural theism, panentheism emphasizes the “closeness” of God to the created world (pan + en + theos = “all things in God”).

    According to Borg, supernatural theism sees God as “out there,” as fundamentally separate from the world, which largely operates according to its own laws and nature. For God to have any influence on the world, God must “intervene” by “breaking” those laws. It also, he says, has contributed to an ecologically desctructive view of the natural world by minimizing the presence of God in the world.

    Panentheism, on the other hand, emphasizes the immanence of God. God is the “encompassing Spirit… the one in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’” (p. 70). God is thus not absent from creation, but includes it, even while transcending it. Borrowing a phrase from Lutheran theology, God is “in, with, and under” creation, or a “presence beneath and within our everyday lives” (p. 67). Borg says that instead of using the language of “intervention,” panentheism uses terms like “divine intentionality” or “divine interactivity” to describe God’s relation with the world (see p. 67).

    A critic of Borg might well say that his description of supernatural theism is a straw man. For instance, what proponent of traditional theism has actually denied the immanence (or omnipresence) of God? Relatedly, it’s not clear to me that panentheism solves all the alleged problems of classical theism, at least not without a great deal more fleshing out than Borg gives it here–and it may introduce new ones of its own. Nevertheless, with the popularity of the slot-machine God of “prosperity” preaching and the all-determining deity of neo-Calvinism, fresh thinking about God and God’s relationship to creation is definitely needed.

  • Play it again, Sam

    I feel like I kept circling around the same points in the last couple posts, but was having a hard time saying anything very clear about them. This sent me back looking through my archives, and I found a whole bunch of posts trying to stake out a similar middle path between overly confident conservatism and deflationary liberalism. It’s funny how much of my blogging consists of trying to make the same points over and over again in slightly different language. Or maybe it’s depressing. Or maybe it shows an admirable intellectual consistency… Anyway, here’s a sampling:

    – “Faith and factuality”

    – “The Virgin Birth: Does it matter?”

    – “He rose again on the third day…”

    – “What kind of resurrection?”

  • Fact, metaphor, and the Bible: the case of the Resurrection

    “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.” – St. Paul

    I’m trying to get clear on the extent to which I disagree with Marcus Borg’s take on the “metaphorical” nature of the Bible, so I thought it might be useful to look at his treatment of the Resurrection of Jesus.

    Borg writes that he sees the “truth of the Easter stories” as twofold:

    Jesus is a figure of the present and not simply of the past. He continued to be experienced by his first followers after his death and continues to be experienced to this day. It’s not just that his memory lived on or that his spirit lived on, as we sometimes speak of the spirit of Lincoln living on. Rather, he was and is experienced as a figure of the present. In short, Jesus lives.

    Not only does Jesus live, but “Jesus is Lord.” In the New Testament, this is the foundational affirmation about Jesus, and it is grounded in the Easter experience. To say that Jesus is Lord is to say more than simply that Jesus lives. It means that he has been raised to God’s right hand, where he is one with God. And to affirm that he is Lord is to deny all other lords. (Heart of Christianity, p. 54)

    Borg continues:

    Because I see the meaning of the Easter stories this way, I can be indifferent to the factual questions surrounding the stories. For example, was the tomb really empty? Was his corpse transformed? Did the risen Jesus really eat a fish? Did he appear to his disciples in such a visible, physical way that we could have videotaped him if we had been there?

    For me, the truth of the Easter stories is not at stake in these questions. For example, the story of the empty tomb may be a metaphor of the resurrection rather than a historical report. As metaphor, it means: you won’t find Jesus in the land of the dead. As the angel in the story puts it, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” The truth of the Easter stories is grounded in the ongoing experience of Jesus as a figure of the present who is one with God and therefore “Lord.”

    Obviously, a lot of Christians would disagree with Borg about the relative (un)importance of the details surrounding the Resurrection. But I think his is a reasonable position for someone to take. What requires a bit more clarification, I think, is the status of the Resurrection itself. And this is where I think the opposition between “fact” and “metaphor” muddies the waters a bit.

    This is because, for Christian faith, the Resurrection is a fact in the sense that it is something that happened–an event that makes a difference to the way things go for the world. But it isn’t something that can be straightforwardly described using the language and concepts drawn from our run-of-the-mill experience. The Resurrection–like the other great hinges of the Christian faith (e.g., creation and final consummation)–is rooted in a Reality that goes beyond the mundane world of space and time.

    Consequently, the language we use to describe it is, of necessity, metaphorical, symbolic, even “mythical.” We see this in the NT accounts of the appearances of the risen Jesus. He is “physical” in some sense, but his body also behaves in ways that are quite atypical for a physical object (changing its appearance, appearing inside locked rooms, etc.). Whatever judgments we might want to make about the factuality of these accounts, the paradoxical language points to the fact that the disciples and those to whom they handed their tradition took themselves to be dealing with a reality beyond the bounds of the ordinary. We could say the same about the other details Borg mentions (the empty tomb, the angels): they may not themselves be “factual,” but they point to a fact.

    This is why talking about the Resurrection as “metaphor” could obscure some fundamental distinctions. Sometimes when people talk like this what they mean is that the stories of the Resurrection are just illustrations of some general “spiritual” truth, such as that new life comes through suffering or some such. But Christian faith stands or falls on something much more concrete and specific than that: that the man Jesus who was crucified lives on in the power of God and that this makes all the differences for our lives and for the world. As C.S. Lewis would say, it’s a myth (or metaphor) become fact.

    Again, I don’t know whether or not Borg would disagree with this. But I think his discussion could’ve brought these distinctions out more clearly.

  • Heart of Christianity 3 – Bible

    Unlike his take on faith, I found Borg’s treatment of the Bible surprisingly weak. He starts out by saying that Christianity is centered on the Bible because it points to God, but that the Bible has become a stumbling block for many because of biblical literalism. Literalism, according to Borg, puts an undue emphasis on 1. infallibility, 2. historical factuality, and 3. moral and doctrinal absolutes.

    By contrast, his emerging paradigm is 1. historical, 2. metaphorical, and 3. sacramental in its treatment of the Bible. Let’s unpack that a bit:

    Historical: The Bible, Borg says, is a human product, created by two historical communities (Israel and the early Christian communities). It tells us how these communities saw their life with God, but, as such, it is historically and culturally conditioned. The Bible should be interpreted in its historical context–as texts written from and to particular communities.

    Metaphorical: Borg defines metaphor as the non-literal but “more-than-literal” meaning of a text. In his account, the more-than-literal is what matters most. For example, the Genesis creation story is primarily about God’s relation to us and the world, not whether the world was created in six 24-hour periods. Likewise, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth as reported in the gospel (the virgin birth, the star of Bethlehem, the wise men, the shepherds, etc.) have rich symbolic meaning that doesn’t depend on their historical factuality.

    Sacramental: The Bible is a “means of grace” whereby God becomes present to us. In personal or public devotional reading of scripture (e.g., lectio divina) we can hear the Spirit speaking to us through the words of the text.

    For the emerging paradigm, Borg says, the Bible is fundamentally a “way of seeing” God and our life with God (metaphor) and a means or way that God speaks to us and comes to us (sacrament).

    I agree with Borg that much of the Bible can–and should–be understood metaphorically and that flat-footed literalism often misses the point. Borg’s key claim is that the stories have this meaning independent of their historic factuality, and, despite the importance of historical context, focusing on the question of “what really happened” detracts from their meaning. While true as far as it goes, I think this is an over-simplification.

    After all, the Bible is a different kind of literature from Shakespeare or Moby-Dick, or even the Bhagavad-Gita. Its spiritual or religious meaning depends, at least to some extent, on historical factuality. To take the most obvious example, Christian faith would collapse–or at least be radically different–if it turned out that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived or that he lived a life very different in character from the one depicted in the gospels (leaving aside how we could ever learn that this was the case).

    Historical truth does matter–even if we agree that there is a lot of mythical embroidery on the basic facts. The meaning of Jesus–the more-than-literal meaning if you like–would be a lot different with a different set of historical facts. This is because the Christian claim is that the divine life was actually lived out among us. I’m not sure Borg would deny this, given the work he’s done on the “historical Jesus” question, but he gives little indication–in this chapter at least–that the history matters much at all. (Which, as Jonathan pointed out, makes you wonder why getting the historical context right is so important.)

    Borg seems at times to want to replace a one-dimensional “literalist” interpretation with a one-dimensional “metaphorical” one. But I think he’s asking the concept of metaphor to do too much work here. (In fact, at times I think he’s using “metaphorical” to include every non-historical type of meaning, from “moral” to “theological” and “metaphysical.” This confuses more than it clarifies.). The Bible is more complex than a simple dichotomy between “literal” and “metaphorical” captures, and I think other approaches do more justice to that complexity.