A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Anarchy, church, and utopia

    Marvin describes and interesting-sounding book comparing the situation of Christianity in contemporary Africa to the young Christian movement in the ancient world. One issue both face(d) is deciding which aspects or elements to preserve of the religious outlook that preceded Christianity. Christians in the ancient world divided between those, like Tertullian, who drew a bright line between Christianity and pagan wisdom, and those, like Justin Martyr, who sought to preserve and transfigure the truths of pagan religion and philosophy. Likewise, the church in Africa faces a similar debate with respect to its pre-Christian indigenous traditions.

    Marvin sides with the modern-day Justin Martyrs and Origens:

    If all things are held together by the Word, as the scripture says, then there are echoes of the Word in every time, place and ideology. If in fact God has revealed his will to us for the purpose of gathering all things unto Christ, then a move like Justin’s and [Kwame] Bediako’s seems not just warranted but mandatory. Obviously we must test the spirits and not be led astray by what is false, but we can also test in the confidence that something valuable will precipitate.

    In short, there is no Christianity, no theology, and no line of interpretation that is pure and unsullied by the accretions of time or the infestations of alien ideologies. The Incarnation and the Lordship of Christ over all creation simply demand an admixture of Christ and culture.

    He says this has implications for us in the “post-Christian” west (or north) too:

    Origen didn’t fear building with Greek philosophy, and neither should we fear building with anew with the brick and mortar of liberalism.

    What’s different about our situation, though, is that we’re living in a society that has been (to some extent) penetrated and shaped by the Christian message. Indeed, liberalism can’t be understood (or so I’d argue) apart from European Christianity. Some of its key elements are (often barely) secularized imports from Christianity: the freedom and dignity of the person, an emphasis on the limited and fragmentary nature of human knowledge, and a recognition of irreducible pluralism in society.

    And yet, as critics have pointed out, liberalism has some significant flaws. I’d say this can be summed up as liberalism’s apparent inability to provide a check or limitation on human appetite and self-will (whether individual or collective) due to a tendency toward relativism about the good that sees human desire as the final arbiter of right and wrong.

    “Reductive” liberalism denies that there is any good for humans as such, beyond what they prefer. Fundamentalisms of various sorts uphold an overly specified and dogmatic vision of the good that ignores the valuable contributions of liberal thought. What we need instead is a vision of a shared good that is objective and independent of the human will, but is also freely chosen. What the church should want is a space of civil freedom in which to preach and live the gospel, providing such a vision of human flourishing that, if true, ought to be inherently attractive to people.

    A church that witnesses for the good, while being open to insights from contemporary culture, science, and other religions, is necessary in a society that seeks to provide its members with the maximum amount of freedom. Just as the nascent church learned from Hellenistic philosophy and Stoic ethics, the postmodern church can learn to permanently put aside dreams for a “pure” community–a dream based ultimately on fear–and joyously offer to share what it has received from its Lord.

  • Humane Society steps up its religion and animals program

    A report from the Boston Globe (via Episcopal Cafe).

    With a rising concern about things like fair trade and global warming within a lot of churches, will animal welfare start to make inroads? My sense is that this is still not on most churches’ radar screens. Perhaps out of a concern that focusing on animals will shortchange human suffering? (A false dilemma, I’d argue.)

  • Groaning of Creation: Index of posts

    Thought it might be helpful to have links to all my posts on Christopher Southgate’s book on animal theodicy, The Groaning of Creation, in one place.

    1. Intro
    2. The only way?
    3. God so loved the world
    4. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
    5. Heaven can wait
    6. Priests of creation
    7. The (vegetarian) restaurant at the end of the universe
    8. The ethics of the Ark
    9. Concluding thoughts

  • The Groaning of Creation 9: Concluding thoughts

    As a wrap-up to this series, I thought I’d offer some concluding thoughts on Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation.

    Just to briefly review: the problem of animal theodicy as Southgate sees it is that the evolutionary process seems to grind so many sentient creatures under its wheels and to doom so many species to extinction (something like 98 percent of the species that have ever existed are extinct). Given what appears to be a vast and pointless waste of life, can we believe that this process is intended by a good creator?

    As we’ve seen, Southgate’s response has three main components:

  • The evolutionary process, or something very much like it, was the only way (or at least the best way) for God to bring a variety of finite selves into existence, given the constraints imposed by a law-like universe.
  • God is present to, and participates in, the suffering of every creature; this reaches its turning point in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus where God identifies by “deep incarnation” with all creaturely life and inaugurates an age of redeemed existence.
  • Those animals who were denied any chance at a flourishing life will, we can coherently hope, be given a chance for a redeemed and fulfilled existence in some kind of postmortem state, and extinct species will be represented as well.

    • The question is: has Southgate made his case? Has he justified God’s ways (with animals) to man?

    Southgate is appropriately modest about what he has shown and admits in several places that he’s speculating, so let me just offer some questions about things that might need to be pursued further. (Hey! Possible topics for future posts!)

  • Divine action: Southgate holds that God is deeply involved in the evolutionary process (see the post on his trinitarian theology of creation). But he doesn’t really specify the nature and extent of God’s involvement and how it relates to a scientific or purely naturalistic understanding of the process. If God can shape and guide the process, at least to some extent, then why can’t God reduce the amount of pointless suffering and frustration? Not to fault Southgate for not offering a complete theory of divine action, but the extent to which God can or does intervene in creation seems like an important question.
  • Possibility and omnipotence: Southgate commends the “only way” argument as a plausible assumption. That is, it’s reasonable to think that a loving God would only choose this means of creating life if there was no other way to do so with less suffering. But are there stronger reasons for thinking that it really is the only way? Answering this question would seem to require more developed thinking about what philosophers call “modality” (i.e. the nature of possibility and impossibility) as well as the nature of God’s omnipotence.
  • Redemption and eschatology: As I mentioned in my last post, Southgate has a strongly eschatological reading of history; he thinks that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated a new age in history in which creation is moving toward a reconciliation of all things in Christ. How does this sit with the fact that life on earth will eventually become extinct? Should we expect that God will miraculously intervene before that happens? Or will the forms of beauty and goodness we create now will be “taken up” into the divine life in some trans-historical fashion?
  • Animal selves and animal immortality: One of the biggest challenges for believers in animal immortality is that it’s unclear whether animals have the kinds of “selves” about which it makes sense to say that they can survive death. Even if we grant, as most modern theologians are wont to do, that human selves (or souls) have no natural immortality but are entirely dependent on God for their continued existence, the problem with animal selves/souls is a distinct problem. That’s because it’s uncertain whether many animals have a unified self connecting their experiences and therefore whether there’s any “self” that even could persist beyond the death of the body. Does this threaten to undercut animal immortality as a strategy for theodicy?

    • Overall, I think Southgate’s study points in the right direction for thinking about animal theodicy; this is more a matter of filling out the details in a convincing way. This general perspective allows us to see the evolutionary process as the creative intention of a good God and as in need of redemption.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 8: The ethics of the Ark

    Throughout this series we’ve seen two intertwining themes. First, death and suffering are necessary parts of the process–perhaps the only possible process–by which finite selves are brought into existence. Second, however, this process involves the (seemingly) permanent thwarting of many of those selves as well as the disappearance of entire ways of being (species). And humanity, in partnership with God’s redemptive purposes, has an obligation where possible to alleviate these side-effects of the evolutionary process.

    In the last post we saw how Southgate applies this insight to our practices of raising animals for food. Any system–like our current factory farming system–that permanently frustrates the abilities of billions of sentient creatures to live lives according to their kind perpetuates (and indeed exacerbates to a tremendous degree) the natural ills of creaturely frustration and suffering. As participants in God’s healing of creation, we should work to reform or abolish such systems.

    Next Southgate turns to the ethics of extinction, considering what role human beings have in preventing the disappearance of entire species. Most non controversially he contends that we are obliged to prevent the extinction of species threatened by human activity (anthropogenic extinction). But he goes beyond this with a confessedly “bold” proposal: “a sign of our liberty as children of God starting to set free the whole creation would be that human beings, through a blend of prudential wisdom and scientific ingenuity, cut the rate of natural extinction” (pp. 124-5, emphasis in the original).

    This intriguing suggestion is based on a heavily eschatological reading of natural history:

    […] the Resurrection of Christ inaugurates a new era of redemption, in which all creation is to be renewed. Extending this thought, I hold that the phase of evolution in which new possibilities are explored via competition and extinction is coming to an end, and it is to be superseded by the final phase in which new possibilities of reconciliation and self-transcendence among already existing species will be explored. The hymn in Colossians 1 stresses that this transformation is first and foremost the work of Christ. However, the enigmatic passage from Romans 8 that has informed this study implies that human beings have a key role in this phase; the labor pains of creation await our coming to live in freedom. And a sign of that freedom would be that we seek to prevent any species presently companioned by the Spirit from disappearing from the network of possibilities within creation. (p. 127)

    In practice this requires an extremely ambitious project of conserving what E.O. Wilson calls the “hotspots” of biodiversity and the “frontier zones” of existing wilderness; a vast transfer of resources from rich nations to poor ones, enabling the latter to preserve the biodiversity where they live while escaping grinding poverty; and a determined scientific investigation to catalogue existing species in order to understand how best to preserve them.

    My biggest worry here has to do with Southgate’s apparent optimism about what large-scale human management of the natural world can accomplish. Preserving species threatened by anthropogenic extinction makes perfect sense to me, as does preserving existing wilderness areas to the greatest extent possible. But can we rely on the comprehensiveness of our understanding and the purity of our intentions to micro-manage competition between species in the wild?

    This may stem from a difference in theological opinion: I’m less confident than Southgate seems that we can unambiguously enact the possibilities for transformed ways of living made available by the death and resurrection of Jesus. We remain, in other words, simul justus et peccator, and I think our persistent fallibility and self-serving tendencies need to be taken into account when considering such ambitious schemes. That said, it’s clear we have a mandate to reduce our impact on the natural world to make room for the species that we threaten to crowd out. It may be that we can do far more good this way than by trying to bring to an end a fundamental process of natural selection.

    I’ve probably got one, maybe two, more posts before I wrap up this series.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 7: The (vegetarian) restaurant at the end of the universe

    We saw in the previous post that Southgate thinks humans should play an active role in “healing” the creation by ameliorating some of the negative effects of the evolutionary process. And we’ve also seen that chief among those effects, in his view, are the problem of animal suffering and the problem of extinction.

    Turning to matters of practice, he discusses our relationship with the animals we raise for food and the question of what our response should be to the extinction of species. In this post I’ll discuss the first issue, leaving the discussion of extinction for the next one.

    With respect to food animals, Southgate considers Andrew Linzey’s proposal for what Southgate calls “eschatological vegetarianism.” In Linzey’s view, animals have God-given rights (he calls them “theos-rights”) to live lives according to their kind. Further, he argues that vegetarianism is a way of living in anticipation of God’s peaceable kingdom where there will be no more killing or exploitation between species.

    Southgate reads Linzey as saying that predation is inherently evil and due to the fall of creation, but I’m not sure this is entirely fair. Linzey does flirt with the idea of the cosmic fall, but he allows that the story of the fall may be an imaginative picture that gives us hints of what a redeemed creation will look like, but does not necessarily depict an actual historical state of affairs. (See, for example, the discussion in chapter 3 of his Animal Gospel where he talks in terms of an “unfinished” creation; Linzey seems rather close to Southgate’s own position here.)

    That said, Soutgate agrees with Linzey that the biblical vision of a redeemed creation also condemns many of our current practices toward animals, in farming, science, and industry:

    […] the great proportion of current killing of animals is not reverent but casual, the final act in a relationship with confined animals who know no freedom to be themselves, or healthy relationships either with each other or their human owners. And “owners” is the key word here, because much of this problem stems from the reduction of animal nature to a mere commodity, which in its rearing and killing alike must be processed as cheaply as possible into products. (p. 118)

    However, Southgate thinks that some forms of farming–of the pastoral, free-range variety–can create a flourishing life for animals and genuine community between animals and humans. If we were to stop breeding these animals for food, he contends, this valuable form of community would disappear. He’s therefore unwilling to categorically deny that killing of animals for food can sometimes be done reverently.

    Nevertheless, he recognizes that vegetarianism might still be a sign of kenosis, a self-limiting for the sake of the other. In particular, he says, Christians might feel called to abstain from meat that has been “sacrificed” to the idols of mechanized efficiency and profit that our factory farming system serves, and to avoid animal flesh that wasn’t humanely raised and slaughtered (which would be nearly all of it).

    Southgate’s and Linzey’s positions actually seem rather close here. Both oppose the practices of factory farming and would see free-range alternatives as vastly superior. Moreover, Linzey acknowledges that there are people living today who have to eat meat to survive. Where they may differ is in evaluating the goods of pastoral farming–the form of community it makes possible–and whether that good justifies rearing animals for slaughter when doing so isn’t required for human survival and flourishing. It’s also far from clear whether a large-scale shift to humane animal husbandry could meet current (and future) demand, especially in the context of the current environmental situation, in which case vegetarianism might be embraced by some as a special vocation, even if not a duty.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 6: Priests of creation

    Having offered an account of why God permits the suffering and frustated lives of so many non-human animals, Southgate turns to the question of what role humans might play in alleviating their plight.

    Key to his understanding once again is the notion of creation in travail, or “groaning.” Creation is good, but it’s destined to be redeemed, to be made into something better.

    Southgate’s touchstone biblical passage is from Romans 8:

    I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (vv. 18-23, NRSV)

    Southgate suggests that we can understand “futility” here as the evolutionary process with its attendant death, suffering, and frustration. Yet this process has led to the incarnation of the Son of God and the new age that his dying and rising inagurates. New possibilities for transformed living have been made available, and humanity is called to participate in God’s redeeming work.

    In light of this, Southgate goes on to consider what role humanity has with respect to the rest of creation and non-human animals in particular. Human beings can’t bring in the eschaton–that’s God’s job–but they can anticipate it to some extent and live as signs of the dawning age. And this includes “having some part in the healing of the evolutionary process” (p. 96).

    What does this mean, specifically? Southgate suggests that humanity actually has several different roles in respect to creation:

  • First, we are responsible for the well-being of the entire biosphere, simply because our actions can affect and profoundly change it (as in the case of climate change). So, we’re called to preserve the biosphere’s ability to support and nourish a wide diversity of life.
  • Second, we are called to make room for wilderness, for parts of the Earth that serve no utilitarian human purpose. These serve as a reminder that creation doesn’t exist solely for our sake and that other creatures have a right to live flourishing lives in our shared world.
  • Third, we need to find ways of living with our fellow creatures that are respectful of their God-given natures and existence. Our occupation of much of the Earth’s surface requires us to live alongside with–and make use of–our fellow creatures, but this isn’t a license for exploitation. Southgate quotes Wendell Berry: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such a desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want” (quoted on p. 106).

    • Southgate proposes two ethical concepts to illuminate these duties: ethical kenosis and priesthood. Ethical kenosis means just what it sounds like–a kind of self-limitation; we have to limit our own desires and will to mastery to make room for the flourishing of the rest of creation. This includes

  • kenosis of aspiration–or the desire to grasp at a role for ourselves that fails to respect other creatures;
  • kenosis of appetite–our seemingly bottomless desire for the good things of this world; and realtedly
  • kenosis of acquisitiveness–our desire for the material trappings of life (see pp. 101-102).

    • Priesthood is a way of understanding our role in God’s world that stands somewhere between anthropocentric views of creation as existing solely for humanity’s sake and the radically egalitarian perspective of “deep ecology” that sees humans as merely one species among others.

    Against the second view, Southgate points out that humans are the de facto stewards of creation simply in virtue of our ability to understand and affect the workings of nature, and that, contrary to deep ecologists, the workings of nature can’t provide us with ethical prescriptions.

    While the notion of priesthood doesn’t offer any neat ethical prescriptions, it does suggest some broad themes in our relation to the non-human creation (Southgate is drawing here particularly on Eastern Orthodox theology):

  • Humans can reshape the world in certain ways, through agriculture, culture, scientific understanding.
  • Humans can bless creation and offer it back to God in contemplation and worship.
  • Humans can sacrificially offer themselves for the good of creation.

    • There is a tension here between a more passive and activist stances. To the extent that creation is good, we receive it and contemplate it with awe and thanksgiving. But to the extent that it is “groaning” we may be called to a more activist intervention in light of the norms of God’s promised new creation. In the next post I’ll discuss what Southgate thinks this might look like in particular cases.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • Peter J. Gomes on Colbert

    Video here. (HT: Chris)

    I saw him preach once at the Harvard chapel “lessons and carols” Christmas service. His preaching was much more full of Jesus than I expected a service at Harvard to be.

  • The Groaning of Creation 5: Heaven can wait

    As we saw in the previous post, Southgate affirms some kind of afterlife as an eschatological recompense for non-human animals who were deprived of the opportunity to flourish in this life, a strategy taken by many theodicies that focus on human suffering.

    But, as Southgate recognizes (and as we’ve discussed here before), “if an altered physics makes possible an altered and pain-free cosmos, why did God not create this in the first place?” (p. 90)

    His response is another variation on the “only way” argument–that such a process, full of suffering and frustration as it may be, was the only (or perhaps best) way available to God to create finite creaturely selves:

    We know that, in the physics with which we are familiar, self-organization–and hence the growth of complexity, and the origin of complex selves–depends on so-called dissipative processes, in turn based on the second law of thermodynamics. This is the way creaturely selves arise. Since this was the world the God of all creativity and all compassion chose for the creation of creatures, we must presume that this was the only type of world that would do for that process. In other words, our guess must be that though heaven can eternally preserve those selves, subsisting in suffering-free relationship, it could not give rise to them in the first place. (p. 90)

    I think there’s something to this if we specify that what we’re talking about are biological selves of the kind we’re familiar with. Creatures not embedded in a biosphere like ours, with similar evolutionary histories, would be radically different from life as we know it, assuming that it’s even possible. Animal selves (both human and non-human) are indelibly shaped by their embodiment, which is a function of this biospheric embeddedness and history. If God wanted to create selves like that, then it’s very difficult to see what other way was available.

    Still, Christian tradition, along with many others, has long held that there are finite selves who don’t require a physical biosphere–at least not one like ours–to exist. I’m talking, of course, about angels and other finite spirits that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have seen as intermediaries and messengers from God and fellow-citizens in God’s kingdom. If God can, as these traditions hold, create finite non-embodied spirits by fiat, then it was possible to bring creaturely selves into existence without the evolutionary process.

    So, a critic could maintain that a heaven populated by such never-embodied spirits who aren’t heirs to the frailty of flesh would be superior to one populated by creaturely selves brought into existence by a long evolutionary process with its attendant suffering and frustration.

    The only way to deflect this criticism that I can see is to maintain either 1) that God couldn’t create finite, non-embodied spirits (thus contradicting the tradition) or 2) that, even if God could create such never-embodied spirits, the specific goods of embodied creaturely selves outweigh the disvalues of the evolutionary process.

    I’m inclined to favor option 2, though, to put it mildly, it’s not clear how you would weigh up the relevant values and disvalues. That said, however, one line of thought suggests itself. It’s been said about the communion of saints that each saint reflects, in his or her own unique way, the glory of God. By analogy, then, we could say that each kind of embodied creature reflects in its own unique way, and perceives from its own unique perspective, that same glory.*

    To use an over-familiar metaphor, a universe of diverse kinds of creatures is like a stained glass window that refracts white light into different colors. Similarly, the multiplicity of creatures “refracts” God’s glory in ways that would be unavialable if there were far fewer, or even just one, kind of finite spirit in existence. Or, to revert to the terminology of an earlier post, the variety of species resemble, participate in, or give expression to different facets of the divine logos.

    Index of posts in this series is here.
    ——————————————————-
    *If memory serves–and it’s been a while–Leibniz says something along these lines: that each finite spirit (“monad”) is its own unique reflection of the divine being.

  • The Groaning of Creation 4: There’s a wideness in God’s mercy

    In Chapter 5, Southgate directly takes up the question of an afterlife for non-human animals. This is another main plank in his evolutionary theodicy, alongside the “only way” argument. Even given that the evolutionary process is necessary to give rise to the values of finite creatures, countless animals still lead lives best described in Hobbes’ terms–nasty, brutish, and short.

    An example Southgate returns to repeatedly is the pelican’s “insurance chick”–the “extra” chick that is hatched but which in most cases is pushed out of the nest by its sibling and subsequently ignored and left to perish by its parents. “Its ‘purpose’ is merely to ensure that one viable chick survives. It has only a 10 percent chance of fledging” (p. 46). This is an animal that has virtually no chance of living a flourishing life according to its kind, but is a byproduct of the process that gives rise to the possibility of flourishing life in the first place. What can be said, in terms of theodicy, for such victims of the evolutionary process?

    Southgate marshalls three general considerations for positing an afterlife for non-human animals:

  • Passages from the Bible that suggest a redeemed future for all creation, not just humanity
  • The Bible pictures humans themselves as existing in a deep relationship to the surrounding creation
  • God’s goodness suggests that the Lord in his infinite mercy would not condemn his beloved creatures to permanent frustration

    • Once again Southgate recognizes that he’s on speculative ground here; neither the Bible, nor tradition, nor reason provide knock-down arguments for animal heaven. And yet, taken together, these considerations provide, at the very least, hope that God will provide a chance at ultimate fulfillment for all God’s creatures.

    Southgate considers various versions of what eschatology for animals might consist of, such as species immortality vs. individual immortality and “objective” immortality in the mind of God vs. “subjective” immortality for individual creatures. He tentatively comes down on the side of some form of subjective, individual existence.

    Picking up on the previous discussion of creaturely self-transcendence, Southgate admits that heaven for animals might seem to require a radical transformation of their natures. “It is very hard to imagine any form of being a predator that nevertheless does not ‘hurt or destroy’ on the ‘holy mountain of God’” (p. 88). He suggests that predators and prey might enact a playful version of their relationship that doesn’t involve pain or death, but admits this is, again, sheer speculation.

    Nevertheless, he returns to his three lines of consideration for animal immortality: Biblical promises, the interrelatedness of humans and the rest of creation, and the goodness and mercy of God. We might add that it’s not much less difficult to imagine what heaven for humans will be like and how our natures and environment would have to be transformed to make it possible. For Christians, the hope for such immortality–or, better, resurrection–depends not on anything intrinsic to our natures, but on the faithfulness of God. Should we hope for anything less for our animal kin?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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