A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Edwards on animal redemption

    If the entire creation–not just human beings–is to be taken up into the divine life (deified, to use the term Edwards prefers), then it makes sense to ask whether individual, sentient, non-human creatures (i.e., animals) will participate in the new creation. Edwards thinks that, based on the character of the God revealed in Jesus, we can hope that animals will share in the resurrection life.

    He points out that the Bible affirms God’s love for each thing that he has made. Further, the God revealed in Jesus is one of boundless compassion. At the very least, Edwards says, we must affirm that God remembers, holds in the divine mind, the travails and triumphs, sufferings and joys of each one of his creatures. But, he goes on to argue, the biblical concept of God’s memory is much more robust and metaphysically significant than our ordinary human concept. For God to remember us is for God to hold us in the divine mind, to keep the divine attention on us. Metaphysically, God’s holding us in the divine mind is what keeps us and the entire world from lapsing into non-existence. Moreover, the incarnation is God’s assumption of flesh, not just humanity. In some way, it reconciles “all things” to God, not just wayward human beings. So is there something more we can hope for in terms of animal participation in the life of the world to come?

    I have been proposing that each animal is known and loved by God, is the dwelling place of the Creator Spirit, participates in redemption in Christ, and abides forever in the living memory of God. Can more be said? I think it can. It can be said that animals will reach their redemptive fulfillment in Christ. They will not only be remembered and treasured, but be remembered in such a way as to be called into new life. (How God Acts, p. 165)

    Edwards admits that we can’t really form an imaginative picture of what this would be like, but, then, the same is true of the resurrection of human beings. Our inability to adequately imagine something doesn’t show that it isn’t real. As he says, the “basis for our hope is not our imagination but the God revealed in Jesus. … As Elizabeth Johnson has said, our hope is not based upon information about the future but on ‘the character of God’ revealed in the Christ-event” (p. 165). Animal fulfillment, Edwards says, must be based on their proper nature, and we don’t need to think of it as strictly parallel to human fulfillment. “The God of resurrection life is a God who brings individual creatures in their own distinctiveness in some way into the eternal dynamic life of the divine communion” (p. 165).

    In some ways, the problem of animal suffering is more acute for theology than that of human suffering. This isn’t because animal suffering matters more (whatever that might mean), but because, as C. S. Lewis memorably put it, animals can neither deserve nor be improved by pain (as humans arguably can). Plus, there’s no free-will defense available for animal suffering, at least not directly. If God has the character that Christians believe he does, and if the distinctively Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God has acted and is acting to redeem his creation, then it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that God will include his beloved animals in the resurrection life.

  • Denis Edwards on new creation: radical transformation and real continuity

    One problem for any Christian eschatology–an underappreciated one, it seems to me–is reconciling it with the rather bleak view of the universe’s future provided to us by modern science. We’re told that our universe will, after billions of years of expansion, either collapse back in on itself in a “big crunch” expand endlessly into an ultimately lifeless, dissipated “heat death.” Neither scenario aligns particularly well with the hope of a “new creation” offered by Christianity.

    In How God Acts Denis Edwards tries to provide an account of that hope that is intelligible in terms of modern science. He says that it is first important to be clear about the limits of theological concepts and language; imagination is indispensable in religion, but we shouldn’t mistake our images of the ultimate destiny of creation for the thing itself. Nevertheless, he ventures that the Christian hope should be seen in terms of a “deification” of the created, material universe. Taking the death and resurrection of Christ as both an analogue and the definitive sign of God’s promise, the destiny of the material universe will be one of both radical change and continuity. Somehow, the material world will be taken up into the life of God. We hope for this because, echoing N.T. Wright, we hope that God will do for the whole universe what he did for Jesus at Easter.

    Edwards emphasizes that we are to see this transformation as entailing real continuity. We shouldn’t think of the new creation as God scrapping the old one and starting over. But what does continuity mean here? We can, perhaps vaguely, understand what it might mean in the case of a human being–we at least think we can understand how a person’s individual self could be preserved even through a radical transformation. But what about the physical cosmos? Edwards suggests that we should think of matter as inherently “transformable” into a new state; it has a potential, as part of its nature, to become something more–and radically different–than what it is. He points out that our tendency is to think of “spirit” as somehow mysterious and “matter” as basically straightforward. But science has revealed, particularly over the last hundred years or so, that the nature of matter is far more mysterious than we thought. Who knows what it might be capable of becoming?

    This sense of continuity, Edwards contends, gives weight to our actions here and now. While the final consummation of all things is definitely God’s action, everything will in some way be preserved in the new creation:

    Our own efforts, our ecological commitments, our struggles for justice, our work for peace, our acts of love, our failures, our own moments of quiet prayer, and our sufferings all have final meaning. Human history and our own personal story matter to God. The Word of God has entered into history for our salvation. History is embraced by God in the Christ-event. In the resurrection, part of our history–the created humanity of Jesus–is already taken into God. We are assured that all of our history has eternal meaning in God. This means that our stories have final significance, as taken up into God and transformed in Christ. (How God Acts, p. 159)

    It seems that both radical transformation and continuity are necessary to make sense of the struggles and suffering that take place in our world. Transformation is required to right the wrongs and wipe away every tear, but without continuity the whole history of the world would look like a pointless waste. Paul’s metaphor of creation “groaning” like a woman in childbirth is apt.

  • Book notes

    Currently reading:

    Denis Edwards, How God Acts. See my posts on this here, here, and here. The second half of the book, which I may or may not blog about in more detail, is less concerned directly with the question of divine action, but offers Edwards’ take on redemption, the atonement, and the salvation of animals, among other things. Edwards discussed some of these ideas in a previous essay that I blogged about here. I think his “participatory/incarnational” model of redemption has a lot of promise for thinking about the work of Christ as it applies to the wider, non-human creation.

    Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. I was worried this book on factory farming by novelist Foer would be too precious, or postmodern, or that it would simply cover already well-trodden ground. But it’s actually really good! Full of interesting (and alarming) facts, but written with a novelist’s verve. There’s also a recurring theme about the importance of this in light of his being a new father, which resonates with me for obvious reasons.

    Heidi Murkoff, et al., What to Expect the First Year. So, apparently these baby things require a lot of care! Who knew?

  • Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles

    Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events?

    Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve seen, Edwards follows Aquinas in distinguishing between God as the primary cause–that is, the cause of created beings’ very existence–and creatures as secondary causes, “the patterns of relationship we find in the natural world, everything studied by the sciences, and everything that could ever be studied by the sciences” (How God Acts, p. 81).

    A miracle, for St. Thomas, is an event where there is no secondary cause, but which is brought about by God directly. A miracle, in Thomas’s words, “surpasses the capabilities of nature.” Despite following Thomas’s general metaphysical line, this is a point where Edwards differs: “miracles can be seen as wonderful manifestations of the Spirit that occur through secondary causes” (p. 84).

    To flesh this out, Edwards takes a bit of a detour through the philosophy of science. Miracles are often said to be “violations” of the “laws of nature.” But we can distinguish several meanings of “laws of nature.” It can refer to our theories or intellectual descriptions of the patterns and relationships of nature, but it can also refer to those underlying patterns and relationships themselves. Our theories, at best, imperfectly model the reality they seek to describe, and there are multiple levels of reality–mental, personal, ethical, aesthetic–that are, as yet, not comprehensible under some general law-like description.

    The upshot is that so-called miracles may be beyond the laws of nature in the sense that they are not explicable by our currently formulated theories, but may still be intelligible in light of the natural order taken as a whole (if we fully understood it). “This opens up the possibility that miracles may occur though a whole range of secondary causes that our current science cannot yet model or cannot yet model well” (p. 87).

    But if that’s the case, then what makes an event a miracle? Following Karl Rahner, Edwards proposes that a miracles are “signs and manifestations of God’s saving action” (p. 87). To be a miracle, it’s necessary, not that an event be directly brought about by God, but that it be experienced by us as a revelation of God’s grace. For example, in principle, science might come to some understanding of how “prayer, human solidarity, love, or faith can contribute to biological healing,” (p. 89), but that would not detract from the religious significance of such an event.

    It might be useful to compare Edwards’ view with that of another contemporary theologian–Keith Ward, whose book Divine Action is devoted to many of the same problems as Edwards’. Ward would agree with Edwards that miracles are events in which God’s purposes are disclosed to human beings, but he goes further: a miracle can be understood as a sequence of events “which takes physical objects beyond their normal physical realizations, and displays their relation to their spiritual origin and goal” (Divine Action, p. 176).

    Ward argues that contemporary science offers a picture of a universe that is much “looser” and more open than the one offered by, say, deterministic Newtonian physics. The universe, Ward argues, is thus open to being influenced by God: “the whole ‘seamless robe’ picture of nature as a closed causal system is much less compelling than it once may have seemed” (pp. 177-78). In Ward’s view, the universe “is always orientated toward God” as the “purposive causal basis as of the universe itself” (p. 179). Consequently, direct divine action can’t be ruled out.

    This is obviously a complex issue, but there are some considerations that incline me toward Ward’s side of the debate. Edwards is concerned to safeguard the completeness of scientific explanations of phenomena, which, he thinks, requires a closed causal system on the level of creatures. But as Ward points out, miracles and other special divine acts are not the kind of measurable and repeatable events that would fall under general scientific laws or explanations. So, you could theoretically have a “complete” physics without it necessarily excluding divine acts that make a difference to how things go in the world. It therefore seems rash to rule out divine intervention for the sake of preserving a closed causal nexus.

    Secondly, Ward agrees with Edwards that God respects the autonomy of the created order, but that this is not an “unrestricted” autonomy. God will act to bring the divine purposes to fulfillment. “A miracle will be an extraordinary event, improbable in terms of the physical system considered in itself, but fairly probably in the wider context of a spiritual purpose for the whole system” (p. 180). The causal processes of nature are not, in themselves, the final word because the universe as a whole is, by its nature, rooted in and open to its creator (and redeemer).

  • Quasi-mea culpa on Marcus Borg

    A while back I lamented that moderate-to-progressive Christians were in danger of creating their own theological ghetto by creating an “approved” reading list of people like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I wrote that “Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the person of Christ with a historical reconstruction of their own devising.”

    Recently, though, our Sunday school class has been using a series of videos that feature various theological talking heads, Borg among them, and I found myself more impressed with him than I remembered being when I first encountered his work. So on a lark, I picked up his Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time from the library. I have to say, while I by no means agreed with everything in it, it offers a much more robust version of Christian faith than I expected. He has a particularly good chapter on Christology that draws on the “Wisdom” Christologies that have been developed by Elizabeth Johnson, among others, which I found pretty congenial (if not entirely satisfactory). Moreover, Borg writes in a warm, pastoral, and intelligible style; when so much theology is written in the impenetrable jargon of the academic guild, it’s no wonder he appeals to a lot of lay Christians.

    I stand by my point that moderate, progressive, and mainline Christians could do a much better job engaging the tradition, but I think Borg deserves more credit than I gave him for working outside of a narrow, historical paradigm.

    UPDATE: This review of another of Borg’s books from Walter Bruggemann seems to strike about the right balance:

    Borg offers a clear contrast between the older model of faith and the new paradigm he advocates–a paradigm marked by the terms “metaphorical” and “sacramental.” He assures the reader that many of the claims in the old model of faith are caricatures that do not need to be honored. Borg’s contrast between old and new paradigm is instructive and helpful. With generosity of spirit, he acknowledges that over time women and men of faith have been helped by both models, though at points the argument takes a somewhat Manicheistic tone whereby all the good claims are grouped in the new and all the bad claims are grouped in the old. Borg does not entertain the possibility that many people of faith “mix and match” across his paradigms in quite workable ways. He consistently draws a sharp and clean contrast.

    […]

    In such a reading the Bible is either a human document or the divine word. God is either a demanding giver of requirements or a generous giver of transformative energy. Jesus must be seen either as a metaphor and sacrament of God or we are stuck with irrelevant formulae cast in impenetrable rhetoric. Such a simple sorting out of either/or (which Borg does with generosity toward claims that he rejects) seems to this reader not only unnecessary but misleading.

  • Edwards on providence

    If God acts in a non-interventionist way as Denis Edwards suggests–acting through “secondary causes” and allowing natural processes and created beings their own proper autonomy–then what about events that theology has traditionally viewed as special divine actions that bypass the normal order of things? Let’s look at two cases: God’s providential ordering of all things (as traditional faith would have it) and unique, miraculous events. In this post I’ll talk about providence and save miracles for a later post.

    Traditionally, “providence” refers to God’s guiding of nature and history toward divinely chosen ends. Some theologians have gone so far as to say that God directly wills every event that occurs. But if, as Edwards maintains, God allows created being a level of autonomy and doesn’t act in an interventionist way to change the course of nature or history, then what becomes of providence?

    Edwards takes as an example of providence the development of life on Earth, including the emergence of human beings:

    In the approach I am advocating, this can be seen as a special act of God in the sense that God chooses, eternally, that the universe would bring forth biological life on our Earth by means of emergence and increasing complexity. What makes this act special is that (1) this action of God has a specific effect in creaturely history, the emergence of life in the universe, and (2) this specific effect is intended by God. (pp. 64-5)

    He goes on to say that this “act of God takes effect in and through all the regularities and constraints of nature, including chance events occurring within the structure provided by the laws of nature” and there are “no gaps in the causal explanation at the empirical level that theology should fill” (p. 65). God’s one act of choosing this world entails (or is identical with?) the act of choosing a world that would bring about the emergence of life.

    But does this mean that every event that happens must be viewed as a direct expression of God’s will? No, because while God wills to give his creatures good things, he also respects the processes by which they come into being, which can in turn have unpleasant side-effects:

    [T]he God who provides for me through secondary causes may also respect the proper autonomy of the created order. This means that while God can be seen as acting in secondary causes for my well-being, God may not be free to intervene in the functioning of secondary causes in a way that overturns the laws of nature in order to preserve me from suffering. (pp. 69-70)

    This may seem to be an arbitrary distinction, but we have to remember that, for Edwards, God’s nature is revealed in the self-giving love of Jesus. That’s why it makes sense to affirm that God sends us good things, regardless of merit, but also that God chooses to create through secondary causes and to respect their “freedom.”

  • Denis Edwards’ theology of divine action

    In his new book How God Acts, Australian Catholic theologian Denis Edwards offers an account of divine action that is conscious of the picture of the world offered by modern science, but takes its lead both from the Christian revelation of God in Christ, the insights of Karl Rahner, and a modified Thomist metaphysics. The result is what Edwards calls a “noninterventionist” view of God’s action in the world that, he maintains, can make allowances for God’s special or particular actions, such as providence, miracles, and the resurrection of Jesus.

    Science, Edwards says, reveals to us a universe that is multi-leveled and evolving, contains processes with their own integrity, and at least appears to move in a direction toward greater complexity. While this process results in the development of a marvelous diversity of life, sophisticated consciousness, and intelligent personhood, it also has costs in terms of the suffering and extinction of countless billions of living creatures. While the world may give hints of a divine intelligence, it is ambiguous enough to cause us to question whether a benevolent God is running the show.

    However, if we attend to the God revealed in the ministry, teachings, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we may be led to a different picture of divine action–one that is actually more harmonious with the scientific world-view. The God of Jesus, Edwards observes, is a God of vulnerable love, a God who “waits upon creation.” Jesus’ parables picture the reign of God coming in small, often unnoticed ways. His eschatology, on one interpretation, is a “participatory” one where God’s work requires the cooperation of creatures. The picture Jesus paints is of a providential God who cares deeply for his creatures, but not a manipulative puppet-master.

    This understanding is reinforced when seen in light of the entire “Christ event.” In the resurrection of Jesus, God acts to “bring healing and hope to the world in a new creation” (pp. 25-6). But this comes only after the crucifixion. We needn’t see God as directly willing the death of Jesus, Edwards contends. Instead, we should understand that God in Jesus was wooing his creation back into a relationship of love. He was so willing to wait for humanity’s free response that he allows us to have our way, even to the extent of killing Jesus. However, God’s love refuses to give death and hatred the last word:

    Reflection on the Christ-event suggests a theology of divine action in which God actively waits upon creation, upon the unfolding of natural processes and upon the freedom of human responses, yet acts powerfully, faithfully, and lovingly to fulfill the divine promises. (pp. 29-30)

    To fill out this insight, Edwards draws upon Karl Rahner’s theology of creation and St. Thomas’s theology of divine action. Rahner sees the act of creation as a single act of divine “self-bestowal”: God seeks to give himself to something other than himself. This single act, Edwards proposes, has particular effects at various points throughout the created order. Thus every event can be seen as a manifestation of this single act of divine creativity without supposing that there are causal or explanatory “gaps” within the empirical world.

    Following St. Thomas, Edwards distinguishes between God as the “primary” cause of everything that is and created beings as genuine “secondary” causes with their own proper autonomy. There is no causal competition between God and creatures; God’s causality can only be spoken of analogically and operates at a different level than that of creatures. This is the metaphysical counterpart to the more ethical picture derived from the Christ-event: God allows creatures their own proper autonomy, enabling them to flourish. He is the cause or root of their freedom, not the limit of it.

    The way is then opened for Edwards to develop a genuinely “noninterventionist” account of divine action. If God is the power that enables creatures and created processes to exist and to exercise their own proper causality, then we can see God at work in the world without positing occasional divine “interventions” that break or override the “laws” of nature. God creates and exercises providential guidance of the world in and through created processes. “Divine action…works in and through the laws of nature rather than by violating, superseding, or bypassing them” (p. 55).

    This has implications the problem of evil, among other things. If God creates through natural processes and respects the relative autonomy of created reality, then it may be that God cannot (in some sense) prevent the evil that mortal flesh is prey to. Suffering, pain, predation, disease, and death may be necessary (again, in some sense) attendants to the process by which God brings about new life. If the picture of the evolution of the universe offered by science is even remotely accurate, we are compelled to think of God as being very patient in waiting on natural processes to bring sentient and personal life into being. But unlike, say, the God of process theology, who seems to be one being among others within a shared ontological framework, Edwards’ God is genuinely transcendent and the unqualified source of all that is. God respects the relative autonomy of creation, but will take action to bring the divine purposes to completion.

    (More to come in a later post…)

  • Teleology beyond biologism

    One addendum to the previous post. I noted that old-style “biological” teleology had largely fallen out of favor as a foundation for ethics. However, this doesn’t mean that Christian ethics can or should dispense with teleology altogether. I grazed this point when I said that “ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good…and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come.” Our telos, in Christian terms, is an eschatological one and is not given “immanently” in the created order. The same could be said of other creatures: if they are to share in the life of the world to come, then their proper end is a transcendent one too.

    This doesn’t mean that biology is irrelevant to understanding the goods proper to the lives of individual creatures. However, from a Christian perspective, the “natural order” doesn’t fully reflect God’s intention for his creatures. This is expressed in the traditional language of creation being “fallen,” which still has some salience, even if we reject the notion of a historical fall. Creation is, Christians believe, on the way to being transformed. The Risen Christ as the “first fruits” of the new creation provides us with a picture of our genuine end. This can and should inform Christian ethical thinking.

  • Creaturely goods and theistic ethics

    In comments to this post, Gaius asked some incisive questions about how a theist who accepts the general evolutionary picture of the world can avoid falling back on some form of divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism).

    The problem arises because, post-Darwin, it’s difficult to attribute inherent purposive-ness to natural processes. But the old natural law ethics, which has probably been the chief alternative to divine command ethics in Christian history, rested on a teleological view of nature that no longer seems tenable: the good life consisted in realizing one’s essential nature.

    Maybe it’s my Platonistic inclinations, but I’ve never been particularly happy with this choice. I think a full understanding of value will inevitably make reference to the divine, but I don’t think moral rules are simply the arbitrary dictates of God. They are, I believe, rooted in the nature of things, but not properly accounted for by the “biologism” of some versions of natural law.

    My general view is that each individual creature is an expression of (or resembles, or participates in) the divine. The Catholic theologian Denis Edwards, following St. Bonaventure, puts it like this:

    In the life of the Trinity, everything flows from the fecundity of the Source of All, whom Bonaventure calls the Fountain Fullness (fontalis plenitude). He sees the eternal Word of Wisdom of God as the Exemplar, the image of Fountain Fullness. When God freely chooses to create, the fruitfulness of Trinitarian life finds wonderful expression in the diversity of creatures. Each different kind of creature is a reflection and image of the eternal Word. (Denis Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith, p. 71)

    Creation, we can say, is a form of God’s self-expression. Thus, each creature, because it reflects the divine, has inherent value. Further, at least some of these creatures—human beings and many other animals—have an experiential welfare, or, to put it another way, their lives can go better or worse for them. And because these creatures have inherent value (being a reflection of the divine), their well-being matters, not just from their own point of view, but from a universal, or impartial, point of view.

    It’s clearly a matter of controversy what constitutes a good human life—that is, what it means for a human life to go better or worse for the one living it. But there do seem to be some universals. Pleasure, happiness, knowledge, freedom, and companionship seem to be among the goods universally prized by human beings. Likewise, all humans seek, other things being equal, to avoid pain, suffering, frustration, ignorance, bondage, and enmity. (A modified, though not wholly dissimilar, list could be provided for other animals.)

    So, it’s not merely a matter of God’s preference or whim that, say, happiness is preferable to misery. This is a fact rooted in the constitution of the world (which, of course, theists believe is ultimately traceable back to God). And for Christians at least, ultimate happiness consists in greater knowledge of and union with God or the Good. Nothing less will truly satisfy us (and this fulfillment only comes to complete fruition in the life to come).

    While this general picture makes reference to the nature of things, note that we’re not talking about “reading value off of biological processes” here. Clearly the kinds of goods that contribute to a human animal’s well-being are rooted in our biology, but biological processes as such don’t have the same status in this account as they do in some versions of natural law ethics. To take an obvious example, most of us no longer regard it as wrong per se to interfere with the process by which intercourse (sometimes) leads to conception. We need an independent moral criterion to decide when that may or may not be a good idea. And this will involve reference to the kinds of goods that make for a well-lived human life.

  • What are they saying about sex?

    Following up on the Countryman series, I have to wonder: Where is the serious Christian teaching on premarital sex? Or the purpose of sexuality more generally? He sketches out some principles, but I don’t know that our churches (i.e., mainline Protestant one) are really teaching much in the way of a substantive sexual ethic.

    It seems to me that it’s unrealistic to expect people to remain virgins until they’re married, particularly when people are frequently delaying marriage till their late 20s or early 30s (or beyond). Nor is it altogether clear how you’d justify such an expectation. Moreover, Christians do more harm than good when they insist that losing your virginity means losing your “purity” or that people who have sex before they’re married are somehow damaged goods.

    Mainliners typically don’t adopt the more zealous pro-chastity rhetoric and tactics favored by some evangelicals, but what have they replaced it with, if anything? What are teenagers and young adults in our churches learning about how they should carry out their sexual lives? Since I was not a churchgoer during that particular period of my life, I really have no idea what our churches are saying about this stuff. But it seems to me that we need to say something.

    I do get the impression that mainliners almost expect there to be a period during young adulthood when people leave the church and “sow their oats,” only to return once they’re settled down (married, having kids). So we can leave any teaching about pre-marital sex to a kind of benign neglect. Leaving aside whether this pattern will continue to hold (more likely, it seems to me, that fewer and fewer people will bother coming back to church), this hardly strikes me as a responsible approach since the vacuum left by the church will be filled with who-knows-what from the surrounding culture. But what is the alternative?