A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • The religion of animals

    Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this very interesting article about animals and religion from the Martin Marty Center. One of the issues it raises is the upsurge of interest in the “religiosity” of animals:

    There are ancient precedents for the claim that nonhuman animals have a religious sensibility. Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) claimed that elephants, the animal “closest to man,” not only recognized the language of their homeland, obeyed orders, and remembered what they learned, but also had been seen “worshipping the sun and stars, and purifying [themselves] at the new moon, bathing in the river, and invoking the heavens.”

    Today, scholars such as Harvard’s Kimberley C. Patton provide theologically informed readings of many traditional claims about the religious awareness of other beings. Patton deals, for example, with “ways in which animals are believed to possess a unique awareness of holiness,” noting that “in many religious worlds…mutual intelligibility obtains between God and animals that exists outside of human perceptual ranges.” Assertions of a special relationship between animals and God are routinely dismissed in our human-centered world. But the increased attendance at Jigenen temple reflects that we are fascinated by our fellow creatures and the idea of their potential spirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.”

    The Bible certainly seems to suggest that animals have a relationship with God. It speaks repeatedly about the animals (along with the rest of creation) praising God, and God makes his covenant after the flood with human beings and animals. In fact, the biblical worldview in general seems to see human beings and animals as part of a single community, which is obviously closer to the view of modern science than to the Enlightenment-inspired view of human beings existing on one side of an unbridgeable gulf from “brute” creation. And just as we’ve come to see that most capacities once thought of as uniquely human have analogues and precedents in the animal kingdom, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find a religious sense among them. In fact, if, as Thomas Aquinas I think suggested, animals do by instinct what human beings have to freely choose to do, they may exist in a kind of pre-lapsarian state of grace and unity with God that we have divorced ourselves from.

  • Theology and piety

    Marvin echoes a call from Books & Culture‘s Jon Wilson for evangelicals (and, by extension, the rest of us) to get their eucharistic theology in order. Which is all to the good, but only half the battle, I think. Lutherans officially have a “high” eucharistic theology, but the practice at many churches hardly reinforces that. I had to learn most of my eucharistic piety from Anglicans.

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).

    Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time even though I was in a very different place, religiously speaking.

    Faith, for N., has two aspects, the trust aspect and the loyalty aspect. To have faith in something is to trust it as a source of our worth and well-being. But it is also to have loyalty to that thing, to ally ourselves with it and take it up as our cause.

    N. distinguishes “radical” monotheism from polytheism and henotheism. The latter term referred, originally, to the worship of one god, but a god who is recognized as one among several. This god might be a national or tribal deity, but isn’t identified with the universal lord and creator. It’s generally agreed, as far as I’m aware, that the OT scriptures exhibit a mix of henotheism and monotheism.

    But N. wants to use both polytheism and henotheism in a more extended sense to refer to the ways in which we invest our trust and loyalty. For instance, if my loyalties are divided among devotion to work, family, community, leisure, etc. without any unifying or ordering principle, then I am a functional polytheist.

    N. is more interested in modern forms of henotheism, however, both because forms of henotheism are more significant and because they often masquerade as monotheism. A classic case is when our ultimate loyalty is given to our country. Goodness as such is identified with what is good for the nation. And this is often draped in the clothing of civil religion. The cause of god is identified with the cause of our society. Henotheism always involves elevating the penultimate to the place of the ultimate.

    By contrast, radical monotheism identifies the ultimate principle of value with the ultimate principle of being. Giving our loyalty to God as understood by radical monotheism means recognizing God as the bestower of existence and of worth. It also involves making God’s cause our cause:

    For radical monotheism the value-center is neither closed society nor the principle of such a society but the principle of being itself; its reference is to no one reality among the many but to One beyond all the many, whence all the many derive their being, and by participation in which they exist. As faith, it is reliance on the source of all being for the significance of the self and of all that exists. It is the assurance that because I am, I am valued, and because you are, you are beloved, and because whatever is has being,therefore it is worthy of love. It is the confidence that whatever is, is good, because it exists as one thing among the many which all have their origin and their being in the One–the principle of being which is also the principle of value. In Him we live and move and have our being not only as existent but as worthy of existence and worthy in existence. It is not a relation to any finite, natural or supernatural, value-center that confers value on self and some of its companions in being, but it is the value relation to the One to whom all being is related. Monotheism is less than radical if it makes a distinction between the principle of being and the principle of value; so that while all being is acknowledged as absolutely dependent for existence on the One, only some beings are valued as having worth for it; or if, speaking in religious language, the Creator and the God of grace are not identified. (p. 32)

    God’s “cause” or project is nothing less than all being. N. strikes an impeccably Augustinian note when he says that, for the radical monotheist, being qua being is good. God calls all that is into existence and calls it good. And wills its flourishing.

    This is why radical monotheism qualifies all partial loyalties, at least when they threaten to displace the whole. Even putatively monotheistic faiths like Judaism and Christianity aren’t immune from henotheistic tendencies. A Christian tribalism that confines its concern to “the brethren” or an ecclesiasticism that comes close to identifying the church with God is a betrayal of the principle of radical monotheism:

    In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (p. 58 )

    The ethical implication of this radical faith, according to N., is to make the cause of all being our cause. Radical monotheism breaks down the barriers between the sacred and profane. Rather than there being “holy” places, objects, and classes of people are “secularized.” “When the principle of being is God–i.e., the object of trust and loyalty–then he alone is holy and ultimate [and] sacredness must be denied to any special being” and a “Puritan iconoclasm has ever accompanied the rise of radical faith” (p. 52). But the flip side of this iconoclasm is “the sanctification of all things”:

    Now every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness; every living thing, on earth, in the heavens, and in the waters is his creation and points in its existence toward him; the whole earth is filled with his glory; the infinity of space is his temple where all creation is summoned to silence before him. Here is the basis then not only of a transformed ethics, founded on the recognition that whatever is, is good, but of transformed piety or religion, founded on the realization that every being is holy. (pp. 52-3)

    One thing that struck me is how N. follows his own logic to its rather non-anthropocentric end; non-human creation has its own intrinsic non-utilitarian value:

    How difficult the monotheistic reorganization of the sense of the holy is, the history of Western organized religion makes plain. In it we encounter ever new efforts to draw some new line of division between the holy and profane. A holy church is separated from a secular world; a sacred priesthood from an unhallowed laity; a holy history of salvation from the unsanctified course of human events; the sacredness of human personality, or of life, is maintained along with the acceptance of a purely utilitiarian valuation of animal existence or nonliving being. (p.53)

    N.’s Augustinian outlook provides a foundation for a theocentric worldview. As Christopher has recently blogged, Christianity is still stuck much of the time in an anthropocentric perspective, seeing God’s concern aimed primarily at us. For N. this would just be another form of henotheism; God is being used to prop up the human project.

    However, what N. doesn’t provide (which is perhaps understandable given the brevity of this book) is a criterion for ranking the importance of the needs of different kinds of beings. Are we too embrace a flat egalitarianism where all existents have the same value? That doesn’t seem right. And yet, any hierarchical ordering threatens to bring anthropocentrism in through the back door.

    What I’m inclined to say is that ethics have to be grounded in the nature of different beings and the needs that arise from those natures, along with their relationships with other beings. What’s good for x is what x needs to flourish as the kind of being it is.

    For instance, it’s sometimes absurdly claimed that proponents of animal rights want animals to have the same rights as human beings. But a right to vote or to an education, say, isn’t going to do a pig much good. Rather, what a pig needs arises out of her nature: room to root around, be social, to nest, and nurture offspring. If we are depriving our fellow creatures of the opportunity to express their essential natures, then that’s a good sign that we’ve overstepped the bounds of what we truly need to flourish. To attend to all being, then, doesn’t require us to reduce everything to the same level, but it may require us to curtail our own desires when they threaten the essential needs of other creatures.

    The most appealing version of this vision that I’ve come across is Stephen R. L. Clark’s “cosmic democracy,” where each kind of creature is provided with sufficient space to thrive. But this presupposes a couple of things, first that the world is set up in such a way to permit this (which is, in part, a question about providence) and second, and more pressing, that human beings can learn to see themselves as one species among many.

  • Surprisingly relevant

    H. Richard Niebuhr on what Karl Barth called “culture Protestantism”:

    How often the Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism–by which cultural Protestantism is meant–is itself an expression of cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate. Not all though many of these antiliberals show a greater concern for conserving the cosmological and biological notions of older cultures than for the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The test of loyalty to him is found in the acceptance of old cultural ideas about the manner of creation and the earth’s destruction. More significant is the fact that the mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents. The movement that identifies obedience to Jesus Christ with the practices of prohibition, and with the maintenance of early American social organization, is a type of cultural Christianity; though the culture it seeks to conserve differs from that which its rivals honor. The same thing is true of the Marxian-Christian criticism of the “bourgeois Christianity” of democratic and individualistic liberalism. Again, Roman Catholic reaction against the Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems often to be animated by a desire to return to the culture of the thirteenth; to the religious, economic, and political institutions and to the philosophical ideas of another civilization than ours. In so far as the contemporary attack on Culture-Protestantism is carried on in this way, it is a family quarrel between folk who are in essential agreement on the main point; namely, that Christ is the Christ of culture, and that man’s greatest task is to maintain his best culture. Nothing in the Christian movement is so similar to cultural Protestantism as is cultural Catholicism, nothing more akin to German Christianity than American Christianity, or more like a church of the middle class than a workers’ church. The terms differ, but the logic is always the same: Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy. (Christ and Culture, pp. 102-3)

    It’s not hard to think of several contemporary parallels here: the fundamentalist yearning for a “Christian America,” the reduction of Christian distinctives to left-wing peace and justice sloganeering, or the reactionary Christian urge to defend “Western Civilization” at all costs (against immigrants, Muslims, etc.). Niebuhr would have no trouble spotting these as variants of the “Christ of culture” theme.

  • Big questions

    ATR favorite Keith Ward also has a new book out – The Big Questions in Science and Religion. You can read a lenghty excerpt here (I haven’t read the book or the excerpt yet).

    I’m guessing it will cover a lot of the same ground as his recent Pascal’s Fire, though it looks like this one takes a more “comparative religions” approach.

  • Northcott’s A Moral Climate

    Michael Northcott, a Scottish theologian, has a new book out on theological ethics and climate change. Northcott previously wrote a good book on the environment and Christian ethics, and this new one got a glowing write up in the Christian Century by Duke University chaplain Sam Wells. I’ve already ordered the book; it looks like it’s right up my alley: theology of creation, environmentalism, political economy, and animal rights thrown in for good measure.

  • If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

    Christopher speculates a bit about life after death. I’ve never understood or been much interested in a version of Christianity that omits hope in the resurrection. After all – isn’t the entire religion founded on the belief that a man was raised from the dead? Christopher’s both/and approach seems eminently reasonable to me.

  • Ecclesiology

    The blog Inhabitatio Dei has a post describing a typology of ecclesiology, laid out along a “high-low” axis and a “strong-weak” axis:

    High Church Ecclesiology: High view of church history and tradition. Emphasizes the liturgy and above all the Eucharist. Churches are generally structured episcopally (i.e. through a hierarchy of bishops who stand in communion with each other). Emphasizes salvation as membership in the church through participation in the sacraments. Generally holds to infant baptism. Close connection between baptism and initiation into the broad community of faith.

    Low Church Ecclesiology: Generally suspicious of history and tradition. Emphasizes the Bible as the church’s ultimate authority and preaching is more central then the Eucharist or the liturgy. Churches tend to be structured congregationally (i.e. governed by the local congregation itself or through one or more elders appointed by congregations). Emphasizes salvation as the subjective appropriation and confession of faith in Christ. Generally holds to believers’ baptism. Close connection between salvation, baptism, and committed discipleship in community.

    Strong Ecclesiology: Holds a high view of the role of the church in the economy of salvation. Understands that the church is the means by which God is at work in the world. A strong view of the church as the ongoing embodied presence of Christ in the world. The church participates in the mission of God to redeem the world. Membership in the visible church community is indispensable to Christian life and the shape of Christian salvation.

    Weak Ecclesiology: Holds a humble and limited view of God’s role for the church in his plan of salvation. The church exists to strengthen and instruct the believer and to witness to God’s work of salvation that takes place solely through God’s action. The church does not participate in God’s action, but points away from itself to God’s action outside of human effort. The emphasis is on the invisible church, the universal body of all people who believe in Christ throughout the world. All Christians are members of this church and that is what is primary. Membership in a local congregation is for edification and growth, but is not central to salvation.

    I’m definitely high-church, but I’m not happy with the characterization of either strong or weak ecclessiology put forth here. For instance, I would definitely agree that the church is a means by which God is at work in the world, maybe even the primary means, but not that it’s the only means. Same goes for the church as the presence of Christ: I wouldn’t say the church is the embodied presence of Christ, but I definitely think the church is a sign of that presence.

    In other words, I tend to see the church in quasi-sacramental terms: it’s the visible sign of God’s presence and activity in the world, but not in such a way that it can lay exclusive claim to them. Or, to put a Lutheran spin on it, the church is the place where the proclamation of God’s grace takes place, even though that grace is, in itself, an omni-present reality. The proclamation is necessary because it’s how faith is created in us, but it’s not constitutive of God’s love for us. What I want to avoid is, on the one hand, a purely contractual model of the church where it’s entirely a human creation, and on the other a “transactional” model where what counts is getting hooked in to the metaphysical mojo that only the church can dispense. Yet another metaphor: the church is an outcropping of the age to come, a sign of the invisible made visible.

  • Niebuhr on the Ascension (sort of)

    I found this essay by H. Richard Niebuhr and it has some good stuff to say about the Ascension and the whole idea of Jesus being elevated to authority above all the powers of the world:

    What has happened is that this forsaken and rejected Servant of God has been given a name above every name among us. What has happened is that he has entered into the life of the human world as the most persistent of rulers, the most inescapable of companions. His eyes are still upon us when we deny him; he is forever warning us about our ambitions to be great; he is always there teaching us to pray. He is built into the structure of our conscience, not so that we cannot offend against him, but so that it is he who is offended in our offenses. He is present with his wound and in his rejection in all the companions whom in our great disloyalty we make the victims of our distrust of God and our diseased loyalties.

    The ocassion for finding it is that I’m finally getting around to reading Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and was looking for a little background. I hope to have some thoughts on the book up sometime soonish.

  • Thoughts about the Ascension and other faiths

    Today at church we observed the feast of the Ascension and our pastor preached what I thought was a fine sermon. His message, in essence, was that the Ascension is important because it shows that the love that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is affirmed to be the sovereign force over all of creation. Because Jesus, as Paul says in the reading from Ephesians is now seated “above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come,” we know that the self-giving love that characterized his life and ministry also characterizes reality at its deepest level.

    Though it didn’t come up in the sermon, this got me to thinking that the Ascension (and the related feast of Christ the King) presents a stumbling block to any thoroughgoing religious pluralism. It’s one thing to affirm that Jesus is our way to the divine, a way that we have found helpful. It’s another to affirm that Jesus – the crucified and risen one – is the sovereign lord of all creation. This implies that those who don’t affirm this are wrong about a fundamental fact of reality.

    This doesn’t mean, though, that adherents of other faiths can’t perceive the power of the kind of love that Jesus embodied and, seeing it, give their allegiance to it. In fact, if they do that, they’re acting in alignment with what Christians believe to be the deepest truth about reality. Just as many theologians, including early church fathers like Justin Martyr, believed that non-Christians could have access to the logos that Christians believe was incarnate in Jesus, we can say that those who follow this path of love are in touch with the same reality that we believe was manifested in Jesus’ life and which reigns supreme over all lesser powers.