A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Prayer for a squirrel

    Christopher has a terrific piece up at Episcopal Cafe on how prayer can and does connect us with our fellow creatures:

    …to bless God for the life of just one animal, who has been a friend and companion, begins to have us think anew about our fellow creatures, about creation, about ourselves, about God. Such a gesture may be small, but it is significant step toward recognizing our coexistence with, our reliance upon, and our shared flesh as fellow creatures.

    Amen!

    UPDATE:     Also via Christopher comes this wonderful sermon for the annual service of the
    Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals.

  • She Who Is wrap-up

    I’m not going to offer a blow-by-blow account of the rest of Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is, mostly because I don’t think I could do justice to the many nuances and illuminating insights it contains. It’s definitely changed how I think about these issues. Also, it’s a highly readable book for academic theology, and anyone who’s interested should have no trouble getting their hands on a copy. I highly recommend it. But I thought I’d offer a few more thoughts.

    The balance of the book contains discussions of, inter alia, the Trinity, Christology, God’s relationship to the world (classical theism vs. pantheism vs. panentheism) and divine power and (im)passibility that are quite good. Johnson’s taken on the last topic, in particular, strikes me as very worthwhile. Some contemporary theologians, in reacting against the classical view of God as omnipotent and impassible, go to the other extreme and define God almost exclusively in terms of weakness, suffering, etc., as though these were good in themselves. But as Johnson points out, a passive, suffering God can reinforce patterns of victimization just as an omnipotent, impassible God can seem like an overbearing and uncaring tyrant. It’s also not clear what the religious value is of a God who is only “fellow sufferer.”

    What’s we need, Johnson argues, is a way of thinking about the power and suffering of God that avoids both extremes. She points out that there are different kinds of suffering: some, like the suffering experienced in childbirth, are means to a good end and and can be retrospectively seen as contributing to the wonderful gift of new life. Others, like extreme sexual or physical violence and degradation, are impossible to fit into any scheme in which they can be seen as contributing to some greater good. So we need to be careful in making these distinctions lest the “suffering God” end up valorizing victimization. Johnson even offers a feminist reinterpretation of God’s wrath: “the wrath of God in the sense of righteous anger is not an opposite of mercy but its correlative” (p. 258).

    Johnson does affirm that God is present and shares in creaturely suffering. “The compassionate God, spoken about in analogy with women’s experience of relationality and care, can help by awakening consolation, responsible human action, and hope against hope in the world marked by radical suffering and evil” (p. 269). But God is also empowering her creatures to resist violence and victimization, and actualizing possibilities for more bountiful life. The cross and resurrection, in other words, are inseparable. Johnson doesn’t pretend to offer any “solution” to the problem of evil, but if God is thought of more in terms of relationality, both within the triune life and in its relationship to creation, then God’s power needn’t be defined as the unilateral ability to determine everything that happens:

    Sophia-God is in solidarity with those who suffer as a mystery of empowerment. With moral indignation, concern for broken creation, and a sympathy calling for justice, the power of God’s compassionate love enters the pain of the world to transform it from within. The victory is not on the model of conquering heroism but of active, nonviolent resistance as those who are afflicted are empowered to take up the cause of resistance, healing, and liberation for themselves and others” (p. 270)

    This is more suggestive than fully fleshed out, but it highlights how feminist concerns to counteract a God modeled on the aloof, solitary patriarchal male who is able to impose his will on a recalcitrant world dovetails with contemporary efforts to re-think divine power and action in light of both the problem of evil and a scientific understanding of reality. Developing a new understanding of power and new ways of speaking about God as “almighty” is still an urgent theological task, especially when the all-determining God of classical Calvinist theology seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity.

    The opposite danger, though, is reducing God’s power to a moral example or ideal. While Johnson, I think, would deny that this is her intention, she does say things that seem to point in this direction. For example, she says that speaking of the suffering of God is valuable primarily because it “facilitates the praxis of hope” (p. 271), that is, motivating action by and on behalf of those who are oppressed. While this is certainly an important task for Christians to take up, I’m left a bit uncertain about the role of eschatology in her theology. Doesn’t hope, in the Christian lexicon, ultimately have as its object something that God will bring about? While Johnson mentions the resurrection life in a few places, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t seem to play a pivotal role in her theology, and she says little to indicate that it’s ultimately God who will bring about the final emancipation of creation, not human efforts to build a just society, necessary as those are. I’m certainly on board with much of the program developed in She Who Is, but Johnson’s strictures about idolatry also apply, surely, to any tendency to annex God to a political agenda, no matter how worthy.

  • Many names

    After discussing the role of experience–specifically women’s experience of affirming themselves as fully human and valued by God, equally created in the divine image–Elizabeth Johnson turns to the Bible and classical theology as sources for feminist theological discourse.

    It’s no secret that the Bible was written by men in patriarchal cultures and reflects the presuppositions of those cultures. Johnson argues that these aspects of scripture are incidental and don’t pertain to what is necessary for our salvation (just as Vatican II affirmed that historical or scientific inaccuracies in the Bible don’t affect its core message). “It is most emphatically not salvific to diminish the image of God in women, to designate them as symbols of temptation and evil, to relegate them to the margins of significance, to suppress the memory of their suffering and creative power, and to legitimate their subordination” (p. 79)

    Moreover, there are “trajectories” in the Bible that allow for speaking about God with female metaphors. Chief among these are Spirit, or Shekina, God’s holy presence with God’s people; Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom; and Mother. All of these images or names are licensed by scripture and all use female metaphors for God. Johnson finds Sophia to be particularly potent, being both explicitly female and invested with divine attributes. Sophia, who looms large in the books Protestants refer to as the Apocrypha, may even represent some healthy borrowing from nearby goddess cults:

    The controlling context of meaning remained the Jewish monotheistic faith with borrowings being assimilated to that faith. At the same time, through the use of new categories, Jewish beliefs about God and God’s ways with the world were expressed in a way that matched the religious depth and style of the goddess literature and cult and counteracted its appeal. The wisdom literature, then, celebrates God’s gracious goodness in creating and sustaining the world and in electing and saving Israel, and does so in imagery that presents the divine presence in the female gestalt of divine Sophia. (p. 93)

    The importance of the figure of Sophia is further reinforced by the New Testament’s identification of Jesus with divine wisdom (i.e., Sophia). A “wisdom” Christology can, consequently, provide a corrective to a “logos” Christology understood in excessively masculine terms. “Since Jesus Christ is depicted as divine Sophia, then it is not unthinkable–it is not even unbiblical–to confess Jesus the Christ as the incarnation of God imaged in female symbol” (p. 99).

    Turning to the tradition of classical theology, Johnson focuses on the divine ineffability and the long tradition in Catholic theology that language about God is, necessarily, analogical. That is, we can’t speak about God in literal terms, but we aren’t left speechless because certain attributes belong to God in a “more eminent” way than they do to creatures. For instance, we apply “good” to God because we first experience goodness in creatures. But “good” must be qualified and even in a sense negated when applied to God. It points us in the right direction, but it doesn’t provide anything like a literal description of what God is like.

    For Johnson, a renewed emphasis on the analogical nature of all divine language can loosen the grip that male names and metaphors for God have had on the Christian imagination. Even when the analogical nature of all theological language was recognized, the insistence that male language was the only fully proper language reinforced sexist attitudes. But if we appreciate anew the analogical nature of theological language and recognize the full and equal humanity of women, then we can affirm the appropriateness of female names and metaphors for God, including those drawn from under-appreciated parts of the biblical tradition.

    Indeed, Johnson emphasizes the need for many names for God. Because of God’s infinity and incomprehensibility, we need a kaleidoscope of names and images for pointing to that reality. This can prevent certain images from becoming fixed and reified, which can tempt us to idolatry. Paraphrasing Augustine, “If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God” (p. 120).

  • Feminist conversion as a source of theological speech

    In part II of She Who Is, Elizabeth Johnson discusses the sources she’s going to use for her project of theological reconstruction, or as she puts it: “resources for emancipatory speech about God” (p. 61). These are women’s interpreted experience, the Bible, and classical theology. It’s hard not to be reminded of Hooker’s “three-legged stool” of reason, scripture, and tradition or Wesley’s quadrilateral of reason, Scripture, tradition, and experience. The idea is that theology and the life of faith draw from multiple sources, though there is debate about which of these, if any, are the controlling factor.

    Regarding experience, Johnson writes:

    Consulting human experience is an identifying mark of virtually all contemporary theology, as indeed has been the case at least implicitly with most of the major articulations in the history of Christian theology. Listening to the questions and struggles of the people of an era, their value systems and deepest hopes, gives theology of the most diverse kinds an indispensable clue for shaping inquiry, drawing the hermeneutical circle, revising received interpretations, and arriving at new theological insight. (p. 61)

    It follows straight away that theology is always, to some extent, provisional. The questions, struggles, values, and hopes of one era and place will be different from others. Theology is always, therefore, to some degree “contextual.” Only an extremely simplistic understanding of the theological task would deny this.

    To complicate matters further, though, Johnson points out that there is no simple and universal “women’s experience” to which we can point. Johnson doesn’t take a strong stance on the nature/nurture debate, but it’s clear that women’s experiences and how they interpret them vary widely across social, cultural, religious, and other locations.

    However, there are common, if not universal, experiences to draw on. Johnson focuses on what she calls the experience of “conversion,” by which she means “a turning away from trivialization and defamation of oneself as a female person and a turning toward oneself as worthwhile, as in fact a gift, in community with many others similarly changing” (p. 62). Following Karl Rahner, Johnson interprets the self as being in an inextricable relationship with the other, including the Divine Other. Therefore, changes in how one perceives oneself will change how one perceives the other. Consequently, when women come to experience themselves both as victims of oppression and as persons of value with moral agency, this is bound to affect their understanding of religious symbols and language. “The shock of the negative in traditional, internalized devaluations of women, known in the surge of self-affirmation against it, is at the same time new experience of God as beneficent toward the female and an ally of women’s flourishing” (p. 66).

    Johnson goes on to discuss some of the implications of feminist thinking for ethics and for the doctrine of the imago Dei. A feminist ethic of relationship and mutuality will have different implications for how we characterize divine perfection than a traditional ethic of rights that defines the self over against the other. The recognition that women are created in the image of God just as men are gives impetus to using female images for God.

    One might worry here, as has often been worried about “liberal” theologies, that “experience” becomes an independent source and norm for theology and threatens to crowd out revelation. I think Johnson’s answer is indicated by her statement that “the experience of God which is never directly available is mediated, among other ways but primordially so, through the changing history of oneself” (p. 65). We can’t step out of our own skins to achieve an unmediated experience of the divine. Our theologies are always colored by our experience, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. To the extent that women “reject the sexism of inherited constructions of female identity and risk new interpretations that affirm their own human worth” (p. 62)–and to the extent that men join them–their understanding of God will be affected.

    The question comes down to whether the Christian tradition should be thought of as a hermetically sealed ark of salvation, which contains all truth and outside of which is only darkness and chaos, or as a more porous vessel–a tradition that can be nourished by insights originating elsewhere. I think it would be historically dubious to assert that advances in moral thought–not only feminism but abolition, civil rights, animal welfare, and others–owe their success primarily to Christian theological truth. While these movements can certainly claim religious support and sanction, Christianity was often late to the party if not actively resisting. And not only did these movements change Christian moral practice, they often changed the way Christians thought about God.

    But I don’t see why this should be particularly worrying. If, as we believe, people are God’s good creation, then we should expect that they are capable of attaining moral and spiritual insight, even outside the boundaries of the church (and sometimes in spite of the church). And rather than distort, these insights may open to us new ways of understanding the tradition, discovering truths that were previously obscured by an equally context-bound interpretation of faith.

  • Tradition as a source for liberating speech about God

    Granted my theological reading is pretty spotty to begin with, but a particular hole I’ve been meaning to fill has been feminist theology. So, when I saw a copy of Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is at a local used bookstore I decided to pick it up–and I’m glad I did. Not only does Johnson make a compelling case for revisiting how Christians speak about God in light of feminist insights, she writes clearly and straightforwardly, without dumbing down her material.

    I think among feminist theologians Johnson is probably considered to be somewhat conservative in the sense that, while acknowledging that the Christian tradition has played a major role in oppressing women, she also thinks that it has rich resources for liberation. Other feminists think that a wholesale reconstruction, or even rejection, of the tradition is called for, but Johnson is able to mine it in surprising ways, and uncover long-neglected truths.

    Johnson’s main thesis is that Christian speech about God has been deformed by patriarchal social structures and that theological discourse has tended to elevate masculine language for God to a normative and even literal status, despite official disclaimers to the contrary. This not only relegates women to second-class status, but is theologically inadequate, and even idolatrous. Since all speech about God is inherently analogical and God’s mystery eludes any of our attempts to name or describe it, insisting on one set of images presumes that we have captured God in our conceptual or linguistic net. Johnson shows this most clearly when she points out that any deviation from masculine language about God is thought to be in need of justification, which implies that such language is more “proper” or “appropriate” for speaking about the divine.

    But Johnson argues persuasively that this, in effect, denies the full personhood of women. Women are created in the divine image, just as men are, so it follows that feminine language can represent God just as adequately (or inadequately) as masculine language. In fact, both types of language (along with more “cosmic” language drawn from the realm of nature) are necessary if we are to avoid idolatry and recover a more holistic way of speaking about God. The criteria for adequate speech about God, from a feminist perspective, is “the emancipation of women toward human flourishing” (p. 30). No theological language or system that oppresses and dehumanizes can be religiously true, adequate, or coherent.

    Johnson rejects some common attempts to correct the exclusive use of masculine language. One such solution is to avoid personal language for God altogether. The problem with this is that it has the effect of denying personality to God. While God is certainly “supra”-personal in that God transcends personality as we know it in human beings, God is not less than personal.

    Another strategy Johnson rejects is that of attributing “feminine” qualities to some aspect of the divine. The Holy Spirit is the usual candidate here. The problem with this approach is that it usually leans on stereotypes of men and women and associates the “feminine” aspect of God with qualities like nurturing, compassion, etc., while the other more “masculine” qualities are attributed to other aspects of God. Not only does this perpetuate stereotypes of men and women, Johnson argues, it introduces a kind of division in God. (Indeed, Johnson argues that in the West many of the feminine qualities were, in practice, transferred to the figure of the Virgin Mary, creating another de facto mediator between us and a wrathful, “masculine” God.)

    What Johnson proposes instead is that women and men can both–in their diversity and complex fullness–point to the inexhaustible reality of God:

    The mystery of God transcends all images but can be spoken about equally well and poorly in concepts taken from male or female reality. The approach advocated here proceeds with the insight that only if God is so named, only if the full reality of women as well as men enters into the symbolization of God along with symbols from the natural world, can the idolatrous fixation on one image be broken and the truth of the mystery of God, in tandem with the liberation of all human beings and the whole earth, emerge for our time. (p. 56)

    To tackle this task of enunciating a more adequate language about God, Johnson draws on three sources: women’s (interpreted) experience, scripture, and classical theology. I’ll try and say a little about each in a future post (or posts).

  • Hebblethwaite on natural and revealed morality

    In his book Christian Ethics in the Modern Age, British philosopher-theologian Brian Hebblethwaite offers a nice summary of what I tend to think of as the classic Christian understanding of the nature of ethics:

    Christians certainly believe that all goodness stems from God and reflects both God’s own nature and His will for man. But recognition of this comes in two ways: the good for man is built into human nature and can be discerned, however fragmentarily and incompletely, in what makes for human relationship and human flourishing. This ‘natural’ recognition of the good can be affirmed despite the ‘fallen’ state of man. But the true good for man is further revealed, so Christians believe, through the saving acts of God, culminating in the story of Jesus and his Resurrection. (p. 13)

    Hebblethwaite goes on to point out that both of these ways of knowing are subject to distortion and in need of correction:

    Here too there is no guarantee of freedom from distortion in the human media of revelation or in man’s understanding of divine revelation. So it is quite possible for the two channels of moral knowledge, human experience of goodness and human response to the revelatory acts of God, mutually to illuminate and correct each other. Moral criticism of religious revelation-claims is possible because natural human morality is itself a reflection of the image of God in man. Christian morality’s criticism and enhancement of natural human morality are possible since they reflect the definitive revelation of God’s nature and will through His saving acts.

    And yet there is only one moral truth:

    But the two channels, on this view, cannot be ultimately incompatible, since it is the same divine nature that is reflected, however hazily, in human goodness, as is reflected most clearly, on the Christian view, in the character of Christ. But the divine revelation, including the character of Christ, has itself to be understood and applied correctly by men and women down the ages; they may get it wrong, and thus be open to moral criticism.

    Where Hebblethwaite may depart from some classical views is in recognizing the context-bound nature of our understanding of revelation. Even if God reveals his will and nature to us, that revelation still has to be mediated through human language, concepts, and understanding. These will (inevitably?) produce a kind of distortion. This is why Hebblethwaite can say that our natural morality can act as a corrective on “revelation”: because no revelation is sheerly self-authenticating. A purported revelation that outright contradicted some tenet of natural morality would for that reason be highly suspect.

    This also allows Hebblethwaite to say that Christian morality can be not only confirmed, but enriched by insights from other sources. We can see, both in other religions and in secular movements, aspects of God’s goodness reflected that may not have been so clear in our own tradition. Christians may be compelled to reject insights that flatly contradict the Christian revelation, but they needn’t believe that they all ready possess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For instance, it seems clear that Christian theology and practice have been enriched by the insights of such movements as feminism, Marxism, and environmentalism, insights that are compatible with the essential tenets of Christianity, but which Christians previously weren’t able to derive from the resources of their own tradition. Similarly, other religions can reveal aspects of the truth that Christians might not otherwise have been aware of.

    On this view, explicit belief in God is not necessary to discover the conditions of human flourishing, but those conditions are–ontologically speaking–rooted in or derived from God’s creative will and goodness. Thus the revelation of that will in Christ gives a fuller and clearer picture of the good. Just as importantly, Hebblethwaite argues, the work of Christ, the sending of the Spirit, and the formation of the Church provide resources for embodying that good in our lives and communities that transcend natural human capabilities.

  • The Trinity as a model for human society?

    From Mark D. Chapman’s article, “The Social Doctrine of the Trinity: Some Problems“:

    In these various different discussions of the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity for life together in society, there is an implicit assumption that the picture of the relationships between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is able to function as something of a blueprint for human society: God is spoken of in terms of an idealised society which in turn is capable of being mirrored here on earth through the witness of the Church. Although this is undoubtedly appealing, it is precisely at this point that a problem begins to emerge. Whereas all the conceptions of the social God discussed understand the Trinity as a community of mutually interdependent persons who necessarily exist in relation, it does not necessarily follow that the sociality of human societies, even ideal ones, is rooted in such a notion of being-in-relationship. Factually, it is patently true that human beings do not always act together in conformity of will and action; and yet the claim is that the social Trinity and its concomitant ecclesiology should provide a vision as well as a practical model for humans in society. It is this step in the argument that does not seem to be self-evident. It is at the very least questionable that human beings express themselves most fully and perfectly in terms of the harmony and balance of mutual reciprocity.

    If it can be shown that tension, conflict and debate rest at the heart of human society, then the opposite might indeed prove to be the case. Indeed it may well be that far from an aberration or even sinful distortion, the normal and proper condition of society, and even of the Church, is one of dispute and conflict. And this leads on to a question: if we are to try to model the Trinity, then what place is there for the tensions and conflicts resulting from human diversity and difference? The harmonious understanding of God, which characterises so much of the social Trinitarianism discussed above, perhaps expresses a longing for concord and a conflict-free zone, but it seems quite divorced from the creative and constructive conflict that can plausibly be shown to be the foundation for democratic human societies.

    It’s fairly common in contemporary theology–popular and academic– to leap from some idea of the Trinity as a “perfect community” to using that as a blueprint for ecclesiastical and/or social reform. Chapman’s concern here strikes me as well founded: even assuming we can describe with any confindence the “inner” life of the Trinity (itself a dubious notion), it’s far from clear that this is an appropriate model for human communities. In the traditional Christian understanding, the persons of the Trinity enjoy a unity of will that is not only rarely found among human beings, but probably undesirable.

  • (How) does Jesus reveal moral truth?

    It occurred to me after the last post that there might be a subset or version of the first view (God is necessary for us to know the difference between right and wrong) which has a stronger claim than I gave it credit for. That is the idea that moral truth is revealed in the life of Jesus. Christians believe that, in Jesus, God has (among other things) revealed a what a human life completely suffused with love of God and neighbor looks like. Thus we might say that there is–on any Christian view–a kind of revealed moral knowledge.

    However, one shouldn’t conclude from this, I think, that Jesus is the only source of moral knowledge. For starters, Jesus himself disclaims this repeatedly, appealing in his teachings not only to his hearers knowledge of the Mosaic law, but also to their common moral sense. Moreover, the picture of Jesus that we have in the gospels, while evocative of a human life that is shaped in a specific way, doesn’t provide us with anything like an answer key to all of our moral questions. Asking that it should is probably to to put more weight on that portrait than it could bear.

    Another consideration: Jesus’ life and ministry are not, in general, a “transvaluation” of all previously held values, but something more like their consummation or the horizon point where they converge. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how people could’ve recognized him as good in the first place. That they could presupposes that people who encountered Jesus and responded positively to him had some prior understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, and recognized Jesus as the embodiment of virtues like compassion and self-giving love.

    This isn’t to say that Jesus doesn’t add to our previously existing moral knowledge. But maybe what he adds is a vivid concrete actualization of values or norms that would otherwise remain abstract and incomplete. I’m not saying that Jesus is only a moral exemplar, as some liberal theologians seem to say. Christians affirm that his life, death, and resurrection are also the very presence and activity of God with us and for us. But at the same time he is not less than a moral exemplar. We might add that Jesus also shows us the depths of our own sin in that the world’s hostility toward him exemplifies the reaction of sinful humanity to the embodiment of perfect virtue and complete faith.

  • Do we need God to be good?

    It’s often asserted, or assumed, that God is “necessary” for morality, not infrequently leading to furious argument about the relative virtues of believers and atheists. But there are several senses in which God might be related to morality, so it’s important to distinguish them:

    God is necessary for us to know the difference between right and wrong. This is the view that moral truth is a subspecies of revealed truth, i.e., we can only know the difference between right and wrong by consulting the Bible, the church, or some other religious authority. Even within Christianity, though, this is a minority position. The more common view is that we can know the difference between right and wrong using our natural reason and observing the world around us, particularly what actions are conducive to human well-being, etc. There has been a tendency in some self-consciously postmodern theology to see morality as tradition-constituted or embedded in the practices of a particular community, which does in some ways hark back to the morality-as-revealed-knowledge view.

    God is necessary for us to be motivated to do right. This may be more common than the previous view. In its crassest form it asserts that the threat of punishment and/or promise of reward by God (whether here or hereafter) is what provides the necessary incentive for us to behave morally. In a more sophisticated vein, one might argue that God’s valuation of the world and the creatures in it provides a motive–if we love God–to treat God’s creatures with respect and care. Yet it seems that atheists, agonostics, and other non-theists can be motivated to moral behavior by many other considerations that make no reference to God. Though one might wonder if positing a transcendent dimension to morality gives an extra incentive to, for instance, more self-sacrificial actions than some alternative views (e.g., naturalism).

    God is necessary to make sense of morality. This is the view that God is necessary to account for the deep, metaphysical basis or structure of morality. We might say that God is the “truth-maker” for moral statements. This doesn’t necessarily imply that we must believe in God’s existence to apprehend moral truth; it simply means that what ultimately “makes sense” of morality is God’s existence and/or nature. Most Christians probably hold some version of this view. On the other hand, we may doubt its practical import since it seems possible to have moral beliefs that guide one’s actions without enquiring very deeply into their metaphysical foundation (if any). Not to mention, there are several competing accounts of the metaphsyics of morality, none of which, it’s safe to say, commands anything close to universal assent. And yet it doesn’t seem as though having such a satisfying metaphysical account is necessary for moral discourse to funciton effectively.

    I think the second and third views are more plausible than the first, but both would be very difficult to prove. I think one could make a plausible argument that the existence of God makes better sense of moral values than at least some competing views and that belief in God may provide motives for moral virtue that aren’t available to other views, but that falls short of showing that God is necessary for morality in the strong sense sometimes claimed.

    ADDENDUM: I left out yet another sense in which it might be said that God is necessary for morality, which seems obvious now that I think of it: God as causally necessary for morally good actions. Most Christians have held that, in some way and to some degree or another, God’s grace empowers us to do good works. This goes beyond merely saying that our knowledge of God’s commands or love acts as a motive for doing good; it’s the claim that God somehow strengthens our wills so that we can do things that, left to our own devices, we would be unable to do. Without this empowering grace, it is sometimes held, we would be utterly incapable of doing good. This also seems to imply that non-believers, to the extent that they do good, are also beneficiaries of God’s grace. Clearly this opens up a whole can of worms concerning God’s providential action in the world, as well as the relationship between divine action and human free will.

  • One more (at least) on pluralism

    Another thought occurred to me about John Hick’s pluralism hypothesis: that it risks introducing a moralistic distortion into religion. Since, for Hick, religion is primarily a practical rather than a cognitive enterprise (because the Real in itself eludes our cognitive abilities), the criteria by which he judges religion are primarily moral ones. Religions are vehicles for moving from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness, where that largely means being more compassionate, etc.

    But Christianity, at least, isn’t primarily about “being moral.” It’s primarily about a loving, personal God that longs to be in relationship with his creation. Because human sin disrupts that relationship, morality has a role, but it’s a subordinate one (and, in itself, insufficient for restoring the divine-human relationship). The primary story is that of God’s self-bestowal on creation–in creating all that is and calling it good, in the calling of the patriarchs, in the liberation of Israel, and in the conjoining of the divine and the creaturely in Jesus–not human efforts to be more moral.

    Because Hick has prescinded from the particulars of the Christian story, though, he is left with little choice but to make the subordinate theme of morality central to religion. He’s hardly alone in this, since many people seem to think that the purpose of religion is to make people “good.” But, from a Christian perspective at least, that is really to miss the point–which is the overflowing love and grace of God. Ironically, then, Hick’s position ends up being more human-centered than Reality-centered, since the focus is on our moral self-improvement instead of on God.