A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Close encounters of the religious kind

    The Post had an article this morning on a conference being sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences on religious implications of the possible discovery of extra-terrestrial life.

    In principle, I’m not sure most the challenges posed by such a discovery would be all that different from ones we’re already used to. We’re already having to come to terms with the idea that human beings aren’t the center of the cosmos. Why should it be threatening to Christians to think that God, in his overflowing goodness, would want to create other creatures throughout this unimaginably vast universe?

    Similarly, the question of salvation and Christian uniqueness with respect to aliens doesn’t necessarily seem to be tremendously different from the question of Christianity’s relationship to other religions on Earth. The basic options would seem to be (1) that the one incarnation in Jesus is salvifically sufficient for all creatures, (2) that there could be multiple incarnations, or other suitable ways of relating to the divine, for each race of beings, or (3) that alien races aren’t in need of salvation, or at least not in the same way that humans are (C.S. Lewis depicted such an “unfallen” alien race in his Space Trilogy). Interestingly, Lewis proposed that the more likely scenario would be one of humans trying to exploit alien races and that it would be better for all parties concerned if we never came into contact with them.

    Maybe the most challenging scenario would be to encounter races of intelligent aliens who had no religion whatsoever. Christians have been inclined to think that the development of a certain level of intelligence necessarily brings with it the potential for relating to God. But suppose there were aliens who simply lacked this sense or capability, but were otherwise just as intelligent as us (or more intelligent). Would that count as evidence against God’s existence?

    UPDATE: See Caelius Spinator’s thoughts on this at the Monastery of the Remarkable English Martyrs here.

  • Incarnation and animal redemption

    I recently got my hands on an excellent anthology of essays–Creaturely Theology: God, Humans, and Other Animals, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough. It brings together essays on history, theology, philosophy, and ethics to deepen the conversation about the place of animals in Christian theology and practice.

    So far I’ve only read a few of the essays, but they’ve been good ones. In his essay “The Redemption of Animals in an Incarnational Theology,” Denis Edwards, the Australian theologian of ecology, develops a theory of redemption that is inclusive of non-human animals. Following Athanasius, he proposes an incarnational theory of redemption as an alternative to theories that lean heavily on notions of substitution, satisfaction, or sacrifice.

    It has the great advantage of bringing into focus the overwhelming and unthinkable generosity of God. It presents redemption as a divine act of self-bestowal rather than as something that changes God. God gives God’s self to us in the Word made flesh and in the Spirit poured out in grace. The Word enters into the world of flesh, that in the Spirit the community of fleshly life might be forgiven, healed, freed from violence, reconciled, and find its fulfillment in the life of God. (p. 91)

    In becoming incarnate and living a life of self-giving love, the Son of God bestows the divine love and presence on a sinful and suffering world. In taking the journey into the depths of pain and abandonment he identifies with the suffering of all sentient creatures; in rising he overcomes death and sin and makes possible the redemption of all creatures as the first born of the new creation. In Christ, not just human nature, but creaturely, fleshly nature is reconciled to its Creator. In this scheme, creation and redemption are held more closely together than they are in many other accounts of atonement: the Logos or Wisdom of God is both the agent of creation and of God’s loving self-bestowal on that creation. “In the Word made flesh, God embraces the whole labor of life on Earth, with all its evolutionary processes, including death, predation and extinction, in an event that is both a radical identification in love and an unbreakable promise” (p. 95).

    This boundless compassion of God gives us reason to hope that individual animals will find some kind of ultimate fulfillment in the divine life, in whatever way is appropriate to their natures. It also provides the ground for transformed relationships between us and the rest of creation. Incorporating some of the insights of French theorist Rene Girard and the theologian Raymund Schwager, Edwards proposes that Jesus overcomes violence and sin through non-violence and love of enemies. The death and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of his Spirit unmask the powers of scapegoating and death-dealing and form a new community dedicated (however haltingly and incompletely) to overcoming tribalism and competition and exemplifying a more universal, unrestricted love. This should properly extend to our relations with non-human creatures, and part of redemption for animals means transforming human attitudes toward them and beginning to overcome our violent exploitative ways.

  • A broad orthodoxy

    Pastor Robb (a.k.a. LutherPunk) recently asked how people defined orthodoxy. The question was raised in the context of the recent decisions of the ELCA church-wide assembly, as many traditionalists are now accusing the ELCA of lapsing into heresy. Interestingly, Robb got about as many different definitions of “orthodoxy” as he had commenters responding to his post, which might say something.

    The way I think about it is this: you’re essentially “un-churching” whomever you declare a heretic (i.e., not orthodox). That is, a heretic is someone beyond the pale of orthodox, historic Christianity. So, in pondering how I define orthodoxy, I have to think: who would I consider a heretic?

    Put this way, I end up with a very generous definition of orthodoxy. Despite theological differences, I certainly don’t consider Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Mennonites, free-church Christians, non-denominational evangelicals, or Pentecostals to be “heretics” in the sense of being beyond the bounds of Christianity.

    This seems to imply that there’s a kind of Lewisian “mere” Christianity that all these groups have in common. I’d specify that as roughly (1) a confession of the triune God (2) a commitment to the authority of Scripture and (3) participation in a community gathered around the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the two dominical sacraments. I think I’d also want to include certain other key practices, or “marks” of the church, like the forgiveness of sins, hospitality to the poor and marginalized, and a triune pattern of prayer.

    Beyond that core there are theological elaborations of first-order proclamation and practice. I’d include here things like theology of the sacraments, church polity, soteriology, views on election and predestination, eschatology, etc. And beyond that are all our attempts to work out concrete moral, social, and political implications of the gospel. Here we get into the realm of adiaphora–things that Christians can in good faith disagree about.

    This definition, admittedly broad though it is, does recognize certain borderline cases: Unitarians, Mormons, and some Quakers for example (depending on their specific beliefs) would likely fall outside my definition of orthodoxy. And, naturally, a Muslim, or Jew, or Hindu would not be included. Though it makes little sense to consider them heretics: they’re simply not Christian and make no claims to be.

    My view clearly allows for a lot of diversity in both belief and practice. I’m not claiming that this is what most Christians have historically meant by “orthodoxy,” but I just don’t think it’s feasible, for a whole host of reasons, to insist on a fully specified list of doctrinal beliefs in order to be considered orthodox. A certain epistemological pluralism is just our lot in life at this point, and I don’t think people should claim to know with certainty things they couldn’t possibly know. Plus, if, as we believe, truth is primarily a Person, we should expect that truth will elude complete capture in our theological and doctrinal language.

  • Anglican-Roman doings

    There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled over the last week or so about the Vatican’s announcement that it will make it easier for Anglicans to convert, establishing, it appears, a more widespread use of the so-called Anglican Rite liturgy and allowing for some degree of self-governance for former Anglican communities. (Including continuing the practice of allowing married Anglican clergy to convert, be re-ordained, and lead these parishes.)

    People have interpreted the announcement as everything from crass sheep-stealing, to creating a haven for Anglicans opposed to women’s ordination and/or gay clergy, to attempting to establish a united Christian front against Islam. But I think before we jump to conclusions about the significance of this move, it’s important to get at least some sense of who’s likely to actually make such a move.

    A lot of the media reports have been focusing on “traditionalist Anglicans,” a vague and not terribly helpful term that could include everyone from a Nigerian charismatic-evangelical to the spikiest of high-church Anglo-Catholics. The former is, for obvious reasons, far less likely to swim the Tiber than the latter.

    But even among Anglo-Catholics–a notoriously fissiparous lot–there are significant differences of opinion and practice. There are Anglo-Catholics who worship with the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (or its equivalent in other countries) and those who insist on using the 1928 BCP. There are Anglo-Catholic parishes that use the Catholic Tridentine Rite; there are others that use the reformed Roman rite (the so-called Novus Ordo). There are “Affirming” Anglo-Catholics who support the ordination of women and equality for LGBT Christians; there are others who take traditionalist positions on these matters (or, in some cases, a traditionalist position on one and a revisionist position on the other). There are Anglo-Papalists who identify very strongly with the Catholic Church and long for reunion with Rome, and there are even a few “Byzantine” Anglicans who identify with the spirituality and theology of the Eastern church. (Obviously not all these groupings are mutually exclusive.)

    Needless to say, not all of these folks–even within the minority persuasion of Anglo-Catholicism–will be enticed to convert. It’s true that in addition to Anglo-Papalist types, there may be some people in the traditionalist wing of Anglo-Catholicism who will be tempted to convert not because they unhesitatingly accept all the claims of the Catholic Church but because they feel–rightly or wrongly–that Christian orthodoxy is a losing proposition within Anglicanism. Even still, it’s hard to imagine more than a small minority of Anglicans making the decision to go over to Rome. Whether the Pope showed ecumenical bad manners is debatable, but if Benedict’s goal was to absorb the Anglican Communion, Borg-like, into the Catholic Church, this is a peculiar way to go about it.

  • Non sequitur of the day

    Theologian Paul Griffiths has an interesting post about how Christians should think about Muslims, but then ends with this:

    I hope, that is, that we Christians will increasingly choose to see Muslims as allies and affines against the deadening and bloody weight of late-capitalist democracy. It would be better, I think, for the Church to live under the constraints and difficulties of an Islamic state, violent and restrictive though these can be (as they are, for instance, in Saudi Arabia), than to return with ever more passion, as it is increasingly doing, the bodysnatching embrace of late-capitalist democracy.

    Well, um, okay…are those our only choices?

  • Free theology

    Via Per Crucem ad Lucem, the Scottish Journal of Theology has made a collection of “classic papers” available for free through the end of the year. See here. Pretty sweet for those of us who aren’t academics, but (strangely) have a taste for theology.

  • In and out

    Christopher has a post on universalism that pretty closely approximates my own view. In short: we believe salvation is through Christ, but we don’t know how far that salvation extends. We can hope–but not know–that it extends to everyone.

    One other point I’d add is that Christians usually presume we’re on the “inside,” and the question is whether non-Christians get “in” too. But an Augustinian account of grace would remind us that we don’t know, definitively, who’s “in” or “out” in this life. The line between the city of God and the city of man isn’t given to us to discern. In the Bible, it’s often the outsiders who demonstrate, in surprising ways, their closeness to God, and the insiders their blindness.

  • Smith: animal rights=idolatry

    Wesley Smith is shocked and appalled (surprise!) by Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle’s recent column on Michael Vick’s efforts to rehabilitate himself.

    First, Pacelle:

    In a civil society, there must be accountability for grievous actions. But there also must be an embrace of people who are willing and ready to change – even in tough cases, like Michael Vick. We are all sinners when it comes to animals, and we can all do better.

    Smith, weirdly, asserts that this reveals the “religious” nature of the animal rights movement:

    We have all sinned against animals? Substitute God for animals in this piece, and you have a classic Christian message. Yup. animal rights is religion and Wayne Pacelle a high priest of the faith.

    Um, does Smith realize that in Christian terms it makes perfect sense to talk about sinning against beings other than God? As in, “If your brother sins against you…” (Matt. 18:15)?

    So how much of a stretch is it to talk about sinning against animals, especially when we’re talking about the kind of sadistic abuse Vick was guilty of? Sure, Kant and some other philosophers said that we have no direct duties to animals, but they were wrong! Pacelle is simply using religious language to point out that we all, to some degree or another, seriously wrong the animals who share our world.

    It’s a staple of conservative anti-environmental and anti-animal rights rhetoric that those movements are ersatz religions. But actual religion already teaches us not to sin against our fellow creatures, including the most vulnerable ones.

  • The cosmic prodigal son

    I’ve been reading a book called Created from Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism by the late philosopher James Rachels. The thesis is that Darwinism does have far-reaching implications for morality, even if not the ones commonly thought. This is in contrast to those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who tried to erect an insuperable wall between the realm of “values” and scientific fact.

    Rachels’ long opening chapter, in which he reviews Darwin’s life and the basic argument of the Origin of Species, is extremely clear and compelling, and worth the price of the book alone (well, at least in my case—I picked it up used for around five bucks). Subsequent chapters delve into the more properly philosophical argument about how Darwin’s findings might be related to ethics.

    What Rachels is trying to show is that Darwinism pulls the lynchpin of “human dignity” out of our existing moral framework by undermining crucial beliefs that support it. He agrees with many other philosophers that you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”—that is, statements of fact do not logically entail statements of value. But, he argues, our belief in human dignity—by which he means the view that human life is uniquely sacred or valuable—derives its support from certain beliefs about the world and our place in it. Chief among these are one religious belief and one secular philosophical belief: that human beings were specially created (in some sense) in God’s image and that human beings are uniquely rational.

    If, as Rachels believes is the case, Darwinism undermines the grounds for these beliefs, then the corresponding normative belief in human dignity will be undermined, even if it is still logically independent of those beliefs. In other words, we could still retain the belief in human dignity as a sheer judgment of value, but without the supporting beliefs (or some substitute), it’s not clear why we should.

    So why does Rachels think that Darwinism does in fact undermine these beliefs? For the purposes of this post, let’s focus on the imago dei doctrine. According to Rachels, the traditional view that human beings are created in the divine image means that “the world [was] intended to be [humanity’s] habitation, and everything else in it given for [our] enjoyment and use” (p. 86). The evolutionary picture of the world, Rachels contends, undermines this for several reasons. First, there have existed long stretches of time–billions of years, far and away the vast majority of time–where human beings did not exist and the universe got along just fine without us. Second, Darwinian evolution undermines the view that all things in nature have the form they do in order to serve some human purpose; instead, it sees the forms of creatures as an adaptation to their environment. Finally, the path of evolution doesn’t require us to posit a god to explain the emergence of human life; on strictly scientific grounds, we aren’t required to believe that the existence of human beings is anything other than a fortuitious (for us) outcome of a blind process.

    It’s possible, Rachels says, to say that God is the “first cause,” the one who sets up the basic laws of the universe, but whose further intervention isn’t required to explain the emergence and development of life. But even if this is accepted (and he’s not sure that it should be–why not just say that the universe is uncaused?), we’re a long way from the God of the Bible or Judeo-Christian tradition. Such a deistic god doesn’t possess nearly the same religious significance as a more traditional one. At that point, it’s not clear why we’d insist on hanging on the word “god” at all.

    Regular readers are probably not terribly surprised to learn that I have some sympathy with Rachels’ argument. Like much of the best atheist and agnostic thought, Rachels’ argument provides the opportuntiy for a purification of religious thought and for smashing a few idols. And surely one of the great idols of the Christian tradition has been precisely the view that creation was made just for us and all other creatures were given for our enjoyment and use. While there are certainly parts of the Bible that support such a view, modern biblical scholars have pointed out that a “humano-centric” interpretation of the Bible (as distinguished from a theo-centric one) is profoundly distorting.

    The Bible is clear in many passages that creation exists not for our sake, but for the creator’s sake. God creates all that is and calls it “good” (not “good for us”). After the flood in Genesis, God makes a covenant with all flesh, not just with humanity. The Psalms tell us repeatedly that creatures of land, air, and sea praise their creator in their own language, without the mediation of human beings. God’s admonition to Job is that the creator’s purposes encompass far more than parochial human interests. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon praises the mercy and love of the Lord: “you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” Jesus insists that our heavenly Father cares for the lillies of the field and the sparrows of the air. St. Paul contends that “all things” are reconciled in Christ and that the entire creation is groaning for liberation from bondage.

    Rachels isn’t wrong to see the anthropocentric interpretation as the dominant one in Christian history. This may have been encouraged by a secular philosophy that defined the imago primarily as reason and free will, thus emphasizing the distinction between human beings and other creatures. A more “functionalist” understanding of humanity’s role as caretakers or gardeners of the earth, by contrast, emphasizes our embededness in and responsibility to the rest of creation.

    If this alternate narrative is right, then the evolutionary story can be seen in a different perspective. Human beings are one among millions of species in whom God takes delight. The story of creation is more of an open-ended process than a static, once-and-for-all act, one that gives rise to a multiplicity of beings that reflect some facet of the divine goodness.

    And the creator has many purposes, or many stories to tell. The overarching story is that of God’s overflowing goodness in creating other beings, beings with whom God wishes to share God’s self. Within that story are sub-plots, like that of humanity. Instead of seeing humanity as the jewel of creation, maybe a truer story would be that we are the prodigal son of creation, the ones who go off and squander the riches left to us by our Father. But the Father is constantly calling us back, willing to mend the broken relationship between us so that we can be restored to our proper place in the household. This isn’t a measure of how great we are, but of how great God’s love is.

    I’m not claiming to have solved all the problems evolutionary thought poses for religion (far from it!), but in this case I think a better understanding of the natural world can actually point us to a deeper understanding of our faith. (I’ll likely have more to say about Rachels’ moral project in a later post.)

  • Yes, Virginia, the pope believes in global warming

    Apparently some right-wing Catholics have interpreted the fact that the words “global warming” or “climate change” do not appear in Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical to mean that the pope is a global warming skeptic of some sort. Neil Ormerod, a Catholic theologian in Australia, attempts to set the record straight.