A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • The end of the world as we know it (4): Human nature

    As we’ve seen, Polkinghorne is developing an eschatological vision that takes the findings of modern cosmology seriously, but is consonant with the deepest insights of the biblical tradition. The key principles are: that any hope for life beyond this world must be rooted in God’s faithfulness and that the shape of this hope will be determined by the kind of discontinuity-in-continuity. This is displayed preeminently in the resurrection of Jesus.

    Polkinghorne believes that the view of human nature that is most consistent with modern biology and neuroscience is one that sees human beings as integrated wholes rather than soul-body compounds. The language of “the soul” can be maintained, he thinks, but we should think of it as the “information-bearing pattern” which makes me the unique individual I am. Polkinghorne sees this as an updating of the traditional Thomistic-Aristotelian language of the soul as the “form” of the body. “It would be altogether too crude to say that the soul is the software running on the hardware of the body–for we have good reason to believe that human beings are very much more than ‘computers made of meat’–but that unsatisfactory image catches a little of what is being proposed” (p. 106).

    Polkinghorne’s suggestion, then, is that our destiny beyond death consists of God “re-embodying” our “information-bearing pattern” in a new form:

    It is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is a human being could be held in the divine memory after that person’s death. Such a disembodied existence, even if located in the divine remembrance, would be less than fully human. It would be more like the Hebrew concept of shades in Sheol, though now a Sheol from which the Lord was not absent but, quite to the contrary, God was sustaining it. It is a further coherent hope, and one for which the resurrection of Jesus provides the foretaste and guarantee, that God in the eschatological future will re-embody this multitude of preserved information-bearing patterns in some new environment of God’s choosing. (p. 108)

    Polkinghorne addresses the objections that some philosophers have had to this notion of “re-embodiment” or “replication.” The concern is that such a replicated person living in the eschaton would not really be me, but merely a new person who resembled me with respect to certain psychological traits. This has sometimes been expressed by the hypothetical scenario in which two replicated individuals with the same “information pattern” are brought into existence – which one is the authentic “descendant” of the deceased person?

    Polkinghonrne argues that this is a pseudo-worry. “The answer is surely that only God has the power to effect such re-embodiment and divine consistency would never permit the duplication of a person” (p. 108). But this seems to me not to do justice to the objection. The problem isn’t that there’s any reason to believe that God would actually bring about such a state of affairs. It’s that the mere logical possibility of post-mortem “twins” shows that this kind of resemblance is an insufficient criterion for continuity of individual identity.

    It’s actually somewhat surprising that Polkinghorne invokes St. Thomas in trying to articulate the relation between body and soul. For, though Thomas certainly employs Aristotle’s “form/matter” terminology, he also clearly believed in a substantial soul that survives the death of the body. Whatever qualifications he makes, Thomas is clearly a kind of dualist. (Though Thomas is clear that a human soul without a body is fundamentally “incomplete” and that we will be re-joined to our bodies at the final resurrection).

    Polkinghorne admittedly is treading a middle ground between outright dualism and a pure replication theory. He’s not entirely clear what type of subjectivity a disembodied “soul” has in the “intermediate” state. So, there may be room for him to assert a degree of continuity that is sufficient to guarantee personal identity. There’s support for this in Polkinghorne’s suggestion that there will be a kind of purgatorial “healing” in the intermediate state.

    Wherever one comes down on this particular issue, Polkinghorne is right, I think, to insist that our hope for resurrection is grounded in the love of God, and that God intends to save us in our entirety, not as disembodied shades. This point is reinforced by Polkinghorne’s insistence on the fundamental importance of relationality in constituting our selves. The people we become are formed by our relationship to the world around us, and these relationships are mediated by our bodies. To exist without bodies of some kind would to be cut off from any kind of relationship. And these relationships extend beyond other human beings to all of creation.

  • The smiling God

    I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out.

  • The end of the world as we know it (3)

    (See here and here for previous posts.)

    The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus, in its illustration of the principle of continuity/discontinuity, provides the key to understanding the future of the cosmos as a whole. Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical promises that God will redeem the entire creation, not just human beings. He envisions a transmutation of the material cosmos into a new cosmos that parallels the transmutation of Jesus’ dead body into his glorified raised body (Polkinghorne suggests that part of the significance of the empty tomb is to be found here; matter is not to be discarded, but taken up into something new).

    Eschatology is concerned with hope. What can we hope for in a world in which it appears that human aspirations, both individual and collective, are destined for ultimate defeat? “Hope,” says Polkinghorne

    is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect. (p. 94)

    But what is hope’s positive content? It’s the conviction that “all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning” (p. 94). But the only thing that can guarantee this kind of meaning is “the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history” (p. 94). Polkinghorne says that a “thick” eschatology requires an equally “thick” theology and Christology. “To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4:17)” (p. 95).

    This is a robust, “supernaturalist” eschatology, wherein God will act to bring about a new creation that will supplant the old. Polkinghorne’s background as a physicist may give him a more cosmic perspective here. Theologians frequently seem to reduce eschatology to concerns with human destiny, sometimes even to political aspirations. Polkinghorne distinguishes his view from a fully “realized” eschatology that doesn’t privilege the future over the present (a view he attributes to Kathryn Tanner; I’m not sure if this is right since I find Tanner pretty obscure on that point), as well as from the concept of “objective immortality” favored by some process theologians. Both of these options condemn the lives of countless beings to permanent incompleteness. “Actual eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem” (p. 100).

    Polkinghorne thus stakes out a position between a fully “realized” eschatology and a strictly “futurist” one which he calls an “inagurated eschatology.” The pledge of God’s future victory of sin, death, and suffering has been given in the resurrection of Jesus, but the final consummation is still in the future. We can to some extent participate in that future now by being incorporated into Christ’s body through his church and the sacraments. Ethically, this means that follow the way of the crucified and risen one, even though we can’t see exactly where that way is leading us. But we can be assured that “our strivings for the attainment of good within the course of present history are never wasted but will bear everlasting fruit” (p. 102).

  • The end of the world as we know it (2)

    The key principle that Polkinghorne uses to construct his eschatological vision is that of continuity/discontinuity. If God is going to bring new life out of this fated-for-death universe, it must be both continuous with what has come before and discontinuous in overcoming the frailties, limitations, and evils of the present universe. The paradigmatic expression of this principle for Polkinghorne is the resurrection of Jesus: it is both the same pre-Easter Jesus who has been raised, but he has been raised to a new kind of life that is qualitatively different from earthly life.

    In terms of physical continuity, Polkinghorne attempts to isolate some of the fundamental aspects of the universe. He sees the cosmos as essentially a process, a self-evolving spatio-temporal cosmos that eventually gives rise to intelligent, self-aware beings. This cosmos is also characterized by a deep relationality: everything from quarks to human beings find their identity in relation to other parts of the universe; it is imbued with information: patterns and wholes exert genuine causal effect on what happens; and it displays a deep intelligibility and transparency to mathematical reasoning. Polkinghorne’s suggestion is that these deep features of the present universe reflect the will of the Creator and that we can reasonably expect them to persist in some way in the new Creation.

    Hope for a new creation, though, can only be rooted in the faithfulness of God. Consequently, it’s important to discern what we can of the divine nature and character if we are to have hope for the future. In a survey of the biblical material that manages to be both extremely concise and comprehensive, Polkinghorne paints a picture of a faithful, loving deity that emerges from the Old and New Testaments. The Bible, for Polkinghorne, is not “a conveniently divinely dictated handbook in which to look up the answers, but it is the record of the persons and events that have been particularly open to the presence of the divine reality and through which the divine nature may most transparently be discerned” (p. 53). In God’s faithfulness to Israel, in its growing eschatological expectations, and preeminently in his raising of Jesus from the dead, Polkinghorne discerns a God who, because of his loving faithfulness, will act to bring about a state of affairs where God’s presence is made immediately apparent to God’s people and in which the sufferings and limitations of this present life are overcome.

  • The end of the world as we know it (1)

    One of the things I usually make a point of doing when we’re visiting my wife’s family in Indianapolis is to make a trip to Half Price Books. They sell both used books and remainders, and it’s rare that I can’t find some gem at low, low prices. (They also have HPB in California, but I’ve yet to find any on the East Coast.)

    Anyway, when we were there over Christmas I picked up John Polkinghorne’s The God of Hope and the End of the World. Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, offers here a meditation on eschatology in the 21st century. His contention in that Christian theologians need to engage with the picture of the destiny of the cosmos delivered to us by modern science: cosmologists are able to predict with a high degree of certainty that the physical universe will end either in a “big crunch” — where the universe essentially collapses back in on itself — or will continue to spread out indefinitely with entropy reigning as everything decays to low grade radiation. More locally, our sun will eventually go nova and destroy any remaining life on earth (assuming we have avoided man-made or biological catastrophes).

    Even though these events are billions of years in the future, Polkinghorne says, they still call into question the ultimate significance of the universe. If the cosmos is destined to end with a bang or a whimper, it seems to threaten a kind of ultimate meaninglessness. The human prospect will long since have come to an end and all that will be left is, at best, a dead cosmos. Polkinghorne thinks that a credible eschatology has to take this rather bleak picture seriously. His book is part-apologetic, part-constructive theology as he attempts to show how sense can be made of the biblical promise that God will create a “new heaven and new earth.” In this series of posts I’ll highlight some of what I think are Polkinghorne’s more fruitful and intriguing reflections.

  • Faith and factuality

    The question of the Virgin Birth is just one example of a broader issue in the life of faith: how much of what the Bible describes as historical fact must be accurate for faith to have solid foundations? There are two extreme positions that can, and have been, taken here. One insists on literal factuality for all the details of the biblical stories; this is the position of modern Fundamentalism. The other minimizes, to the point of vanishing, any necessary historical basis for Christian faith. This approach is sometimes associated with Rudolf Bultmann and theological liberalism, but can also sometimes be seen in certain “postmodern” versions of Christian theology, such as versions of narrative theology. Liberals tend toward the position that the essential truths of faith are “existential” truths or truths of “meaning” not tied to particular historical events. Post-liberals, by contrast, are more likely to take refuge in a kind of epistemic relativism that disarms the claims of critical historical investigation, making faith immune to historical disconfirmation. (Though moderate post-liberals like William Placher tend to affirm the factuality of the key historical events of at least the New Testament, even while admitting that these can’t be shown to be factual by appealing to “neutral” historical research.)

    At the risk of taking a milquetoast middle of the road approach, I think that Christian faith has to take the results of historical investigation into account and to allow, in principle, that they can affect the content of religious belief. Christianity, maybe most of all major religions, can’t jettison its historical foundation. Its essential claim is that God enters history to share the condition of creaturely life and to redeem it. This can’t be reduced to an ahistorical truth: the Christian claim is that because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus our situation before God and with each other has been decisively changed. This is a variation on Paul’s dictum that “if Christ has not been raised … your faith is in vain.” Meaning can’t be separated from the question of factuality.

    This doesn’t mean that all the apparent factual claims of the Bible are essential to the faith, though. At one end of the spectrum you have apparently trivial details like where a certain conversation Jesus had took place or the particular wording of the Sermon on the Mount. At the other you have the essential facts about Jesus’ life: that he lived, had a certain character, that his preaching involved particular key themes, etc., not to mention the central mystery of his death and resurrection. In the middle, it seems to me, you have a variety of apparent historical facts whose significance isn’t immediately apparent: I would include here at least some of Jesus’ miracles, particular sayings, and so on. Is it essential to believe, for instance, that Jesus healed people and performed exorcisms? Is it essential to believe he performed all the specific healings and exorcisms mentioned in the New Testament? I’d probably put the Virgin Birth in this middle category somewhere.

    Now, as someone with a generally conservative disposition, I’m happy to give the benefit of the doubt to many of the borderline events in the Bible. And philosophically, I’m unconvinced that there’s any metaphysical barrier to God performing miracles. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that the monologues in John’s gospel aren’t verbatim accounts of things the historical Jesus actually said (though I think John may well be more historically reliable than many critics allow). But if I became convinced that the central facts of the story of Jesus were untrue, then I would have to regard Christian faith as radically undermined.

    The resurrection, obviously, is a special case. On the one hand it is rightly regarded as the foundation of Christian faith: if there had been no resurrection, then the early Jesus movement was based on some kind of delusion. And yet, it’s impossible to simply see the resurrection as a historical event like others whose occurrence can be demonstrated by means of the canons of historical research. Some Christian apologists seem to have taken just this view, but I think they underestimate the degree to which different people’s background philosophical and theological beliefs affect their estimation of the likelihood of particular events, especially something as extraordinary as the resurrection. The resurrection is an event of history, but it isn’t “historical” in the sense of being explicable as part of a normal series of cause and effect.

    So, Christians are in a rather precarious position in that their faith is dependent on the reality of something historical which can’t be verified by historical investigation. Kierkegaard identified this dilemma as the requirement of absolute commitment in the face of objective uncertainty. It seems that we are guilty of not apportioning our beliefs and actions to the evidence. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying that faith is “belief without evidence,” as some critics of religious belief have it. But there is a degree of commitment that goes beyond the evidence. The way I think of this, which may well be defective, is that we walk in the direction that our best judgment points us, but in the hope that over time (and ultimately beyond this life) the reality that we commit ourselves to will reveal itself to us with greater clarity. Our commitment to the road of faith is a function of a confluence of influences: the historical record, but also value judgments, aesthetic considerations, and philosophical reasoning. This is a highly personal act that can’t be reduced to any kind of algorithmic process, but which presupposes a reality independent of ourselves to which we respond.

  • A further argument for the Virgin Birth: the argument from beauty

    The Annunciation is one of the most beloved images in Western history, having given rise to some of its most enduring piety, art, and music:

    annunc.jpg

  • The Virgin Birth: does it matter?

    Via Graham, here’s an article in the (UK) Spectator that asked a variety of public figures whether or not they believe in the Virgin Birth. The answers range from the thoughtful, to the flippant, to the downright idiotic (someone named Colin Wilson declaims that “you’ll have some difficulty finding any educated person who believes in it, or any other Christian dogma”). I find the idea of treating the Virgin Birth as a discrete item proposed for our belief rather strange. For starters, if you can swallow the camel of the Resurrection, why strain at the gnat of the Virgin Birth? But more importantly, the Virgin Birth only really has significance in the context of the entire Christian story.

    I think Rowan Williams is right when he says that the “recognition of the uniqueness and newness of Jesus is a recognition of the absolute freedom of God to break the chains of cause and effect that lock us into our sins and failures; the virginal conception is an outward sign of this divine freedom to make new beginnings.” That is to say, the Virgin Birth has a certain “fittingness.” On the other hand, I don’t think that the Virgin Birth is on a par with the Resurrection as an essential item of Christian belief: I think that Christians believe in the Virgin Birth because they believe in Christ’s divinity, not vice versa. And the Resurrection acts as a warrant for belief in Christ’s divinity in a way that the Virgin Birth generally doesn’t, not least because the latter wasn’t a public event in the usual sense.

    In his response, Keith Ward says that the “point of the Biblical account is to see Jesus as the start of a new creation, fulfilling the hopes of the ‘virgin Israel’.” And this doesn’t stand or fall with the literal truth of the Virgin Birth. That said, though, it is virtually the unanimous view of the tradition (I’m not aware of any significant dissenting tradition in the early church), and only a dogmatic refusal to concede the possibility of miracles can rule it out entirely. But the reasons for believing in the Virgin Birth aren’t, in my view, independent of the reasons for affirming the unique identity of Jesus.

  • Catch-all blog update post

    Sorry about the dearth of posting: a confluence of extreme busyness, travel, and computer issues has put a cramp in my blogging style. Although one perk is that I’ve been forced to detach from the various teapot-sized tempests roilling the blogosphere, which is always a benefit of time away from the computer.

    We’re in Indiana visiting the in-laws for Christmas and enjoying some much needed R&R. In my free time I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. This is a marvelous little book in which Lewis delineates the worldview that underlies the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Sometimes I think Lewis has (unjustly) gotten a reputation as something of a shallow thinker due to the popular nature of his apologetic works, but in this book his incredible erudition is on full display, though tempered with his lucid and homey prose.

    I’ve also been catching up on my magazine reading – that is, actual printed matter. I recommend this interesting article from Mother Jones on Ron Paul’s online following, as well as the current issue’s cover story (which doesn’t seem to be online yet), detailing the environmental consequences of China’s amazing economic growth. Also, Jason Byassee has a provocative article on pornography and “Christian eroticism” in this month’s First Things that is well worth checking out.

    Other highlights of the trip so far: hanging out with my brother-in-law and his wife, a trip to Half Price Books (yea!), and taking in a civic theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technocolor Dreamcoat.

    Here’s a few of the notable links I’ve come across in the last couple of days: Wayne Pacelle on Animals and Christmas, two posts on Scripture from Elizaphanian, Marvin writes about stopping global warming, Christopher on recapturing the joy of the Christmas message and Christian living and in defense of the Virgin Birth.

    I’m looking forward to the Christ Mass tonight at a local Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish – the same one we attended last year. For a variety of reasons I’ve had a hard time getting into the spirit this Christmas, but I think this will be just what the doctor ordered.

    I hope everyone reading has a verry Merry Christmas!

  • God’s Own Party

    Harold Meyerson points out one of the problems with touting your party or candidacy as the “Christian” one: people will start to actually expect you to live up to the standards of Jesus.

    Here’s something C. S. Lewis had to say about the idea of a “Christian” political party:

    It is not reasonable to suppose that such a Christian Party will acquire new powers of leavening the infidel organization to which it is attached. Why should it? Whatever it calls itself, it will represent, not Christendom, but a part of Christendom. The principle which divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity; it will have no more power than the political skill of its members gives it to control the behaviour of its unbelieving allies. But there will be a real, and most disastrous, novelty. It will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time–the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind an degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great. Can any more fatal expedient be devised for increasing it than that of dubbing a small band of Fascists, Communists, or Democrats ‘the Christian Party’? The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost; the formation of a Christian Party means handing over to him the most efficient make-up we can find. And when once the disguise has succeeded, his commands will presently be taken to abrogate all moral laws and to justify whatever the unbelieving allies of the ‘Christian’ Party wish to do. If ever Christian men can be brought to think treachery and murder the lawful means of establishing the régime they desire, and faked trials, religious persecution and organized hooliganism the lawful means of maintaining it, it will, surely, be by just such a process as this. The history of the late medieval pseudo-Crusader, or the Covenanters, of the Orangemen, should be remembered. On those who add ‘Thus said the Lord’ to their merely human utterances descends the doom of conscience which seems clearer and clearer the more it is loaded with sin.

    All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. He will not settle the two brothers’ inheritance: ‘Who made Me a judge or a divider over you?’ By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is eficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us. (from “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” in God In the Dock)