A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

Stumbling blocks
There’s a good interview with Francis Collins, author of The Language of God, at Books & Culture. This passage in particular struck a chord with me:

You take both the Bible and evolution seriously. Did the harmony you find between evolution and your faith just come naturally?

You know, it really did. When I became a believer at 27, the first church I went to was a pretty conservative Methodist church in a little town outside Chapel Hill. I’m sure there were a lot of people in that church who were taking Genesis literally and rejecting evolution.

But I couldn’t take Genesis literally because I had come to the scientific worldview before I came to the spiritual worldview. I felt that, once I arrived at the sense that God was real and that God was the source of all truth, then, just by definition, there could not be a conflict.

I returned to church as an adult after abandoning it for most of my teenage years and early-to-mid 20s. And even prior to that my religious education had been fairly minimal. If someone would’ve expected me, at the time I returned to church, to adopt a young earth creationist worldview I would’ve been completely baffled. It would’ve been a literal impossibility. (Fortunately, no one did; that’s liberal Protestantism for you.) Being educated outside of the creationist milieu had effectively inoculated me against any such proposal. It had long ceased to be a live option for me, and I had already learned that alternate readings of the Bible were entirely possible–and held by plenty of great theologians.

Christians often forget that much of what we talk about, and the language in which we talk about it, is completely and utterly foreign and even unintelligible to people outside the church. To some extent that’s inevitable, and any serious religious conversion will require learning a “second language.” But Christians also need to be careful that we aren’t elevating cultural accretions to the status of essential tenets of the faith (I’d most emphatically include YEC here, but more “sophisticated” mainline versions of Christianity have this problem too). Insisting that converts (or re-verts) adopt such cultural baggage is placing stumbling blocks where they don’t need to be. Sometimes Christians take refuge in the idea that they’re a virtuous remnant holding out for truth against a pagan world; that kind of self-righteousness needs a heavy dose of humble self-examination.

Incidentally, I see via Brandon that Collins has been nominated by the President to serve as the new director of the National Institutes of Health.
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July 10, 2009
Like a pope needs an encyclical
I don’t know if I’ll get around to reading Caritas in Veritate in its entirety (so far I’ve only made it through the introduction), but John Schwenkler is going to be posting thoughts on each chapter once a week (see here for details), which will undoubtedly provide food for thought.
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July 10, 2009
More on Anselm, death, and redemption
Christopher has an excellent follow-up post on Anselm and atonement, addressing some of the worries I had about Jesus’ death being a payment of sorts. Instead of trying to summarize it, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Some of what Christopher wrote brought to mind a passage from Denis Edwards’ Ecology at the Heart of Faith (which I talked about in the previous post). Here Edwards is discussing Karl Rahner’s account of redemption:

[Rahner’s] focus is not on a forensic view of redemption, on Christ making up for human sin in legal terms, but on God embracing humanity and the world so that they are taken into God and deified.

[…]

He sees the death and resurrection of Jesus as two distinct sides of the one event. In death, Jesus freely hands his whole bodily existence into the mystery of a loving God. In the resurrection, God adopts creaturely reality as God’s own reality. Jesus, in his humanity and as part of a creaturely world, is forever taken into God. God’s self-bestowal to the world in the incarnation reaches its culmination in the resurrection, when God divinizes and transfigures the creturely reality of Jesus. (Ecology at the Heart of Faith, p. 87)

What I read Edwards as saying here is that Jesus offers his death, not as a payment, but as an act of total self-offering in trust. Because Jesus has made the perfect response to the Father, humanity–indeed, creaturehood–is taken into the divine life.
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June 30, 2009
Kinship and cultivation, Francis and Benedict
Catholic theologian Denis Edwards’ Ecology at the Heart of Faith provides a good model of engaging environmental issues using the classic Christian theological tradition.

In chapter 2 he discusses the controverted issue of the image of God and dominion over nature. He argues that the imago is best understood as the human capacity for interpersonal love and relationship: with God, each other, and the rest of creation.

[W]hat is specific to the human can be seen as the personal, the capacity to go out from oneself to the other in interpersonal love. Precisely this personal dimension of the human involves the human in relationship not only with that radical other who is God, and not only with other human beings, but with the others who are our fellow creatures. Precisely because human beings are made in the image of God, they are called like God to care for every sparrow that falls to the ground. (p. 16)

Edwards then goes on to consider the topic of human dominion over nature. Rejecting a sheerly exploitative understanding of dominion and an ecological egalitarianism that gives no special preference to human interests, Edwards opts for a view that emphasizes kinship with other creatures and care and cultivation of the earth. As he puts it, this combines the “Franciscan” focus on other creatures as our brothers and sisters with a “Benedictine” call to cultivate the earth in work, gardening, and building and to creative contemplation of the world in learning and study:

Theologically, I would propose that this kinship brings into play what I have identified as the image of God in the human, the personal. It involves humans as persons, personally connecting with other creatures, respecting and loving them in all their differences from ourselves. (pp. 23-4)

[…]

The language of cultivating and caring for creation can include the many ways in which human creativity is used for the good of the community of life on Earth. It includes not only farming with best land-care practice, but also cooking, gardening, building, painting, doing science, teaching, planning, taking political action and many other creative actions. (pp. 25-6)

Edwards here is trying to balance an appreciation and respect for the otherness of the non-human creation with a sense of the importance of human culture and our unique role on earth. “What is crucial is that cultivating and caring for creation are based on the conversion implied in the model of kinship, a conversion in which human beings come to see themselves as interrelated in a community of life with other creatures, a community in which each creature has its own unique value before God” (p. 26). He rejects the metaphor of stewardship, which has become popular in some Christian circles, because it “can run the risk of suggesting an inflated view of the human as a necessary intermediary between God and other creatures” (p. 25). The non-human world has its own relationship with God apart from us. Cultivation of and caring for creation, founded on a recognition of kinship, implies both a creativity and a self-limitation on the part of human beings.
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June 28, 2009
Cognitive ethology, the Left, faith, and dominion
A long but worthwhile essay that to some extent recapitulates the argument made by John Gray in Straw Dogs. Gray’s contention was that the secular Left has largely jettisoned the metaphysics of Christianity but held on to its anthropocentric outlook and belief in a progressive history. Echoing Nietzsche, Gray argues that the scientific, secular outlook undermines, instead of underwriting, humanism.

The author of this essay, Steve Best, maintains that the Left, even while taking pride in its progressive, enlightened, science-informed views, still has largely ignored the “animal question,” i.e., the fact that science increasingly reveals a continuity between human and non-human animals. Instead, progressives still largely hold on to the old, discredited humanism that posits an unbridgeable chasm between us and the rest of creation.

As a Christian who’s also interested in moving beyond a strictly anthropocentric theology, I come at this from a slightly different angle. On the one hand, the Bible (not to mention simple observation) reveals that we have at least a de facto dominion over the rest of nature: what we do disproportionately affects the rest of the world whether we like it or not. On the other hand, historical Christianity has largely adopted an anthropocentrism that is at odds with the Bible, at least on some readings. For instance, in a brief but interesting book, German theologian Michael Welker argues that a close reading of the opening chapters of Genesis describes a human dominion that privileges human interests but also demands a care for the rest of creation:

The mandate of dominion aims at nothing less than preserving creation while recognizing and giving pride of place to the interests of human beings. In all the recognizing and privileging of the interests of human beings, the central issue is the preservation of creation in its complex structures of interdependence. The expansion of the human race upon the earth is inseparable from the preservation of the community of solidarity with animals in particular, and inseparable from the caretaking preservation of the community of solidarity with all creatures in general. God judges human beings worthy of this preservation of creation. They are to exercise dominion over creatures by protecting them. Human beings acquire their power and their worth precisely in the process of caretaking. The mandate of dominion according to Genesis 1 means nothing more and nothing less. (Creation and Reality, p. 73, emphasis added)

Traditionally–and perhaps understandably given humanity’s limited ability to affect the non-human world in the past–Christianity has adopted the view that the rest of the world exists for our sake. There have been debates about whether this is an authentically biblical view or one imported from elsewhere (e.g., classical philosophy). Either way, I believe Christianity has the resources to adapt to new understandings of our place in creation without jettisoning the biblical tradition and the essential tenets of Christian theology.
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June 27, 2009
Barr on faith and evolution
Since I was pretty critical of First Things a couple posts down, it seems only fair to note that Stephen Barr has been writing some excellent posts on Christianity and evolution (see here, here, and here).
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June 27, 2009
The virtues and vices of St. Anselm
Christopher has a terrific post on St. Anselm and atonement theory. As longtime readers might know, I’m definitely in the St. Anselm-as-unfairly-maligned camp. Among other things, his view of atonement is not the same as what is commonly referred to as “penal substitution”: Anselm explicitly denies in Cur Deus Homo that God punishes Jesus in our stead. His entire scheme, in fact, is based on the notion of satisfaction as an alternative to punishment.

That being said (and here I’m riffing on a comment I made over at Christopher’s), one place where I do have trouble with St. Anselm is in his suggestion that Christ had to die as a form of reparation for our sin. As I read Cur Deus Homo, anyway, Anselm’s view is that, since all human beings (including Jesus) owe God total obedience and love, Jesus’ death was the only “surplus” he had to offer. This is because Jesus was sinless and wouldn’t naturally have died, according to Anselm; which is what makes his death a gift. So, it’s Jesus’ death, in its infinite value, that makes up for our sin. While not a penal view, as such, it does seem to be open to similar criticisms (i.e., picturing God as demanding his pound of flesh before he can be merciful).

What I suspect is that there’s a tension between that more transactional view and the “re-creative” Anselm-inspired view that Christopher outlines and which I’m quite sympathetic to. You can definitely read Anselm in a way that sees the work of Christ as a kind of restoration job on human nature, one that we participate in through faith and the sacraments. But I’m not sure how easily this sits alongside the more transactional view–which is also present–of God needing Christ’s freely offered death to forgive our sins.
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June 26, 2009
First Things and climate denialism
John Schwenkler with an excellent post taking down First Thing‘s resident climate change denialist, Thomas Sieger Derr.

I’m not sure if I’ve changed or it has, but I used to really enjoy reading FT and was a faithful subscriber for about ten years. It introduced me to a lot of contemporary theology offered at a level that was still relatively accessible to the layperson. In particular, the essays of its former editor, James Nuechterlein, first exposed me to the notion of evangelical catholicity within Lutheranism, an influence in my ultimately joining the Lutheran church.

Which makes it all the more dispirting to see the magazine descend (further?) into right-wing hackery. Maybe I’m looking back through rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that it used to offer more of a diversity of viewpoints, even while being distinctly conservative. It’s not like there’s some logical connection between traditional Christianity and climate change denialism; surely FT could at least find someone with actual scientific credentials to write about this stuff.
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June 25, 2009
Public plan as second-best option
Christian social ethicist Gary Dorrien argues that a publc health plan–at least one with teeth–could be an acceptable second-best option, in lieu of a single-payer plan, which he favors.

I still don’t have firm views on specifically what kind of heath system reform is needed, but I am convinced that, as Dorrien puts it, “[h]ealth care is a fundamental human right that should be available to all people regardless of their economic resources.” At least assuming that the society can afford it, which would obviously not be true at all times and in all places.
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June 23, 2009
Creation’s travail
To hear some anti-green conservatives tell it, you’d think that nature-worship and radical environmentalism were making major inroads into our society. Of course, the opposite is much closer to the truth: the general attitude toward the natural world that underlies most of our daily activities is one that regards nature as little more than a vast storehouse of resources to be used and a vast sink in which to deposit our waste.

Still, it’s true that Christians, at any rate, shouldn’t idealize nature in either its benign aspects or its wilder and more threatening ones. There is a strain of deep green thinking that is anti-human and anti-civilization. But Christians should be a bit ambivalent about nature.

I don’t like to talk about nature as fallen, because that implies that there was a time when it was unfallen. I don’t think modern science permits us to think that, and I don’t think the Bible requires it. Instead, I’d prefer to talk about the created world as being “in travail” (cf. Romans, chapter 8). This implies that nature is good, but is on its way to being consummated by the power and grace of God. Nature doesn’t provide the standard of good and evil, but neither is it to be disregarded for the sake of human interests.

This view, not incidentally, provides a more solid grounding for compassion and justice for animals than either nature-mysticism or a purely utilitarian attitude toward the natural world. We don’t have to ignore the “red in tooth and claw” aspects of nature in order to recognize that our fellow creatures are caught in a world order that is indifferent to their suffering.

Yes, trying to intervene in the predator-prey relationship will usually cause more suffering than it alleviates, but we can at least recognize that it does cause innocent suffering and will (please God) be abolished–or at least radically transformed–in the eschaton. How much more, then, does a recognition of nature’s travail provide grounds for not adding to the suffering of God’s innocent creatures by imprisoning them in our institutionalized systems of food production and scientific experimentation?
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June 22, 2009