A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Christ, Bible, Church: Some thoughts on in/fallibility

    As I noted on Friday, Derek recently wrote a post setting forth some provisional thoughts on the church and infallibility. While I generally agree with his conclusions, I did raise, in a comment over there, some questions about using the hypostatic union as an analogy or model for thinking about the relation between the human and divine aspects of the church. So I thought it might be worth trying–in a tentative way–to flesh that worry out a bit more here.

    The hypostatic union, of course, refers to the Christian confession that the human and divine natures subsist in one person in Jesus Christ. By analogy, then, we might say (and Derek says he considers it an open question to what extent we can say this) that there is something similar going on with the Bible, the Church, and the Eucharist:

    Now—the Incarnation is about the conjunction of these natures: the Word taking flesh. Theologically there are three other loci where I believe that something similar is happening. That is, in the Holy Scriptures, the Word becomes joined to human language and words as a means of God’s self-revelation. Similarly in the Holy Eucharist, Christ becomes joined to the physical elements of bread and wine as a means of God’s self-revelation and a means of grace. Finally, in the Holy Church, Christ incorporates us into his mystical body which becomes a single organism, a living church built of living stones to use the imagery of Paul, Peter, and John.

    I’m going to leave aside the Eucharist and focus on the Church, and to some extent the Bible. As I see it, there are significant risks in using such a model to describe the Bible and/or Church. (I’m bracketing the question of to what extent this analogy has in fact been used in the history of Christian thought since I’m not well-versed enough in that history to comment.)

    My main concern is that such a move may threaten to collapse the distinction between Christ and the Bible/Church. This is because, what we confess in the doctrine of the Incarnation is that Christ was wholly transparent to the divine will. By this I just mean that nothing in him hindered the expression of God’s character or saving will. To put it another way, Jesus is the divine life lived out under the conditions of human, creaturely existence. But–the same can’t be said–or so I would maintain–of either the Bible or the Church.

    Take the Bible first. There are certainly parts of the Bible that seem to obscure the character of God as revealed in Jesus. Just to take an example at hand, in today’s lectionary reading from 2 Samuel, we are told that God, to punish David for his transgression of committing adultery with Uriah the Hittite’s wife and arranging for Uriah to be killed, “struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became very ill” (2 Sam. 11:15). Now, whatever we may want to say about the Bible as a medium of revelation–and I do want to affirm it–a God who strikes down innocent children because of their parents’ sins seems hard to square with the God revealed by Jesus. It’s the revelation of God in Jesus that provides our norm for interpreting–and if necessary critiquing–the portrayals of God in the Bible.

    The same can be said of the Church. We might define the Church as the fellowship of those people who are united to Christ by faith and Baptism and who consciously seek to subject themselves to Christ’s lordship. The Church attempts, in principle, to follow Christ–but clearly does not always succeed. It is a mixture of elements–some that reflect and some that obscure the divine goodness.

    Granted the New Testament refers to the Church as the Body of Christ, and that this language has been very important in Christian reflection on the nature of the church. But I would argue that “body” language can be misleading if we take it to imply that the Church is a wholly adequate expression of the divine will. The Church is a creature, and maintaining the creator/creature distinction is essential for avoiding the temptation to mistake the finite for the infinite, which is at the root of claims to infallibility. Or, as H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, to risk falling from a “radical” monotheism into a churchly henotheism:

    In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, p. 58)

    Radical monotheism, in Neibuhr’s thinking, relativizes the claim of even the most sacred of authorities. Maybe a useful way of characterizing the Church would be along the lines of Luther’s simul justus et peccator (at the same time just and sinful). The Church lives from its faith in the crucified and risen one and is just through his righteousness alone. At the same time, the Church remains empirically a mixed bag of good and evil, of truth and error, ever in need of reformation.

  • The rise of the more-Catholic-than-thou Protestant

    This was a character who was (blessedly) unknown to me prior to the advent of the theo-blogosphere: the guy (and it’s almost invariably a guy) who is constantly berating his fellow Protestants for not being “catholic” enough. That is, not being in touch with the larger Church and the Great Tradition, being antinomian, relativistic, individualistic, “liberal Protestant,” etc. etc. And yet these fellows never seem quite able to bring themselves to take the obvious step and become Catholiic. Could it be because if they did they’d be just one more humble Catholic and not someone with a mission to tell his fellow Christians everything they’re doing wrong?

    Now I personally have a great attraction to Catholicism, though it’s an attraction to Catholic piety and Catholicism’s intellectual and social tradition rather than any desire for an authoritative church. But I’m just not going to become Catholic for a variety of reasons, so I try not to go around insisting that Protestants be “more Catholic” (whatever that might mean) to suit me. I do think we might consider being better Protestants though.

  • Links for Friday

    – Derek on the church and (in)fallibility and communing the unbaptized

    – Animal advocacy and pragmatism

    – This is your brain on gadgets

    – BLS has been writing a fascinating series of posts on the church and A.A.

    – The thought of Paul Ramsey

    – The AV Club’s June round up of all things metal

    – The New York Times bans the word “tweet”

    – The Karate Kid remake: surprisingly good?

    – The A-Team movie: not that good

    UPDATE: Had to add this: Tyler Cowen points out that the Netherlands has a animal-rights-based political party, the Party for the Animals (website here, but it’s in Dutch).

  • Meat-eating and Benedict’s rule

    Here’s another tid-bit from that Christian Century article on food that I blogged about last week:

    Benedict saw lack of dietary discipline as a sign not of strength but of weakness. In particular, he restricted meat to children, the sick and the elderly. By eating meat unnecessarily, healthy adult members of his community would enjoy a level of luxury inappropriate to their calling. It must be remembered that Benedict expected monks to undertake manual labor as part of their daily routine, so he likely would not have been open to the idea that meat eating is essential to an active lifestyle.

    In our culture, meat-eating is vaguely associated with vigor, manliness, and so on. The picture of a “man’s man” piling meat onto his backyard grill is a staple of popular American imagery. It’s actually kind of ironic if you consider that there’s nothing particularly tough or macho about paying someone else to confine, kill, and “process” a helpless animal for you. But I suppose it’s associated with some real or imagined picture of “man the hunter” going out to kill his family’s food. In his book Meat: A Natural Symbol, Nick Fiddes goes even further, arguing that the prestige of meat-eating is due to its importance a symbol of our domination over nature. Our strength is shown in our ability to bend nature to our will.

    One might then see Benedict’s rule about meat-eating–and other “food disciplines” that Christians might choose to adopt–as symbolizing a new set of values. If Christ inaugurates a new era in human history, one that undoes the effects of the Fall, then reducing our consumption of meat is symbolic of a new relation to nature, one based on kinship and mutual benefit rather than domination. This is the kind of relationship foretold in the Isaianic prophecy:

    The wolf shall live with the lamb,
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
    the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
    The cow and the bear shall graze,
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
    The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
    They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain;
    for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

    The forms of responsible cultivation of the land often associated with monastic houses would be another expression of this new relationship. Being “strong,” in Christian terms doesn’t mean exercising raw power and lording it over the rest of creation. The truly “strong” person follows the path of Christ in self-giving love and service.

  • Food rules for Christians

    I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, with typical pungency, that no religion can be interesting if it doesn’t tell you what to do with your pots and pans or your genitals. By at least part of that criteria, Exeter University theologian David Grumett seems to be trying to make Christianity interesting again. In an article in the Christian Century, he argues for a recovery of “food rules” among Christians.

    Young Augustine’s experience with the Manichees, Grumett argues, left a somewhat unfortunate legacy to Western Christianity of disdaining any religious limitations on how much and what kinds of food we consume. In reacting against the anti-materialism of the Manichees, Augustine delivered a blow to the valuable practice of regulating our diets according to religious ideals.

    Grummett suggests that recovering a more traditional ideal, like that associated with early Benedictine monasticism, can help Christians relate their eating practices to their faith:

    The desert fathers were famous for their meager diets, and early monastic rules were codifying this practice in moderated form. The major rule for monasteries in the West, St. Benedict’s Rule, prohibited healthy adults from eating the flesh of four-footed animals. It also limited the number of meals that could be taken in a day and the range of choices at a single meal.

    This ban on what we today call red meat points to a Christian tradition different from that of Augustine, one in which food choices express spiritual devotion and identify people as part of a faith community. It also shows how, through avoiding the food typically thought of as high-status food, Christians may resist the networks of oppression which such food symbolizes and on which it depends. To eat meat frequently requires significant quantities of land, feed and water—either your own or those belonging to someone else, who might, on a good day, be paid a fair price for them. Worldwide, animals farmed for meat generate more pollution than motor vehicles and consume vast quantities of food while elsewhere people are going hungry.

    “Modern Christians,” he writes, “are in danger of slipping into a fast-food mentality: speed, convenience and illusory abundance rule, regardless of the consequences for the planet.” Attending to the sources of our food–how it’s produced, where it comes from–can be ” a means of reconnecting to our spiritual heritage and traditions and marking the Christian calendar and the seasonal calendar—which is itself God-given.”

    Grummett doubts that agreement on a set of food rules is either likely or desirable, but observing cycles of fasting and feasting, restricting certain types of food, and reconnecting to the sources of our food are all ways of living out our faith in concrete, daily practice.

  • Sermon questions left hanging

    Today was our first attempt at church-going since the baby was born. We made it about half-way through before she started to fuss, and we’re still skittish enough about our baby-comforting skills that we decided to abscond.

    What I did manage to catch from the part of the sermon I heard–it was Trinity Sunday–was a reference to Meister Eckhart and one to Hildegard of Bingen. I wonder where the preacher (a guest preacher) was going with those? And did he ever explain the relevance of the passage from Proverbs we read to the idea of the Trinity? I’m guessing the average parishoner might not make the connection to Wisdom Christology.

  • The trouble with tradition

    Lutheran theologian Robert Benne laments the ELCA’s departure from the “Great Tradition” of marginalizing gay people and its descent into the dreaded “liberal Protestantism.” The problem, it seems, is that the ELCA hasn’t given sufficient weight to the opinions of white male pastors and theologians.

    One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever someone makes an appeal to tradition (or Tradition), there will always come along someone else who’s more traditional than thou. Some of Benne’s commenters are already pointing out that the real problems began when Lutherans abandoned biblical inerrancy (or broke away from Rome). It’s also worth pointing out that some of our most outspoken “traditionalists” on gay relationships are “liberals” on questions like women’s ordination. And almost no Lutherans take the traditionalist position on artificial birth control. One man’s traditionalist, it turns out, is another man’s liberal–or heretic.

    Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible to be a consistent traditionalist. But such a consistency would have to be purchased at the price of plausibility. Why, after all, should we think that all the interesting moral or theological questions were already answered in the first (or fourth, or thirteenth, or sixteenth) century? The Bible itself contains passages where people are wrestling with–and revising–their received tradition (e.g., the fifteenth chapter of Acts). This seems necessary if tradition is to be a resource of wisdom and inspiration and not an ideological rationalization of power and privilege.

  • Natural theology or theology of nature?

    Following up a bit on this post…

    In his book Religion and Science, which is based on his Gifford Lectures, Ian Barbour distinguishes between natural theology and the theology of nature. Natural theology tries to prove God’s existence by appealing to some feature of the created order. Barbour denies that natural theology can achieve its aim, but still sees a positive role for it:

    I do not believe that design arguments of this kind are conclusive when taken alone. However, they can play a supportive role as part of a theology of nature. (Religion and Science, pp. 246-7)

    A theology of nature differs from natural theology in that it offers a religious interpretation of the natural world by incorporating the picture of the world revealed by science into theology. Barbour continues:

    Instead of a natural theology, I advocate a theology of nature, which is based primarily on religious experience and the life of the religious community but which includes some reformulation of traditional doctrines in the light of science. Theological doctrines start as human interpretations of individual and communal experience and are therefore subject to revision. Our understanding of God’s relation to nature always reflects our view of nature. (p. 247)

    A theology of nature tries to relate, in an intellectually satisfying way, the findings of science to theology. For example, as I pointed out before, the “limit” or “boundary” questions raised by modern cosmology may not provide proof of God’s existence, but they may shed light on the relation between the Creator and creation. Similarly, the conclusions of evolutionary biology provide an opportunity for re-thinking ideas of human nature that Christians have inherited from their tradition. As Barbour argues, an evolutionary perspective blurs, or at lest softens, the sharp distinction between humanity and the rest of nature that the tradition sometimes tried to draw (by, for example, insisting that human beings alone had “immortal souls”).

    Such a theology of nature allows both science and religion to shed light on each other without trying either to deduce scientific conclusions from religious doctrine (as fundamentalists do) or derive theological doctrine from science (as more zealous proponents of the “God hypothesis” might like). It also entails that theology will always be, to some extent, provisional, requiring revision as our understanding of nature changes.

  • Science, faith, and the “God hypothesis”

    Kim Fabricius has another set of provocative theological propositions at Faith & Theology–these ones on what he calls the “God hypothesis.” By this he means the attempt, by various religious thinkers, to take on the “new atheists” on their own turf and argue for God’s existence on “scientific” grounds.

    As usual, Fabricius definitely scores some points, but some distinctions are in order. Sure we can agree that “God of the gaps” arguments–like those offered by proponents of “intelligent design”–are misconceived. But there are still boundary questions like Why is there anything rather than nothing? or Why does the universe have the particular set of fundamental laws and properties that it does, which have given rise to intelligent creatures who can ask questions about God? These fundamental questions, many contemporary theologians have argued, may point to a creator. At the very least, they suggest that modern cosmology is consistent with such an idea.

    Part of Fabricius’s distaste for this enterprise seems to be motivated by a Barthian-Wittgensteinian “Nein!” to any natural theology, even a modest attempt to “relate the observed cosmos to traditional religion.” But, assuming that religion and science don’t occupy hermetically sealed intellectual compartments but are rather purporting to offer perspectives on the same universe, then why shouldn’t we look for ways to relate them? Granted that the primary material of the religious life consists of the experiences, stories, rituals, and practices of a religious community, does it follow that the findings of science have no bearing on it? Has God left no traces of the divine nature in the book of creation?

    In my view, a more fruitful approach is offered by the likes of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, and Keith Ward. They neither seek to “prove” God’s existence from the findings of science, nor to cordon off science from theology or reduce them to incommensurable language-games. Instead, they seek a theology that is informed by our best contemporary understanding of the world, as theologians have always done.

  • Creation Sunday

    The ELCA and other churches have adopted the tradition of observing the Sunday closest to Earth Day as “Creation Sunday” (or Care of Creation Sunday).

    To some this no doubt seems like another in a long line of mainline capitulations to political correctness. The reality, though, is that care for God’s creation should be a central component of Christian faith.

    You can read the ELCA’s social statement on the environment, which is actually pretty good as this kind of document goes, here.

    After setting forth the theological vision of creation, sin, and redemption, the statement asks church members to commit themselves to a series of principles:

    – participation: recognizing the right of all people and all creatures to have their interests taken into consideration;

    – solidarity: acknowledging our interdependence with all other people and the rest of creation;

    – sufficiency: giving priority to meeting the basic needs of all human beings and other creatures;

    – sustainability: providing an adequate standard of living for present generations without compromising the well-being of future ones.

    The statement further asks Lutherans to commit to upholding these principles as individuals and congregations, in personal lifestyle changes and in advocacy in the private and public spheres.

    The anthropocentric orientation of much traditional theology and religious practice needs to be replaced by a properly theocentric orientation that roots the human community firmly in the soil of the created world. And the gospel, far from being a privatized message of individual deliverance from the world, is a message of freedom from anxious self-seeking that turns us back toward the needs of the world around us.