A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Christ’s ambiguous reign and living in hope

    Yesterday, of course, was Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we head into Advent. The pastor at our church delivered an excellent sermon on the different aspects of Christ’s kingship and how we can become aware of them in our lives. Jesus reigns over all things, but he reigns as the crucified one – the one who transfigures the symbols of kingship and is present to us as the one who forgives our sins (the gospel text speaks to this with special power).

    This ambiguity in Christ’s lordship is one that I think we’re often tempted to eliminate in one direction or the other. The more common is to see Christ as an earthly ruler writ large, and to downplay, or ignore, the way he transfigures our ideas of kingship. On the other hand, in some recent theology, the emphasis has been laid so heavily on Christ’s weakness and his solidarity in suffering that the Resurrection and his triumphant reign seems to get lost.

    It doesn’t seem right to say that the Resurrection simply undoes the crucifixion, as though it didn’t reveal anything special or new about God. But it does imply that self-giving love is also backed up with ultimate power. The death of Christ isn’t simply a case of a beautiful soul ground under the wheels of an unforgiving universe: it reveals what the universe, at bottom, rests upon and what will ultimately triumph.

    Holding these two aspects of Christ’s sovereignty – power revealed in weakness and his status as the one for whom “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” – isn’t easily done. Maybe this is another facet of living in between the times, but it’s hard not to chafe at what looks for all the world like Christ’s failure to exercise his rule over our world. I don’t think it’s sufficient to say that Christ doesn’t exercise his power that way, since we believe that he will, in some mysterious and unimaginable way, end creation’s rebellion against his rule.

    Believing in Christ’s kingship means that we believe in both his present and future reigns, and yet those reigns are different, at least in the way things appear to us. In this age his reign appears partial at best, while creation groans for its redemption. And it’s hard for us (or at least for me) to believe in that reign, and to experience it, as a concrete reality. This is one more reason, I guess, why hope is a Christian virtue: we believe not merely in an unseen reality, but that this unseen reality will – someday – manifest itself in a final and definitive way.

  • Thanksgiving re-post

    I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I think it holds up pretty well:


    It’s interesting that Thanksgiving is the only secular holiday in the American calendar that has explicitly religious overtones (we might say that holidays like 4th of July and Memorial Day have implicit religious overtones, but that’s another matter). That is, Thanksgiving implies Someone to whom we give thanks, but it’s not an explicitly Christian holiday like Christmas or Easter (i.e. it isn’t part of the liturgical calendar, is not tied to any event in sacred history, is not shared by the universal church, etc.).

    While the original Puritan thanksgiving feast was a religious event rooted in a very specific Christian tradition, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863 (although many individual states had their own Thanksgiving holidays prior to that). In the early years of the Republic, days of thanksgiving were proclaimed in response to particular events, including military victories (by Presidents Washington and Madison).

    President Lincoln’s proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 was prompted by gratitude for the blessings the country enjoyed even in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. It’s noteworthy that Lincoln spoke of it in terms that are difficult to imagine coming from any contemporary U.S. politician:

    No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

    It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

    Nowadays politicians trip over each other to proclaim the innate goodness and downright wonderfulness of the American people. Can you imagine any politician today encouraging us to adopt a spirit of “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”?

    Christians have good reasons to be suspicious of civil religion, but the version articulated by Lincoln is remarkably robust compared to anemic pleas for posting the Ten Commandments in a court house or ritual invocations of “God Bless America.” The God invoked by Lincoln is not the laissez-faire God of the deists, but a mysterious providence whose will can’t be straightforwardly identified with any human cause.

    It would be a pretty radical thing to do for some public figure to suggest that we not only give thanks for all our blessings, but actually engage in self-examination to see where we have been “perverse and disobedient,” individually and as a nation. Not that I particularly want politicians to assume the mantle of the preacher, but it would be a refreshing change from the feel-goodism of so much civil religion that seeks to merely put a stamp of divine approval on the American Way of Life.

  • All theology is animal theology

    Christopher:

    Considering animals in relationship to God is not something extra or foreign to Christianity. In my opinion, a serious doctrine of Creation cannot ignore the rest of the living world and the Creation as a whole and finally be Christian. Even rocks glorify God. And frankly, neither can a complete doctrine of Redemption or Sanctification. Indeed, to set up one’s “serious” theology in such a way that one can ignore, dismiss, or deride creatures great and small, organic and inorganic, is a sign of the Fall and the effects of sin, alienation and division. The rest of Creation pays dearly and regularly for our lack of relational recognition and failures in thankfulness.

    Maybe this is just special pleading on my part, but I think he’s absolutely right. In fact, I’m not sure Christian theology, much less Christian practice, has even begun to move from a thoroughly anthropocentric perspective to one that is more properly theocentric. Even churches that pay lip service (or more than lip service) to “the environment” remain steadfastly human-centered in their concerns. To some extent this is inevitable, but I wonder if we end up pushing a very thin gospel that essentially addresses only human concerns, and that often in a very therapuetic individualist way. And, if so, isn’t this a denial of the Lordship of Christ over all creation?

    What would theology and practice look like if they genuinely incorporated the cosmic aspect of the biblical story that we so frequently downplay? My sense is that we in the mainline ignore this cosmic dimension out of embarassment. After all, a faith that is confined to fostering psychological well-being or political action is much more respectable than one that talks about the redemption of all creation. We have very little idea, I think, of what that would even look like.

    If mainliners want to criticize fundamentalists for believing that we’re about to be whisked away in the Rapture, leaving the earth a smoldering cinder, maybe the proper response is to have a counter-story about the destiny of creation. Not to mention a counter-story to the post-Enlightenment industrial view of nature as a vast repository of resources for our exploitation. After all, isn’t there ample biblical and theological warrant for saying that creation – including our animal cousins – has a destiny in God’s kingdom? And doesn’t that imply that it matters now what happens to creation, since those aspects of the present age that serve God’s purposes will be preserved and transfigured (in ways we can scarcely being to imagine) in the age to come?

    I actually am not sure how far we can push the de-anthropocentricizing (is that a word?) of Christian theology; this strikes me as still relatively unexplored territory. Some eco-theologians have tried it in ways that seem to me to sacrifice too much of traditional Christian belief. On the other hand, someone like Andrew Linzey is doing it in a way that builds on traditional orthdox trinitarian theology. I think this is the more promising route for a variety of reasons, maybe most importantly because traditional doctrines of creation and incarnation provides what I think is the strongest foundation for taking the created world to have permanent value for God.

  • The political Christian

    American Christians tend to be a bit schizophrenic about politics. They swing from utopian optimism (“Christianizing the social order,” “restoring America as a Christian nation”) to extreme pessimism when the inevitable disillusion sets in about the limits of what politics can accomplish. This recent post at the Christian Century blog by David Heim offers a more sober perspective:

    Skepticism about politics is always healthy. But it strikes me that [David] Kuo’s and [Gregory] Boyd’s comments reflect a broad, unhelpful tendency in American Christianity to oscillate between two poles: either a fervent engagement in politics for the sake of the gospel and the world, or an equally fervent detachment for the sake of the purity of the gospel and the health of the church. Isn’t there something between the two poles?

    Heim goes on to argue that Christians should see politics as a vocation that some have (and that all of us have some of the time) to participate in making improvements in the social order. He cautions against the churches corporately making pronouncements on specific political issues, but encourages individual Christians to be engaged in the public sphere:

    Meanwhile, however, individual Christians have their particular vocations. In a democracy, all people have the vocation of citizen and so are in some degree called to the work of politics. Beyond that, a certain number of individual Christians are called to a more specific vocation: to study, analyze or participate in the day-to-day workings of politics. They make arguments and pay attention to data. They look for affinities between the gospel and political philosophies and programs. They listen to what constituents say and arguments other people make. Their work is fallible, limited, pervaded by sin, always subject to revision—but so are lots of vocations.

    This decidedly non-utopian approach to politics would recognize that it’s about caring for the neighbor and making the social orde a place where all people can have a chance at leading decent lives. A backlash against “Constantinianism” has soured some Christians on any involvement in politics, but there’s no reason that a chastened political engagement that recognizes the fact of pluralism and the limits of what politics can accomplish isn’t a legitimate vocation for Christians.

    However, I think there’s still a role for the church acting corporately to equip its members for their various vocations in the world. While it doesn’t necessarily have the expertise to make judgments about particular issues, the church ought to form its members in a way that helps them approach politics with a gospel-shaped vision. For instance, I think it’s entirely appropriate for Chrisitans to evaluate public policy with an eye to how it affects the most vulnerable members of society. This kind of formation might come as a result of experience serving such vulnerable people by participating in the church’s corporal works of mercy.

    There’s also a long tradition of Chrisitan moral reflection that forbids certain means in the pursuit of even worthwhile ends. Just war theory is an example that applies to foreign affairs. In most cases these constraints probably won’t dictate a single policy, but they might rule out some options. Well-formed Christians are not going to support a military policy that targets innocent civilians, or acquiesces in torture.

    So, I agree with Heim that Christians can chart a middle course between Constantinianism and sectarianism. This involves seeking the good of the neighbor in a way that is shaped by an awareness of our own fallibility and the limits of politics, but is also formed by the gospel of God’s gracious love.

  • See how these Christians love one another

    A former religion correspondent for the Guardian recounts his loss of faith after seeing how church people treat each other. Sigh.

  • Jesus vs. marriage

    I had the same thought about the Gospel reading this Sunday that Derek did. I don’t know why it never struck me this way before – maybe it was the translation I was reading/hearing it in. But it sounds for all the world like Jesus is saying that his followers–“those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead”–don’t (shouldn’t?) marry. Although Jesus’ words elsewhere in the NT (not to mention his presence at/wine catering for the wedding at Cana) suggest a more positive view of marriage.

    We’re familiar enough with the idea that Paul seems to give marriage only a grudging thumbs up. I wonder if this represents a wrestling with an earlier more stringent apocalyptic ethic in light of a delayed parousia?

    Lutheranism has usually seen the institutions of the world as ordered toward human flourishing but also as provisional. Marriage would seem then to be part of the kingdom of the left and of the world that is passing away. This seems to me to argue for a more flexible approach to marriage – to being willing to tinker with the institution in light of new experiences. This would be in line with Paul’s seeming pragmatism (“it is better to marry than burn” etc.).

  • Alison on sin, wrath and the “deathlessness” of God

    I’ve been reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, and he has an interesting take on the relation between forgiveness, sin, and the wrath of God.

    Alison, as readers may know, is a follower of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and uses it as a key to understand what’s going on in the gospel stories, especially regarding Jesus’ death.

    The heart of Girard’s theory is that human psychology and culture is driven by a desire-based rivalry that threatens social peace. All our desire is other-directed in the sense that we learn to desire something by seeing someone else desire it. But this creates the conditions of rivalry, which threatens to turn violent. To defuse this violence, the community will unite and turn on a scapegoat – a victim – and, having spent its violence on the scapegoat it enables social peace to be restored.

    The paradoxical result is that the scapegoat is identified both as the source of conflict and the means by which peace is restored. Consequently, myths grow up that invest the victim with divine properites. And in the process, these myths occlude our complicity in the violence and victimization that we (mistakenly) believe to be necessary and justified.

    However, according to both Girard and Alison, the Bible gradually reverses this view by proclaiming the innocence of the vicitm and stripping the scapegoating mechanism of its mythical and religious shroud, exposing it for what it is: human violence directed against the other. This process culminates in the crucifixion of Jesus where an undeniably innocent man is put to death “for,” or, on account of, our sins. The scapegoating mechanism is revealed for the evil it is in the machinations of the various parties who collude to put Jesus to death as a threat to social peace.

    Alison’s particular emphasis is on the way that the Resurrection makes a new situation possible. Jesus returns from the dead, not as an aggrevied victim seeking vengeance, but as the forgiving victim. He is thus able to break the cycle of desire and scapegoating by making a new individual and social reality possible. Since, for Alison, human selves are formed by an other, Jesus provides us with a new self that makes a pacific (non-rivalrous) mimesis possible.

    This picture of what’s going on in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus leads Alison to deny that there is any violence or exclusion in God. Death and violence are human realities (though they’re not essential to being human: hence original sin), and we tend to project these on to God. But what Jesus reveals is a God for whom, according to Alison, death and violence aren’t even realities, properly speaking. And this leads him to rework the notions of wrath and judgment.

    Alison argues that this new revelation only made possible by Jesus’ death and resurrection has a subversive effect on existing religious categories and language. So, in the New Testament we see a gradual process of purifying the image of God from traces of violence. Paul, Alison thinks, usues much of the traditional language (wrath, sacrifice, etc.) but in a way that ironically inverts its meaning, as Alison attempts to show in a discussion of Romans:

    [T]he content of the wrath of God [for Paul] is itself a demystification of a vindictive account of God (whose righteousness has just been declared). For the content of the wrath is the handing over by God of us to ourselves. Three times in the following verses the content of the wrath is described in terms of handing over: 1:24; 1:26; and 1:28. That is to say, the wrath, rather than being an act of divine vengeance, is a divine nonresistance to human evil. However, I would suggest it is more than that. The world “handed over” (paredoken) has in primitive Christian sources a particularly subtle set of resonances. For God is described as handing over (paredoken) his own son to us in a text no further from our own than Romans 8:32. The handing over of the son to us and the handing over of ourselves to sin appear to be at the very least parallel. The same verb (paredothe) is used in 4:25, where Jesus was handed over for our trespasses and raised for our justification. I would suggest that it is the handing over of the son to our killing him that is in fact the same thing as handing us over to our own sins. Thus wrath is life in the sort of world which kills the son of God. (pp. 126-127).

    Alison contends that this comes to clearer expression in the Johannine writings, particularly in the identification in John’s gospel between the judgment of the world and Jesus crucifixion. The crucifixion of the Son of God is God’s judgment upon the world. Alison discusses the story of the man born blind as a way of illustrating this inversion of judgment:

    Jesus’ final comment, “For judgment I came into the world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind,” is his assessment of the whole story. In the first place, Jesus has carried out no active judgment at all. The only judgment related in the story has been that of the Pharisees, casting the man out. This is part of the ironic Johannine recasting of judgment: it is by being crucified that Jesus is the real judge of his judges. So because Jesus is the cause of the former blind man’s expulsion, the former blind man shares Jesus’ role as judge of those who have expelled him. It is not that Jesus simply abolishes the notion of judgment or is merely much more of a judge than the other judges: the sense in which Jesus is a judge is a subversion from within of the notion of judgment. The judgment that excluded the former blind man is revealed as the judgment (also discernment) that the expellers are really blind. (p. 121)

    What this judgment reveals, according to Alison, is that sin is essentially what he calls the “murderous lie.” We expell and victimize in order to maintain order and security, and then we lie to ourselves about what we’re doing and why we do it. This is why the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus provides the key to making a new way of living possible: the crucifixion, in being the murder of the innocent victim par excellence, reveals the scapegoating mechanism and our complicity in it as the lie that it is. But the resurrection of Jesus as the forgiving victim makes possible a new kind of life that is based on the truth and not a lie. Forgiveness presupposes that there is something to forgive: it doesn’t cover up what was done but makes it part of a past from which it becomes possible to move on in a different direction.

    God is then recast as the forgiving victim and wrath is seen as a projection of our violence onto God. In killing the son of God we bring judgment on ourselves, but he returns as if to say “Even if you kill me I’ll keep forgiving and loving you.” There is a kind of double revelation here. On the one hand the crucifixion of Jesus reveals the violent means by which we keep order, that death isn’t something that just happens, but is something that we visit upon others. On the other, it reveals God as characterized by “deathlessness.”

    This means, Alison says, that God is “indifferent” to death; it’s as though it’s not even a reality for him. God’s love carries on loving, even through death. And in raising Jesus specifically – the preacher of God’s love and forgiveness – God shows that he loves us. “It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us” (p. 118).

    So, we have human beings marked by death in that it structures their reality. But we also have God as deathless, as loving through and beyond death. The third piece of the picture is that human life is not essentially entwined by death, but that it’s a contingent fact about us. “If God can raise someone from the dead in the middle of human history, the very fact reveals that death, which up till this point had marked human history as simply something inevitable, part of what it is to be a human being, is not inevitable” (p. 118). The doctrine of original sin has always walked a tightrope in that it posits a primal human sin that has infected the entire race, but denies that this was in any way inevitable or a necessary aspect of human or creaturely existence. What Alison is arguing is that original sin is to be understood “backwards” from the resurrection. That only in Jesus’ death and resurrection do we begin to understand the nature of our predicament and how God acts to free us from it.

    This post is already too long, but I’ll try to offer some more thoughts on this once I’ve made it through the rest of the book.

  • The evangelical crack-up: not all it’s cracked up to be

    An honest-to-goodness evangelical pours some cold water on David Kirkpatrick’s NY Times Magazine piece on the splintering of political evangelicalism. (via Jeremy)

    I’ve seen a number of outlets assume that evangelical dissatisfaction with Bush and the GOP must be dissatisfaction from the Left. While younger evangelicals may indeed have a newfound concern for issues like global warming and AIDS, this doesn’t mean they’re becoming liberal per se. And, as the threats of Dobson, et al. to bolt to a third party indicate, much of the dissatisfaction is from the Right.

    David Sessions, the author of the Slate article, makes the interesting suggestion that the growing popularity of Reformed theology in conservative evangelical circles may account for the newfound focus on broader social issues. Neo-Calvinists like Abraham Kuyper were very big on Christ as the Lord of all and that his reign should encompass the entire social sphere. This is in sharp contrast to a kind of Left Behind theology that emphasizes snatching souls out of a society firmly ensconsed in a hell-bound handbasket. In this respect neo-Calvinism has a lot in common with Catholic social thought.

    Lutherans, meanwhile, have historically been more skittish about this kind of thing. Obviously God is sovereign over all, but God relates to us in two ways. The two kingdoms doesn’t refer to distinct spheres of church and state, but to these two ways in which God relates to creation: redemption and conservation. The kingdom of the right, God’s “proper work,” is calling people to faith and repentance through the preaching of the Gospel. The kingdom of the left, meanwhile, refers to the way in which God upholds and conserves the structures of creation and society to provide for and promote human well-being in this life. Politics, for Lutherans, is not redemptive, but pertains to penultimate matters, to serving the neighbor in her concrete needs in this age. To Lutheran ears, the talk of “building God’s kingdom” that you sometimes get from both the evangelical Right and Left smacks of Calvinist-inspired Puritanism.

  • Flew’s conversion – greatly exaggerated?

    I blogged last week about a new book published by British philosopher and atheist-turned-deist Antony Flew which supposedly details his newfound belief in God (or at least a god of some kind).

    Now, via Ross Douthat, I see there’s some legitimate reason to think that Flew, apparently in declining health and mental acuity, may have been pushed into putting his name on a book that was heavily ghotswritten by some of his Christian acquaintances, in particular Roy Varghese, whose academic credentials seem sketchy at best. At the very least, the article casts serious doubt on Flew’s ability at this point to make and defend the kinds of arguments being attributed to him. And Douthat is right that N.T. Wright putting his name to this project is particularly unfortunate.

  • About 80% Lutheran

    Here are my results from the Eucharistic Theology quiz that’s been going around:

    You scored as a Luther
    You are Martin Luther. You’ll stick with the words of Scripture, and defend this with earthy expressions. You believe this is a necessary consequence of an orthodox Christology. You believe that the bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Christ, but aren’t too sure about where he goes after the meal, and so you don’t accept reservation of the Blessed Sacrament or Eucharistic devotions.

    Luther: 81%
    Orthodox: 69%
    Catholic: 63%
    Calvin: 50%
    Zwingli: 50%
    Unitarian: 0%

    The main thing I learned from this is that I don’t have particularly strong or well-formed views on what happens in the Eucharist – I believe Jesus is really present and that we’re united to him by partaking, but I’m happy to leave the metaphysics of it a mystery. Oh, and I also learned that whoever made this quiz really doesn’t like Unitarians.

    I’m also not necessarily opposed to Eucharistic devotions. The Reformers were probably right to oppose them if they were being used as a substitute for frequent reception of the sacrament among the laity. But in churches where communion is frequent (and perhaps even too casual at times) they could potentially be powerful reminders of the presence of Christ in the Sacrament. I found the one Benediction service I attended very effective in this respect .