A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • More on +Rowan’s lecture

    Via Fr. Chris, an in-depth analysis and defense of the now-infamous Rowan Williams “sharia lecture” by Mike Higton, a theologian and scholar of Williams’ work. As Higton says in his brief summary:

    Despite everything you’ve heard and read, the most striking thing about Rowan Williams’ lecture is that he mounts a serious and impassioned defence of ‘Enlightenment values’.

    Fr. Chris also makes the following point that’s well worth considering:

    It is always interesting — frustrating, too — to observe how Muslims are criticized illegitimately for doing things that Christians seem to be called to in some ways as well. 1 Cor 6 seems to suggest that we Christians should also avoid bringing our legal disputes into the secular realm, solving them within the Church wherever possible. The Muslim system goes further than this, so the situations are not identical. But on the face of it, I don’t see the desire to adjudicate some claims within one’s faith community — especially where there are safeguards so no one is coerced to give up their basic human rights, an important caveat in Williams’ proposal — is illegitimate.

    P.S. See also Ross Douthat and Alan Jacobs for somewhat more critical, but still intelligent takes.

  • John Gray contra humanism

    Over the weekend I started reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Gray, a British political philosopher, has gone from being a free-market Thatcherite to a critic of global capitalism to a proponent of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. If there is a connecting thread here it’s Gray’s resolute opposition to utopianism of every kind, whether it’s communism and socialism, “global democratic capitalism,” or humanisitic progressivism. (In his latest book, Black Mass, he takes on neoconservatism.)

    Straw Dogs is somewhat loosely organized around the theme of human uniqueness. While Gray dismisses Christianity without devoting much argument to it, he reserves the majority of his scorn for post-Christian humanism. It’s cardinal error, he says, is that it wants to maintain an ideology of human uniqueness and progress which is completely undercut by the naturalistic and Darwinian foundations of secular thought. Humanists think that scientific progress will translate into progress in the moral and social spheres, but Gray demurs: “For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive” (p. 4).

    The problem as Gray sees it is that humanists aren’t naturalistic enough. They still maintain a view of human nature that is essentially Platonic and Christian: that we are defined by our possession of reason and free will and that these qualities allow us to take charge of our destiny as a species.

    Some of the more extreme versions of this hope envision us “transcending” our humanity, either by means of bio-engineering or artificial intelligence. However, Gray points out, whatever post-human forms of life we may engineer will inherit the “crooked timber” of their creators, since technology is deployed by frail humans. C. S. Lewis made the same point in The Abolition of Man when he said that “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means … the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

    On naturalistic, post-Darwinian premises, Gray contends, the idea of “the species” transcending its own limitations is abusrd. Moreover, technology is not deployed by disinterested philosopher-kings, but by a confused melange of human interests, some sordid and some noble. It’s just as likely to be used for destructive ends as for beneficial ones.

    Humanism, in other words, is still trying to live off the moral and metaphysical capital of Christendom. A thorough-going integration of the teachings of biology with our world view would lead us to see ourselves not as standing over nature, but as part of it. And an increasingly destructive part of it at that. Gray thinks it just as likely that humanity will face a major die-off as Gaia reasserts herself as that humanity will somehow “master” its environment:

    Darwin’s theory shows the truth of naturalism: we are animals like any other; our fate and that of the rest of life on Earth are the same. Yet, in an irony all the more exquisite because no one has noticed it, Darwinism is now the central prop of the humanist faith that we can transcend our animal natures and rule the Earth. (p. 31)

    The teachings of modern science – from Darwinian evolution to neuroscience – tend to show that human beings are actually far less free and less rational than we – influenced by our Christian heritage – would like to think. The only “salvation” possible, Gray thinks, is to recognize our status as one animal among many, as part of the natural world. Though Gray thinks that perhaps some of the illusions we have about ourselves are ineradicable.

    Though humanism is Gray’s main target, I think it’s worth thinking about what a proper Christian response would be to a view like his. He seems to think that Christian belief is necessarily fading for “modern” people, but I obviously think he dismisses it far too easily. Still, I think that Christian theology, even where it accepts the general outlines of the Darwinian picture, hasn’t yet fully absorbed it. For instance, can theology continue to maintain the sharp distinction between humanity and other creatures? What does theology do with the virtual certainty of the human race’s eventual extinction? How does it address the picture of human beings suggested by some science as far more conditioned by both biology and environment than many traditional theological anthropologies would have it?

  • Sane repetition

    I see that the Catholic webzine Godspy is up and running again (via Kevin Jones). One particular article I liked was blogger Eve Tushnet’s commendation of repetitive prayer. This hits home for me:

    In “falling back on” other people’s words I can admit that I can’t express myself very well, and I need help even to understand what I might want to say. Helplessness and a sense of terrible distance from God lend themselves naturally, I think, to these shy borrowings of others’ speech. (Jesus on the Cross uses the Psalmist’s words when He cries, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”)

    St. Josemaria Escriva touches on a similar theme in The Furrow, with added bite: “For those who use their intelligence and their study as a weapon, the Rosary is most effective, because this apparently monotonous way of beseeching Our Lady, as children do their mother, can destroy every seed of vainglory and pride.” So it isn’t only that the repeated prayers can help us when we already feel as weak and small as a child; it’s also that we need to put ourselves, voluntarily, in that state of spiritual littleness, overcoming our pride. It’s good to put aside our very own, special-snowflake words sometimes, and accept others’ words as an act of humility. The repetitions push us to recognize how much more there is in these humble words than we might initially realize. It’s good at times to pray patiently in a way we did not choose, and see what others’ practices can teach us.

    I notice that often when trying to pray “in my own words” I end up praying, not simply and directly, but in what I imagine to be “theologically correct” language, as though I’m trying to show off my knowledge and erudition to God. Which is, of course, completely ridiculous (not least because I don’t have much knowledge and erudition when it comes to theological matters).

    I’ve also found the Rosary in particular to be the best way for me to focus my prayers, not on my own needs, but on the great story of God’s love for us. By meditating on the Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries I sometimes find that my own needs (or more often wants) which seemed so pressing are put in their proper perspective. Such prayers focused on what Christians believe to be God’s own story help, I think, to orient the self to reality, rather than trying to manipulate reality in service to the self.

  • The Buddha and the Christ

    Here’s an interesting piece by a lapsed Catholic who studied Tibetan Buddhism and eventually found his way back to the Catholic Church. He discusses Tibet, and the many misconceptions Westerners have about it, as well as the differences between Buddhism and Christianity.

    Partly for personal reasons and partly out of curiosity I’ve been delving into the world of Buddhism a bit myself. Here are some books I’ve read over the last few weeks that I liked:

    Sitting: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation, by Diana St. Ruth

    Zen for Christians, by Kim Boykin

    Buddhism Plain and Simple, by Steve Hagen

    I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this, but trying to practice meditation daily has been a good discipline. And at the risk of becoming some kind of cheesy Western dilettante, cultivating an awareness in and of the present moment strikes me as a good thing to do, regardless of your religious beliefs.

  • Whose faith? Which rationality?

    In a comment to this post, Eric makes the valuable point that “reason” is not a univocal term. He points out that what some theologians are up to is trying to recover a richer notion of what reason is. He refers to Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address which called for a kind of “re-Hellenization” of our understanding of what reason does in contrast to the often dessicated account of reason offered by much modern (and post-modern) thought.

    Now, I think this is all to the good. There definitely is a strain in post-Enlightenment thought that has reduced reason to instrumental or scientific rationality, banishing everything else, such as religious and moral truth, to the realm of the subjective.

    However we understand reason though, we need to be careful not to smuggle our preferred conclusions into our definition of rationality. For instance, should reason be defined as that which, when rightly used, leads us to God? This makes atheists irrational by definition, but that sounds like a word game or winning by definition. It’s more charitable to admit that different people, employing their powers of reason to the best of their ability, can come to different conclusions about God’s existence and other important questions of existence.

    I agree that there is a problem with certain modernist accounts of rationality to the extent that they restrict the category of knowledge to beliefs supported by a certain kind of evidence or method of inquiry – that appropriate to scientific work. This excludes certain modes of knowing – personal, experiential, intuitive, even mystical – a priori. A more comprehensive view of reason would see these as complementary ways of knowing, not inferior ones. But by their very nature these modes of knowing aren’t publicly demonstrative or easily verified intersubjectively. So, as a basis for deliberating about the common good they have problems.

    The challenge, if a pluralistic society is to find some kind of modus vivendi, is to locate an overlapping consensus on the conditions for a relatively decent social order. To say that Christians should be in the public sphere “as Christians,” as Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, leaves unclear what it means for them to be there as Christians alongside non-Christians. Should Christians seek to embody their convictions about what’s right in the law, to bring it into conformity with God’s law, as Mike Huckabee says? Or should they take a strict policy of non-involvement with the structures of government?

    I sometimes think that this is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one. Personally, I often find I have more in common politically with my some of my secular friends than many of my co-religionists. Indeed, I have little difficulty finding common ground with them on a whole host of issues. Does this mean that my political views are insufficiently informed by my religion? Maybe. But it could also be that religious belief under-determines political belief by its very nature. After all, I’m hardly the first person to observe that the line from Christian doctrine and moral principles to concrete policy prescriptions is hardly a short or straight one.

    This brings up another, often unappreciated, fact: we talk all too easily about “the” Christian tradition or “the” Christian narrative. But there is no single, coherent, uncontested Christian narrative. The Christian tradition is an ongoing conversation or argument, sometimes a bloody one. In a very important sense it’s highly misleading to think in terms of “Christians” being aligned with or in conflict with “non-Christians” or “secularism.” There simply is no unified Christian community or perspective on society. This may be a tragedy or a blessing depending on your point of view, but it’s a fact that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

    I guess what I’m saying is that however we understand reason, it’s not going to guarantee unanimity on the ordering of our public life. In fact, one of the most important conditions of a peaceful and liberal society is that those in the minority – who, after the votes are counted, still dissent – can count on their rights being respected and that unanimous agreement isn’t a necessary condition for social peace. The same need is present in the church, where we see that even shared theological premises don’t automatically generate agreement on contentious issues.

    I’m not pretending to have resolved the issue: it’s an open question whether we can continue to get along and seek the common good while maintaining divergent conceptions of the good. But this may be a problem that’s never “solved” once and for all – it may not be a theoretical solution that we need, but the virtues of civility, charity, and humility required to travel alongside those very different from ourselves.

  • Faith, rationality and the common good

    Fr. Chris has a good post defending Jeffrey Stout from Christian neo-traditionalist critiques. I’m no expert on Stout, but I think I’m overall more sympathetic to what I take to be Stout’s side in this debate.

    Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but I am deeply skeptical about this idea of replacing a shared rationality with appeals to particular “narratives” or “socio-cultural traditions.” And this is not, in my view, a sheerly “secular” or “liberal” view: there is a long theological tradition which holds that the logos that became incarnate in Jesus is also the principle of intelligibility in the universe which is, in principle, accessible to all people. And this shared participation in the logos allows all of us to discern something of the true and good.

    Each tradition, I would suggest, discerns some aspects of the logos, but at the same time “we see through a glass darkly” which mandates a degree of humility in our judgments about the good. It’s not as though we have a “tradition-free” vantage point which gives us access to pure rationality, but that we each start in a particular place, but seek to find common standards for making judgments about the good.

    Keith Ward makes a similar point in discussing Karl Barth’s “Nein!” to natural theology:

    Barth accepted the pluralist view that various competing worldviews can be equally rational or justifiable to their respective adherents, but made the invalid inference that no reasons can be given for accepting a particular revelation. He was right to think that the giving of reasons is very largely an ‘internal’ matter of exhibiting the coherence and integration of your own scheme of beliefs. But he was mistaken in denying that there could be a common basis of human knowledge and experience to which your belief-scheme needs to be related, with varying degrees of plausibility. All of us speak from a specific viewpoint, but we have the best chance of approaching truth when we take fully into account the viewpoints of others on what is, after all, the same reality. (Ward, Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 195)

    This is the core problem as I see it with certain “postmodern” approaches to Christian belief. Yes, you can make it appear that any worldview is as justifiable as any other if you see them as employing incommensurable and competing “rationalities.” However, once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially undermined any claim for your belief-system to be true. After all, if rationality is sheerly up for grabs, what reason do you have for thinking that your worldview gets at the truth any better than your neighbor’s?

    A better starting point – and one that I would argue is theologically sounder – is to assume that all human beings have, in virtue of their innate cognitive abilities, the ability to grasp at least some part of the truth about reality. Now, Christians believe that they have been given a particular insight into the nature of that reality by God’s self-revelation in the history of Israel and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but this doesn’t necessarily cancel out other insights or knowledge. Given that God is both creator and redeemer, we ought to expect the opposite: that people’s natural God-given capabilities for knowledge will yield genuine insights.

    This ought to encourage a great deal of cooperation and even consensus in thinking about the common good while at the same time allowing Christians (and others) to offer their own distinctive perspectives on that good. I agree what I take to be Stout’s view that, for the most part, whatever consensus is achieved will be ad hoc and empirical, rather than deriving from a priori universal truths embedded in rationality as such, but Christians in particular should expect there to be a great deal of overlap considering that we all share a God-given ability to reason, learn about the world, and reflect upon the good.

  • O brave new world!

    At the First Things sort-of-blog Jason Byassee reviews what sounds like a fascinating book from Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall called Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction which, in Byassee’s words “aims to show that the powerful narrative of ‘progress’ in twentieth-century American Protestantism is linked indelibly with eugenics, abortion, Hiroshima, racism, sexism, psychotropic drugs for kids, and the triumph of a neoliberal economics that grinds the heads of the poor….”

    The debate about genetic manipulation, selective abortion and other kinds of bio-engineering have taken something of a back seat in recent years to what have seemed like more pressing issues, but this is going to be with us for a long time as technology continues to raise new questions. Byassee wonders – with good reason I think – whether the mainline churches in particular have the theological spine left to look critically at the presumption in favor of “progress” and our desire to exercise ever greater control over natural processes.

  • Ash Wednesday ruminations

    I managed to make it to church this afternoon for the service of Communion and the Imposition of Ashes. And it occurred to me that the cyclical nature of the liturgical year is a good way of driving home the Lutheran insight that we’re always beginning anew and always utterly dependent on God’s grace. In his explanation of baptism in his Small Catechism Luther writes:

    [Baptism] signifies that the old creature in us with all sins and evil desires is to be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance, and on the other hand that daily a new person is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.

    Characteristic of the Lutheran love of paradox, this is a fine encapsulation of the insight that we remain throughout our earthly lives sinners and saints at one and the same time (simul justus et peccator). Lutherans have traditionally been more skeptical than some other Christians of the prospects for a linear moral and spiritual progress. And yet, at the same time, we’ve already “arrived” in the sense that there is nothing we can add to what God has already given us. (Compare this to the Buddhist notion that we are at the same time already enlightened and yet woefully unaware of our own Buddha-nature.)

    And if, as Luther says, we have to return to the source of our justification and repent of our sins daily, how much more is it true that at the beginning of Lent we should take stock of where we are and of how far short we fall. But this is also a heartening message if, like me, you find that you often don’t seem to be “progressing” in your spiritual life.

    Without fail, every time I decide I’m going to “get serious” about my faith by forming habits of prayer and spiritual reading, or become “more intentional” about performing regular acts of charity, and other disciplines it’s only a matter of time before things start to fall off. Inevitably life seems to intrude and I just can’t seem to “make time” for these things. Of course, if I was honest I would recognize that the reason I can’t make time for them is because I don’t want to – I prioritize other things in my life.

    But Lent is where we come around, once again, to that time in the Christian year where we’re brought face to face with our failings but also with God’s promise to be merciful and to draw us more fully into the divine life. It’s a potential fresh start every year, just as, for Luther, every day is a potential fresh start as we recall our baptism and try to live into it. At least, I hope that’s right, or else I’m sunk.

  • Trendy would-be theologians, take heed!

    Postmodernism is sooo 1990’s.

  • What kind of religious “center”?

    Bill McKibben reviews two books on Christianity: one by Harvard preacher Peter Gomes, and the other a book from the Barna Institute, the Gallup of evangelical Protestantism, reporting on young people’s perceptions of Christianity.

    Gomes is an interesting guy: a black, old-school New England conservative, Anglophile Baptist minister who happens to be gay. He’s widely regarded as one of America’s best preachers and has published popular collections of sermons as well as a book on the Bible. (I once heard him preach at a Christmas “Carols and Lessons” service in Harvard Memorial Church.)

    In McKibben’s telling, Gomes’ new book focuses on the Gospel texts and seeks to recover the scandalous and countercultural message of Jesus from religious accretions. Jesus, Gomes writes, “came preaching not himself but something to which he himself pointed, and in our zeal to crown him as the content of our preaching, most of us have failed to give due deference to the content of his preaching.”

    McKibben elaborates:

    That preaching, in Gomes’s telling, has several important dimensions. First, it is a doctrine of reversal — of the poor lifted up and the rich laid low. It’s not just that the meek will inherit the earth, a sweet enough sentiment, but that the powerful will lose it. In Jesus’ words, “How terrible for you who are rich now; you have had your easy life; How terrible for you who are full now; you will go hungry!” Jesus takes sides, and usually he is found on the side of the oppressed and unlucky: “The good news was for those who had no good news,” writes Gomes, sounding much like the Catholic liberation theologians of late-twentieth-century South America, now largely suppressed by Rome, who spoke often of Jesus’ “preferential option for the poor.” For the rest of us, we are instructed to love our enemies, to practice the Golden Rule, “love those beyond our comfort zone, and be merciful to others as we hope God will be merciful to us.”

    Turning to unChristian by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, we see a portrait of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 who have turned against a Christianity that they perceive as “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned,” “insensitive to others” and having a single-minded emphasis on conversion that’s irrelevant to their lives. “This is a brand of religion that, for all its market share, seems at the beginnings of a crisis.”

    McKibben sees signs of hope, however, in a cross-pollination of moderate evangelicalism and a revivified social gospel movement. He points to the National Association of Evangelicals’ statements on global warming, the work of Jim Wallis-type evangelicals, and the fact that even Rick Warren, the veritable poster boy for suburban mega-churches, has changed the focus of his ministry to addressing dire social needs like third world poverty. Further, McKibben thinks that someone like Peter Gomes, with an emphasis on the message of Jesus, can challenge the nascent moderate and center-left varieties of evangelicalism further in this direction, and in particular on its attitudes toward homosexuality.

    In general, I think the idea of a revitalized religious “center” is a good thing. Not in the sense of a restoration of the oldline quasi-establishment, but in the sense of a living alternative to ultra-conservative or socially comfortable brands of Christianity that have, until recently, been its chief public face in the U.S. The oddness of this situation is only highlighted by the fact that, for instance, in the UK evangelicals seem to be spread over a much broader portion of the political spectrum; the close identification between evangelical Christianity and the Right seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon in significant respects. (Compare, for instance, the views of “conservative” British evangelicals like N. T. Wright and John Stott on issues like debt relief, war, and globalization with their American counterparts.)

    However, I am wary of too pat a distinction between the “preaching about Jesus” and the “preaching of Jesus,” with the latter being preferred to the former. While recovering the challenging and countercultural message of Jesus is surely something American Christians need to do, there’s an opposite danger of ending up in the empty cul-de-sac of 19th and 20th century religious liberalism that reduced Jesus to a preacher of ethics and social reform while downplaying any supernatural claims about his status. This particular stream always ends up running into the sand for a very specific reason: if Jesus is merely a teacher of morals or social reform, once you’ve learned the lesson you don’t need the teacher any more. And, for that matter, once it becomes clear that these teachings are discernible by all people of good will, what does Christianity offer that’s distinctive?

    I think more recent biblical scholarship also reinforces the close identification, rather than separation, of the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. Once scholars have dropped certain progressivist assumptions from the 19th century they were able to see that in the preaching of Jesus one’s response to him was decisive for one’s standing in God’s kingdom. This doesn’t return us to an individualist pietism, since the kingdom is a social reality, but it’s a reality with Jesus at the center. (An overview of recent scholarship that I found helpful is Michael McClymond’s Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth.)

    My worry then is that, in its quest to be socially relevant, “neo”-evangelicalism may be in danger of repeating some of the mistakes of Protestant liberalism. In my view, a revitalized religious center has to hold together dogma and ethics, personal transformation and social reform, mysticism and ministry. If Christians have anything to offer the world it can only be because they think Jesus offers something that transcends (but also affects) politics or social reform. Interestingly, there seems to me to be a real thirst among younger mainliners for a recovery of the traditional spiritual practices of the church along with a recognition that the mainline has too often forsaken mystery, worship and holiness for political activism. And, no doubt, mainliners can learn a lot from the warm-hearted piety of evangelicals. A whole church will, to borrow a phrase from John Paul II, breathe with both lungs – those of the active and contemplative life.