A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Charles Wesley gets his due

    It appears that new scholarship is discovering some of the long-forgotten (or even suppressed) differences between Charles Wesley and his more famous brother. One interesting point that comes up in this piece is that C.W. leaned more heavily toward keeping Methodism as a movement within the Church of England.

    I suppose it doesn’t mark me out as particularly interesting or original to note that I love Wesley’s hymns.

  • Burke v. Madison

    Whether, like Burke, one believes that anarchy is the great threat to liberty and social peace, or, like Madison, that tyranny poses the greatest threat to liberty, goes a long way toward determining if one is a conservative or a liberal. –John McGowan, American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time, p. 105

    McGowan here is talking specifically about traditionalist conservatism, and this isn’t the whole story about the liberal/conservative divide, but this strikes me as insightful. Conservative worries about the fragility of the “moral ecology” of society rest on a view of liberty and peace as very precarious accomplishments. Meanwhile, liberals are apt to see any claims to power and authority as inherently suspect.

    This divide reproduces itself, it seems to me, in church matters. Here I would place the divide between those for whom the greatest threat to the church is antinominanism, and those for whom it’s legalism.

    The former tend to see any challenge to received understandings of the law as the first steps down the slippery slope to moral anarchy. What’s always needed is a robust re-assertion of “orthodoxy” or the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

    By contrast, the latter group bristles at any assertion of authority, tending to see all such claims as oppressive. Even those requiring, say, a priest or bishop to uphold the creeds or a communicant to have been baptized are illegitimate intrusions upon personal liberty.

    It’s not that I think the truth lies simply in striking a happy medium between liberal and conservative positions, but both are certainly prone to unhelpful excesses. This fundamental difference in outlooks may also help explain why the two sides–in both the political and ecclessiastical spheres–so often talk past each other.

  • Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

    In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes:

    …ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no possible alternatives to it, since it is the basis of every possibility. It can be spoken of as omniscient, in the sense that it conceives or generates all possible states, knows what they are and knows that there are no more than it conceives. It can be spoken of as omnipotent, in the sense that it brings whatever is actual into existence from the realm of possibility, or it generates actual beings with a derivative power to make some possible states actual. Nothing that comes into being can have more power than ultimate mind has, since the latter is the source of all actuality.

    It might well be as well to note that these definitions of omniscience and omnipotence are not exactly the same as the ones classical philosophers have often given. Many philosophers define omniscience as knowledge of absolutely everything, possible, actual, past, present and future. They define omnipotence as the power to do absolutely anything that is not self-contradictory. The definitions I have given are more restricted than that. They do not entail that God knows what will be actual in the future. Perhaps God leaves the future open for radical freedom. And they do not entail that God can do absolutely anything. Perhaps God leaves, or even must leave, finite reality to follow its own inherent laws of development.

    Yet we can still say that God knows everything that is possible and actual (the future may not be actual yet) and that God is the most powerful being there could possibly be and the ultimate source of all things that come into being. This leaves open the question of exactly which possible states can be made actual adn whether there are restrictions on what possible states can be actual. Though such an ultimate mind can sensibly be called omniscient and omnipotent, this may not be enough to satisfy some religious believers. It is enough, however, to satisfy the requirements of being an ultimate explanation of the universe. (pp. 132-3)

    Elsewhere Ward speaks of God’s “temporality,” as the divine experience of a succession of states. God is still trans-temporal in the sense of transcending the multiple processes of temporal succession posited by relativity theory. But Ward argues, contra the classical view, that it is a perfection, not an imperfection, for God to experience the flow of new experiences and new possibilities for creativity, in response to real relationships with creatures.

    God can enter into many different times, acting and responding in them, while also existing in a trans-temporal way. We cannot imagine this trans-temporality of God, but it should not be conceived as a totally immutable and static existence. It might be better conceived as a transcendent agency that acts incessantly in many temporal streams, manifesting its changeless perfection in continual creative activity, sensitive awareness, and overflowing goodness. (p. 216)

    Obviously a lot of argument would be required to establish this position with any confidence, but I think there are two root insights that motivate it. The first is that, if God does not experience temporality in some sense, then God’s knowledge is, paradoxically, limited. That is, there’s a mode of experience that God has no knowledge of. The second is that God, according to the Bible and much religious experience, exists in responsive relationship with God’s creatures. For this to be a genuine relationship and not an illusory one, God must be able to actually enter into the flow of time and, potentially, be affected by it. Classical Christian thought limited this to the Incarnation, but Ward goes further than that here.

    So, if there is a temporal aspect to God’s existence, then we can begin to see why omniscience might still allow that God doesn’t know certain things. If there are genuinely undetermined events (and there may be quite few for all we know), then even God would only have probably knowledge of how they are going to turn out. As Ward says, God knows all possible states and all actual states, but non-actual future states would not necessarily be part of God’s knowledge.

    I always feel a bit impious even speculating about this stuff.

  • Unfair but amusing

    “…when Theodore Roosevelt, to his lasting discredit, referred to Thomas Paine, without having read him, as ‘a filthy little atheist,’ he was slandering someone whose belief in the traditional doctrines of the existence of a Supreme Power and the immortality of the Soul was much more unqualified than the belief of two thinkers who have been characterized as the leading Protestant theologians of the twentieth century–Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.” –Sydney Hook, from his introduction to Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine

  • Is theistic evolution incoherent?

    At the First Things blog, Joe Carter has a post challenging the coherence of “theistic evolution.” This view, held by people like Kenneth Miller, accepts the orthodox Darwinist position that the evolution of human beings did not require any special intervention by God (contra both old-school creationists and Intelligent Design proponents). Further, according to an article that Carter quotes, Miller denies that God has human beings specifically in mind. Instead, God “set up” the evolutionary process so that some intelligent creatures capable of offering praise to their Creator would emerge, but not necessarily human beings.

    Carter writes:

    If God did not have a plan for the specific outcome of evolution, as MIller contends, then he must have at least had a general plan for the process to create some form of creature with “exceptional mental capabilities.” But then the process would no longer be undirected, which means that it is not compatible with the Darwinian view of evolution.

    Ironically, the view held by [Francis] Collins and Miller shares much in common with the position of creationists. If evolution is random and undirected then the probability of a “creature capable of praising Him” (i.e., a being similar to humans) coming into existence is extremely low. God would likely need to run the experiment a number of times to get the desired outcome and then select that instantiation (maybe that’s why we have the multiverse). This special selection of results, however, is not so different than creationist’s view of special creation—in each God simply chooses the outcome he desires. Also, Collins’ view of God making evolution appear undirected is similar to the idea that he planted dinosaur fossils and created geological strata to fool us into thinking the earth has been around more than 6,000 years. Creationists have to interpret the evidence to fit their theological preconceptions; Collins has to interpret the evidence to fit his theoretical preconceptions.

    I think Carter goes astray here by taking the language of “random and undirected” too literally. Clearly, evolution is not random in any absolute sense: it operates within the constraints provided locally by the environment and the qualities possessed by organisms, and globally by the fundamental constituents of the universe (e.g, the laws that govern the behavior of subatomic particles). There are reasons–which have been widely canvassed–for thinking that the emergence of intelligent life is, if not inevitable, then at least intelligible given the nature of our universe. All a theistic evolutionist is committed to is that God set up those fundamental constraints in such a way that He could foresee–at least with a high degree of probability–that intelligent life would emerge at some point.

    The difference between the theistic evolutionist and the ID proponent is that the former doesn’t think we need to appeal to special divine intervention to explain how life (including human life) evolved. We can ask why the universe has the fundamental constituents it does and not others, and this is where the theistic evolutionist might bring in God. But it’s important to note that this doesn’t present a conflict with orthodox Darwinism; biologists qua biologists don’t ask, much less answer, the question of why the universe has the basic features it does. That’s a properly philosophical (and perhaps theological) question. The fact that a high percentage of evolutionary biologists are atheists isn’t particularly relevant. The theistic evolution position is an interpretation of the process as a whole, not an appeal to God as one causal input among others.

    I should add that I’m not personally dogmatically committed to the view that God never intervenes in the evolutionary process. There are a variety of models on offer for thinking about how God might do that without giving up the idea of a basically law-like process. Nevertheless, the methodological naturalism of biology is entirely appropriate; I just don’t see how ID constitutes a research program. What we can and should do as Christians is offer a way of integrating the findings of the sciences with a richer picture of reality that takes account of all our experience (moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.). Reality is a many-layered thing.

    It also strikes me that Kenneth Miller’s statement that human beings are “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out” is a salutary and properly humbling one. Christian theology has been entirely too anthropocentric, and a more theocentric and creation-centric perspective is urgently needed.

    UPDATE: See also this post from the ubiquitous John Schwenkler who, in addition to his other gigs, is now blogging at “dotCommonweal,” the Commonweal magazine blog. I should note, in clarification, that I was assuming, for the purposes of this post, that God is not eternal in the traditional sense of being “outside” of time altogether. I have some problems with the traditional view of God’s timelessness, and I think attributing temporality to God can be combined with a sufficiently robust notion of divine transcendence. I recognize that this is a minority position in the tradition, and John’s approach is certainly a legitimate one to take.

  • Clergy and theological/liturgical experimentation

    Derek has a good post on those he calls spiritual adventurers/seekers in the Episcopal Church, in the context of debates about messing around with the liturgy. As Derek points out, the liturgy (including, I’d emphasize, the creeds) provides guard rails for the life of the church. A priest or pastor who ignores these for the sake of following his or her own spiritual bliss is doing a disservice to the congregation he or she has been called to serve.

    For whatever reason, this seems to be a more prominent phenomenon in TEC than in the ELCA. I don’t know if this is because Lutheranism has a more defined theology, or because the Episcopal priesthood attracts more free spirits, or if it’s some other reason altogether. Personally, I want my pastor to be more theologically conservative than I am. As a layperson I prize my freedom to explore theological possibilities and entertain outlandish and even heterodox theories. Not to say that we should have a double standard for laypeople and clergy, or that laypeople don’t have responsibilities to uphold the faith–we do, as part of our baptismal covenant. But someone who is called to the pastorate/priesthood carries a much heavier and more public burden to hew to orthodoxy in preaching, teaching, and leading worship.

    And yet, many of the great reformers, saints, and mystics of the church who were also ordained clergy have pushed the envelope of what’s acceptable and orthodox. (A certain Augustinian monk comes to mind.) If anything, the church has often erred on the side of suppressing the spirit of freedom that allows new insights to be unearthed. This is probably not the biggest problem in mainline churches today where, if anything, an overly-liberal, anything goes attitude holds sway in many quarters. One of Derek’s concluding points strikes the appropriate note:

    On one-hand, I’m open to legitimate spiritual adventurism on the part of the clergy in so far as it reflects necessary growth and listening to the Spirit and transformation into the Mind of Christ. On the other hand, I believe that much of it reflects a failure of our discernment and formation processes. Yes, it’s fine to deepen, but I’m seeing a lot more wandering around than rooting down.

    I guess the question–which is hard to answer in particular cases–is whether someone’s theological, spiritual, or liturgical gyrations are occurring because they’re on a quest for self-fulfillment or self-expression, or because of a deepening fidelity to Christ and his gospel. I think Derek is right that formation is a prerequisite here–both for clergy and laity–to ensure that we are grounded in the tradition before proposing changes to it. And community discernment is necessary to “test the spirits” of any proposed innovations.