A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • 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.

  • Barth, Yoder, and the problem of war

    I assume that most readers of this blog also read Marvin’s site regularly, but in case you don’t, you should really check out his current series on Karl Barth and war:

    Part 1
    Part 2
    Part 3
    Part 4
    Part 5

    With more to come, including a “Yoderian” response to Barth’s position.

    See here for some brief thoughts of my own on J. H. Yoder’s critique of Barth.

  • MLK and non-violence

    Given how Martin Luther King Jr. has become a kind of American plaster saint that politicians of all stripes routinely genuflect toward, it’s easy to forget how radical his message was:

    As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement–we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press! (emphasis added)

    More here (via Hit and Run).

    Of all the people currently running for president, who’s really willing to embrace this message?

  • Lutherans and lay presidency

    The case for it. LutherPunk and Fr. Chris comment.

    I think there are good reasons to have only ordained persons presiding at the Lord’s Supper. However, in extreme cases I don’t see any insuperable theological objection to a lay person doing it. There’s a remark of Luther (perhaps apocryphal) that in emergencies “even” a woman or child could administer the sacrament. The idea that anyone could, in principle, administer sacraments would seem to follow in a fairly straightforward way from the priesthood of all believers. Naturally, what counts as an extreme case is a matter of debate.

  • Avery Dulles: Who Can Be Saved?

    Haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but I might have something to say about it later.

  • The end of the world as we know it (6): animals

    (Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian presuppositions, sharply divided the world into spiritual and material realms, with only human beings partaking of the former. Off the top of my head I can think of a few exceptions: John Wesley addressed the issue, as did C. S. Lewis. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the mainstream view has been that only human beings have an eternal destiny, either because they are specially loved by God or because only they possess immortal souls.

    Polkinghorne doesn’t spend much time discussing animals, but they do have a role to play in his scheme of cosmic redemption. He balks at the notion that “every dinosaur that ever lived, let alone the vast multitude of bacteria … will each have its own individual eschatological future” (p. 122). But he does allow that representatives of each kind of animal will exist in the world to come, preserving the type if not each token. He also speculates that pets, “who could be thought to have acquired enhanced individual status through their interactions with humans,” might have a share in the new creation. This is similar to a suggestion made by Lewis, who argued that, in bonding with their human masters, pets may acquire a “self” that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

    The question of animal “selfhood” is obviously a vexed one. Some philosophers and theologians have suggested that animals don’t have selves because they lack self-awareness. But this seems wrong: just because they aren’t self-aware (assuming they aren’t) doesn’t mean they don’t have selves to be aware of. The central question, it seems to me is whether animals posses some measure of individuality and interiority. And it seems clear that they do. Modern science indicates that there is a continuity between humans and other animals in capacity for feeling and thought. This isn’t to deny that human beings have capacities that animals lack, merely to say that many animals are in fact “subjects of a life” as Tom Regan puts it. The fact of individual personality among animals is obvious to anyone with a pet, and only dogmatic materialists and behaviorists deny that animals experience sensations like pain and pleasure. The ancients were actually wiser than some moderns here: they acknowledged that animals had souls that gave them the power of self-motion, feeling, and even a measure of thinking.

    It seems at least possible, then, that God, if he wished, could preserve animal “selves” in existence beyond death. Certainly if a human soul consists of an “information bearing pattern” similar patterns would exist in the case of non-human animals. But would God have reason to do so? Why would God wish to provide post-morterm existence to individual animals? One reason is simply that God loves all things in his creation:

    For you love all things that exist,
    and detest none of the things that you have made,
    for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.
    How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?
    Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?
    You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. (Wisdom of Solomon, 11: 24-26)

    A related consideration is the question of animal theodicy. Will there be some recompense for the animals who have suffered through no moral fault of their own? And would a world built on such enormous suffering be worth it without restoration for the victims? It would be presumptuous to insist that God has to resurrect individual animals, but at the same time we can hope that the wideness of God’s mercy might make room in his kingdom for all creatures.

  • The end of the world as we know it (5): New creation

    At the end of the previous post I wrote that Polkinghorne sees embodiment as essential to what it means to be human, partly because of the interrelatedness that is an intrinsic feature of all things. A self existing in isolation is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least living an extremely diminished and attenuated life. Consequently, the biblical image of the “new creation” points toward a very different state of affairs than the ethereal bodiless idea of heaven we sometimes imagine.

    Polkinghorne thus suggests “a destiny for the whole universe beyond its death” (p. 113). To create a suitable environment for a resurrected humanity, God will transform the entire physical cosmos into a new form. Just as the matter of Jesus’ dead body was transmuted into the stuff of his glorified risen body, so the humble material of the cosmos will be taken up into an everlasting destiny.

    Just as the matter of our present universe possesses specific properties that allow for the development of life, the matter of the new creation will be specially suited to life there. And moreover, the entire cosmos will be “transparent” to the divine presence: “The new creation will be wholly sacramental, suffused with the presence of the life of God” (p. 115). And the “laws” of this new universe will, unlike our present world, be adapted to unending life rather than intrinsically involving the cycle of life and death.

    Polkinghorne insists that there will be both continuity and discontinuity between the old and new creations, in keeping with his central principle. The new creation is not another creation ex nihilo, but a redemptive act that draws the new out of the old. The old creation provides the “raw material” for the new creation, one that will continue to be constituted (though in a new way) by space, time and matter. Polkinghorne denies that the new creation will be an eternal (timeless) state of being; instead, he says following Gregory of Nyssa, we will spend everlasting ages moving more and more deeply into the inexhaustible mystery of the divine nature.

    One of the consequences of Polkinghorne’s view that the old creation is, in some sense, the raw material of the new is that it gives some account of why God created this world in the first place:

    The pressing question of why the Creator brought into being this vale of tears if it is the case that God can eventually create a world that is free from suffering, here finds its answer. God’s total creative intent is seen to be intrinsically a two-step process: first the old creation, allowed to explore and realise its potentiality at some metaphysical distance from its Creator; then the redeemed new creation which, through the Cosmic Christ, is brought into a freely embraced and intimate relationship with the life of God. (p. 116)

    What makes this an explanation of the sufferings of the present world? The idea seems to be that, in order to allow creation to develop freely, God had to hide, or at least dim, the divine presence. This allowed creaturely freedom, but also introduced the possibility of sin. At the same time, the laws that govern the development of the cosmos seem to intrinsically involve the possibility of suffering. “Its unfolding process develops within the ‘space’ that God has given it, within which it is allowed to be itself” (p. 114).

    This is a question we’ve tackled here before: is suffering an intrinsic feature of life in this universe because of the constitution of the laws that govern it? Or is the world as we experience it fallen from a primeval state of perfection? Polkinghorne opts for the first answer, but with the proviso that the universe is on its way to being something different. His proposal has the virtue of investing what we do here and now with a certain importance: there are aspects of the present world that will persist in the world to come. If we foster beauty, harmony, and excellence in this world, we can hope that they will be drawn up into the next and reflect the divine glory.