Try saying that three times fast! And then read this fascinating essay about philosopher John Rawls’ early writings on religion (which have only recently been published) and the continuity of the ideas expressed there with his mature (and completely secular) political philosophy. It seems that the young Rawls considered entering the priesthood of the Episcopal Church but lost his faith after his experiences in World War II. Nevertheless, based on this piece, Rawls’ earlier religious ideas–particularly a highly personalistic and communitarian understanding of Christian ethics–continued to have analogues in his later work.
Category: Theology & Faith
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Quote for the day
“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.” — William Ralph Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1911-34)
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Salvation as re-creation
A while back I wrote about Keith Ward’s understanding of how God acts in the world, as explained in his book Divine Action. Later in the book he devotes a chapter to the incarnation and offers an interpretation of the atonement.
Ward argues that Jesus is properly seen as the enfleshment or embodiment of God’s love in the world: “We could then say that Jesus does not only tell us about God’s love or even act out a living parable for the distinctly existing love of God. Rather, what he enacts is the very love of God itself, as embodied in this human world and for us human beings” (p. 215).
However, the incarnation isn’t merely a lesson for us about God’s love. Or, as Ward says, “Jesus is not primarily an educator, who comes to bring salvation through knowledge, achieved in meditation and stilling of the individual mind” (p. 221). The human predicament is more radical than that; “liberal” views of the atonement sometimes suggest that we merely need to see or learn what is right in order to do it, reducing Jesus to an example:
[God] cannot simply forgive us, while we are unable to turn from our sin — that would be to say that it does not really matter; that somehow we can love God while at the same time continuing to hate him! He cannot compel us to love him, without depriving us of the very freedom that has cost so much to give us. He cannot leave us in sin; for then his purpose in creation would be wholly frustrated. (p. 222)
What Ward suggests instead is that the atonement is God re-creating human nature in the life of Jesus. In his life, obedience, suffering, passion, and death, Jesus re-enacts the drama of human life, but in a way that maintains its complete fidelity to God. He thus overcomes sin and the powers of evil to which we are subject. “He takes human nature through the valley of the shadow of death, and in him alone that nature is not corrupted. He is the one victor over evil; he has experienced the worst it can do, and he has overcome it” (p. 223).
In Jesus, human nature is made anew, the way God intends for it to be. But how can this help us? Aren’t we still stuck in our sins? Ward contends that Christ can help us because he “has remade human nature in an uncorrupted form” (p. 223), and we can participate in that nature, or have it implanted in us through faith in Christ. As St. Paul puts it, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).
The nature that we receive from God is a human nature that has triumphed over evil, that has entered into its heart and remained uncorrupted. It is not that God simply creates a new nature in us when we ask; but that he takes human nature to himself, shows what it truly is and what its destiny is and shows that it cannot be conquered by sin and death. That is the nature he places within us, making us sons by adoption, taken into the life of the Son.
This view seems to have more affinities with the Eastern Christian emphasis on theosis than certain substitutionary or retributive models of the atonement promulgated in the West, particularly since the Reformation.
The idea of incarnation and atonement as “new creation” also, it can be argued, fits better with an evolutionary view of the development of human nature. As I’ve argued before, evolution seems to require that we relinquish the supposition that humans existed in a state of perfect righteousness prior to a historical fall. Instead, we might propose that early human beings were immature and undeveloped and that God intended them to develop along a certain path. Instead, however, humanity has taken the wrong road, preferring self-seeking, greed, and violence to altruism, justice and peace. Atonement, then, consists of setting us back on the right road.
A view very much like this has been developed by George L. Murphy, a physicist and Lutheran pastor, in two interesting articles: “Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin” and “Chiasmic Cosmology and Atonement.” Regarding atonement as re-creation, Murphy writes:
Atonement comes about because God in Christ actually does something to change the status of people who “were dead through the trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). To be effective, the work of Christ must overcome the nothingness toward which sinful humanity is headed, a nothingness which through its terror of death, guilt, and meaninglessness, it already experiences. If humanity and (as we shall note later) the rest of creation with it, is on the way to nothingness, God must re-create from nothing. Atonement parallels in a precise way the divine creatio ex nihilo.
One benefit of this view of salvation is that it puts humanity back in its proper place as part of creation. As Lutheran “eco” theologian H. Paul Santmire says:
The Incarnation of the Word is thus a response to the human condition of alienation from God and rebellion against God, as well as a divine cosmic unfolding intended to move the whole of cosmic history into its final stage. United with the Word made flesh, human creatures are restored to their proper place in the unfolding history of God with the cosmos. Thus united, they are free to live in peace with one another and with all other creatures, according to the imperfect canon’s of creation’s goodness. Now they may live as an exemplary human community, as a city set upon a hill, whose light cannot be hidden. (Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, p. 60)
I think this provides one fruitful way for thinking about salvation that avoids some of the pitfalls of both a forensic and merely exemplarist view and has a certain consonance with an evolutionary picture of the world.
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Circuses are animal abuse
I don’t know about St. Patrick, but I can’t imagine St. Francis would approve.
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Theological pet peeves
When Christian writers do one or both of the following:
1. Posit a simplistic dichotomy between “Hebrew” (or “biblical”) and “Greek” thought. These days the former is invariably portrayed as earthy, holistic, and life-affirming, while the latter is otherworldly, dualistic, and sees matter as evil. (As an aside, I often wonder what Jews think when Christians purport to define “Hebrew” thinking. Bonus question: was Maimonides a “Hebrew” or “Greek” thinker?)
2. Going on ad nauseum about how God cannot be contained in “propositions” and how “propositional truth” and “reason” are irrelevant to the life of faith, which is a dynamic, life-changing relationship that, in some way I can’t fathom, doesn’t involve having beliefs with any specifiable content or truth conditions.
Here endeth the rant.
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Ward on God’s action in the world
I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same time natural laws describable by science can provide a full account of what happens in the world.
In differentiating his position from Peacocke’s account, Ward suggests that we live in an “open and emergent” universe that leaves room for God to act. The indeterminacies of quantum mechanics and complex systems theory show that the Laplacian universe of strict, mechanistic determinism is an unwarranted extrapolation from the success of Newtonian physics. The universe has a “loose,” probabilistic structure–or at least it looks that way, and this means that divine action in the universe can’t be ruled out.
Is this a return to the much-maligned “god of the gaps”? Ward argues that it’s not. The point isn’t that there are causal nooks and crannies where God can intervene. It’s that science is, by its very nature, an abstraction from the fullness of reality. Physics, for example, takes as its subject matter one slice of reality–that aspect of it which is describable in quantifiable, law-like terms. But, logically, this can’t show that all of reality has this character. An exhaustive account of reality would have to include all the non-quantifiable, qualitative aspects too. To the extent that physics (and other natural sciences) abstracts from the totality of reality, there is something it doesn’t capture. Thus, in principle, God’s acting in the universe can’t be ruled out.
This isn’t to say that science can positively show that God acts in the universe; on the contrary, given the limitations of its method it couldn’t pick up on divine action. This is because God’s action couldn’t be subject to repeatable, controlled experiment. As the ultimate subject, God’s activity can’t be captured in any kind of regular, law-like conceptual scheme. It would be missed by any natural science acting according to its own prescribed methodology. Evidence for God’s activity comes instead from historical and personal religious experience.
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Faith and economics
A conservative evangelical questions his uncritical embrace of laissez-faire economics.
When you think about it, the marriage between evangelicalism and free market capitalism is downright odd, and, as far as I can tell, largely confined to the U.S. (British evangelicals, for instance, seem quite a bit more left-wing on economics than their American counterparts).
I’m not saying that a Christian can’t be a free market libertarian; in this sinful and imperfect world we have to use our reason to determine the best set of social arrangements. But it does, on its face, seem strange that Christians, of all people, should think that the unhampered pursuit of self-interest would maximize the social good.
A libertarian counterargument might be that only laissez-faire provides sufficient check on various centers of power that would otherwise tend to become concentrated. But, whatever might be the case in the anarcho-capitalist utopia, in our world the concentration of economic power is a reality that seems to many people to require a public counterweight (anti-trust laws, regulation, etc.).
I don’t personally think that there’s any ideal social and economic system from a Christian point of view. We’ll always be responding to changing circumstances in a somewhat ad hoc fashion. But Christians can bring certain principles to bear on the discussion, such as a concern for the worst off members of society, an insistence on the dignity of the human person, and care for God’s creation. Implementing these principles, though, will require a knowledge of the principles of economics and an awareness that trade offs are inevitable.
Too, there’s a certain wisdom in the idea that the market has to be subordinated to human ends and needs. The market was made for man, not man for the market, we might say. This would seem to imply some role for public and democratic control of the economy, limited though it might be by the dangers of over-regulation.
This article from sociologist Peter Berger, though written in 1993, still seems pertinent, particularly this part:
It is clear that a market economy, once it has reached a certain level of affluence, can tolerate a considerable amount of governmentally managed redistribution. This, of course, is the basic lesson to be learned from the coexistence of capitalism with the welfare state. It should also be clear that this tolerance is not without limits. If political redistribution reaches a certain level, it must either send the economy into a downward spin (wealth being redistributed faster than it is produced) or dismantle democracy (to prevent those whose wealth is to be redistributed-a population which, as redistribution expands, will be very much larger than the richest group-from resisting). Now, it would be very nice if economists and social scientists could tell us just where this level is-one might call it the social-democratic tolerance threshold. Right-of-center parties in Western democracies perceive a very low threshold (each piece of welfare state legislation another step on “the road to serfdom”); left-of-center parties believe in a very high threshold, and some in that camp seem to think that there is no limit at all. What evidence there is clearly does not support either the disciples of Hayek or Swedish social democrats; but neither, unfortunately, does the evidence locate the tilting-point. Once again, a sort of “interim ethic” is called for, full of uncertainties and risks.
An “interim ethic” is a far cry from a blueprint for utopia, whether of the left or right. But it seems singularly appropriate for Christians to the extent that they recognize the complexities and frailties of a fallen world.
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“God is not beyond”
This meditation by Christian Wiman at the Christian Century is worth your time. Though, Wiman, being a poet, writes in a way that’s somewhat opaque to my flat-footed mind. Still, your mileage may vary.
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What could Jesus have been wrong about?
One Christian anti-evolution argument that I came across recently goes something like this: evolution can’t be true because Jesus believed in a historical Adam and Eve, a historical fall, etc., and this is incompatible with evolution. Clearly this is an argument aimed only at convincing other Christians.
What’s interesting here is the implicit view of Jesus. In olden times there were indeed Christian writers who seemed to think that the man Jesus possessed divine omniscience. But more recently this view has been abandoned by most theologians for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that it contradicts the Nicene Creed itself: if Jesus is truly human, then his knowledge must have been limited. Strict omniscience isn’t, as far as we know, a potential human capability.
Jesus was a man of his time; his mind was formed by the concepts and language available to him in his particular context, and so on. It would be absurd–wouldn’t it?–to think that Jesus knew, for instance, all of modern physics, or that Barack Obama would be elected the 44th president of the U.S.A., or that he was familiar with post-structuralist literary theory.
Maybe I’m naive, but surely no one wants to defend the omniscience of the historical Jesus in this strong sense. So, at least on first blush, it would seem that there’s no problem with saying that Jesus likewise was unfamiliar with evolution and probably had a view of the development of living things that he inherited from his culture and its sacred stories, most prominently the creation narrative in Genesis. More speculatively, Jesus may not even have had the conceptual apparatus for clearly distinguishing between “myth,” history, sacred story, and scientific explanation that we take for granted.
Still, I imagine the idea that Jesus was wrong about Adam and Eve (assuming for the sake of argument that he did believe in what we’d call a “historical” Adam and Eve) may not sit well with a lot of people. Maybe the discomfort here comes from the suggestion that Jesus was wrong about something of specifically religious importance. Sure, we may say, Jesus can’t have been expected to know everything there was to know about science, history, geography, and so on. But surely the Son of God knew all there was to know about moral and religious subjects!
What this objection assumes, though, is that the “religious truth” of the Genesis story is identical, or at least inextricably bound up with, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve. If we deny this (as I think we should), then we can say that Jesus was correct about the “religious” issue–in this case his diagnosis of the human condition–while admitting that his apprehension of this truth might have been expressed in a way that we can’t share. In other words, Jesus was right about sin even if he was wrong about Adam and Eve.*
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*For what it’s worth–and I’m well out of my depth here–my impression is that Judaism has a very different understanding of the significance of the story of Adam and Eve from the one that has prevailed in Christian churches; so, what Jesus understood as the significance of that story may well not be identical, or even very similar, to how most Christians have understood it.
A Thinking Reed 