A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century.

    Small Is Still Beautiful is one among a recent spate of books re-thinking what it means to be conservative in light of the apparent triumph of global capitalism and the preeminence of America as global hegemon. Fans of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (review here) and Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America (review here) will find much to like here, as Pearce upholds the small, familiar and local against the forces of globalized homogeneity.

    Pearce doesn’t break much new ground in terms of fundamental ideas; this book is more of an update of Schumacher’s original. But this actually works well since Schumacher’s ideas seem just as timely now as they did thirty years ago. The issues that this book grapples with – our insatiable appetite for growth, environmental despoilation, and the plight of local communities – have gained a new resonance in recent years.

    If you had to boil down Schumacher’s (and Pearce’s) message into a pithy maxim, I think it would be that “Economics was made for man, not man for economics.” Schumacher’s vision was rooted in a view of humankind as having transcendent worth, but also part of an ordered cosmos that has its own beauty and integrity. For Schumacher, much of the problem of conventional economic thinking was that it subordinated the ends of human life to the means of economic production – a complete reversal of the proper order of things.

    Pearce sees both cause for worry and celebration in the events that have transpired since Small Is Beautiful was originally published. On the one hand, many of the worrying trends Schumacher identified have only accelerated: neoliberal globalization and its attendant monoculture, skewed theories of development that privilege intensive industrial production and agriculture, and, of course, the worship of centralization and “giantism.” On the other hand, a counter-movement of organic farmers, craft brewers, proponents of local economies, co-ops, and movements for political decentralization have also made a surprising amount of headway.

    The underlying premise of Schumacher’s work is that unlimited economic growth in the pursuit of meeting a never-ending stream of consumer demands is “unnatrual” in the deepest possible sense. It goes against the grain of human nature in that it won’t satisfy our deepest longings, and it threatens to destroy the fragile biosphere upon which we and all other life depend. Only a reorientation of our economic and political life toward proper human ends – joy, wisdom, peace – can stave off an ecological disaster.

    This view is both radical and conservative in that it requires a massive re-thinking of the political and economic status quo, but does so in the name of a very traditional, even religious, view of human beings and their destiny. Schumacher’s less-known work, A Guide for the Perplexed, actually presents the key to his thought here. His aim in that work was to recover the traditional metaphysical view of humanity and the universe that underlies what Huston Smith calls the “wisdom traditions” of the world. This philosophia perennis stands in stark opposition to the materialism of post-Englightenment modernity.

    Pearce, like Schumacher, is a practicing Catholic who combines what we’d call social conservatism with economic positions well to the “left” of most Democrats, much less Republicans. He opposes “free trade” and thinks government policy should favor small businesses and local producers. He takes the issue of climate change and environmental degradation with the utmost seriousness, seeing them as direct consequences of growth-oriented and inequitable economic policy. He excoriates the World Bank and IMF and their regimes of “structural adjustment” programs for developing nations. And he opts for organic farming as the only way to save the land from destruction at the hands of intensive agriculture.

    Somewhat confusingly, and despite the subtitle, Pearce says little directly about families. There are a few asides about the ways in which market capitalism breaks up social bonds, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. But very little is said about how families in particular are affected. For instance, it seems to me that Pearce could’ve made a lot of hay out of the way that our current economic practices force parents to work long hours, depriving them of the opportunities to spend time with their children as well as to participate in their communities.

    I have to say that this book likely won’t convince anyone who isn’t already at least somewhat familiar with and somewhat sympathetic to Schumacher’s original arguments. But Pearce has done us a service even if the only effect of his book is to send people (particularly the more conservative-leaning people likely to read this) back to Schumacher’s original works. And beyond that, it’s nice to see Schumacherian principles applied to the current scence, giving us a picture of their continuing relevance.

    P.S.     Dear Publishers: I would be happy to review books like this when they come out instead of waiting till they’re available at the library. Please feel free to send review copies. 😉

  • Natural law, homosexuality and the ELCA

    Carl Braaten has published a spirited defense of natural law ethics at the Journal of Lutheran Ethics with which I’m in substantial agreement. I think that if natural law ethics didn’t exist we’d have to invent it, and that people who claim to be deriving their ethics solely from uniquely Christian principles have usually smuggled covert premises in from other sources. So, best to be above board about the whole thing.

    However, toward the end of his article Braaten goes on what can only be characterized as a tirade about homosexuality, and this makes me think that he’s working with a defective notion of natural law. Now, Carl Braaten has undoubtedly forgotten more about theology than I’ll ever know, so I enter here with trepidation, but his account of the ethical issue here strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate.

    Braaten writes:

    We know by reason what the natural law tells us — the sexual organs are designed for certain functions. God made two kinds of humans, “male and female created he them.” (Gen. 1: 27) By the light of reason human beings the world over, since the dawn of hu­man civilization and across all cultures, have known that the male and female organs are made for different functions. Humans know what they are; they are free to act in accordance with them or to act in opposition to them. The organs match. What is so difficult to understand about that? Humans learn these things by reason and nature; no books on anatomy, psychology, or sociology are needed.

    Nor do people first learn what the sexual organs are for from the Bible. Scholars say there are seven explicit passages in the Bible that condemn homosexual acts as con­trary to the will of God. This is supposed to settle the matter for a church that claims its teachings are derived from Scripture. But for many Christians this does not settle the matter. Why not? The answer is that they don’t believe what the natural law, transpar­ent to reason, tells us about human sexuality. In my view the biblical strictures against homosexual acts are true not because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible be­cause they are true. They truly recapitulate God’s creative design of human bodies. The law of creation written into the nature of things is the antecedent bedrock of the natural moral law, knowable by human reason and conscience.

    The problem with this passage is that both the argument from reason and the argument from Scripture elide crucial factors. Let’s start with the argument from reason. It’s undoubtedly true that human sexual organs have particular functions. But does it follow straight away (pardon the pun) that human beings must always use their sexual organs in those particular ways, or that it’s never permissible for them to be used in any other way? Anyone who thinks that it’s morally ok to have sex for non-procreative reasons is conceding that it’s permissible to use one’s sex organs in a way that doesn’t constitute their primary function.

    But this doesn’t get at the deeper issue. What gives natural law ethics its traction isn’t that it asks what the purpose of bodily organs are. It functions as an ethic because it asks: what is good for human beings (and the rest of creation)? To ask what the functions of sexual organs are is only part of the broader question of what is good for human beings. To say that organs function in a certain way and so must (only) be used in this way is actually to revert to a rather crude version of divine command ethics – God created them that way, so that’s the way you have to use them, and don’t bother asking why.

    If we do ask why, however, we see that human sexuality functions to further the good of human beings, individually and as members of a series of ever-widening communities. But then any particular sex act is necessarily subordinate, in terms of moral evaluation, to this broader notion of what is good. And determining what this broader good is requires the use of our reason and powers of observation to understand what kind of life is good for human persons. Non-procreative sex was long held by the Christian tradition to be immoral, but seen in the broader perspective of what’s good for individuals, communities, societies, and creation as a whole, we can see reasons why it can be moral.

    Braaten assumes that because sexual organs are made to function a certain way that they can therefore only be used that way, morally speaking. But if we can simply read our ethics off of nature in this way, what do we do with the fact that there are people who find themselves exclusively attracted to members of the same sex? They’re just as much a part of “nature” as the particular configuration of human sexual organs, at least in the sense of being something naturally occurring (if not statistically “normal”). If what is given is the standard for what is right, how do we decide between two seemingly incompatible natural givens?

    What a more “holistic” natural law ethics needs to ask, it seems to me, is this: Given that gay people exist, what is good for them (and the communities of which they are a part) and how should their sexuality be ordered toward those distinctively human goods that we are all called to realize? The fundamental question then, is not: what are sexual organs for, but what are people for? As Keith Ward puts it “[t]he physical and biological structures of the natural world must always be subordinated, in morality, to the realization of those universal goods which all free agents have good reason to want” (“Christian Ethics” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, Geoffrey Wainwright, ed., p. 232). The kinds of goods that free personal beings are naturally oriented toward realizing take moral precedence over the biological processes that constitute the substratum of those persons.

    Again, this is something that can only be answered by reason and experience. Some conservatives have contended that gay sex is intrinsically ordered toward narcissism or other anti-social tendencies, which is at least the right kind of argument, since it claims that homosexuality is inherently opposed to human flourishing. But it simply doesn’t measure up to empirical reality. Gay people’s sexuality is capable of contributing to the building up of relationships that exhibit all the virtues that straight ones do and in my view the onus is on those who would deny this fact.

    Regarding the argument from Scripture, Braaten surely knows that there is widespread disagreement not so much about whether the Bible condemns certain same-sex acts, but whether the kinds of monogamous faithful relationships exhibited by many gay people fall under that condemnation. Again, the question can’t be settled simply be saying that the Bible forbids x until we ask further why does it condemn x? What underlying reason is there for a given prohibition and does it apply to this particular case?

    Natural law ethics is animated by the idea that creation is rational and that it mirrors, if imperfectly, the mind of God. A corollary of this is that God’s commands aren’t inscrutable demands, but are intended to guide us toward our ultimate good and are, in principle, transparent to our understanding. To understand what that good is requires the exercise of our own reason, which partakes, at least in some small way, of the Divine Reason. This doesn’t mean that our reason is perfect or that it doesn’t require additional illumination from God, but there is an underlying rationality to the moral principles that arise out of the fact that we have been created in a particular way.

    Braaten seems angry that the ELCA should even take up this issue, since the right answer is so obvious (to him). But it’s only obvious (if at all) if one adopts the biological reductionism that he (erroneously in my view) identifies with natural law ethics. A more holistic view sees biology in service to the realization of distinctly human goods and, as such, doesn’t give it the last word in determining what is right. Straight people who think of themselves as safely “in” the charmed circle of being approved by God might consider what it would mean to adopt this biologistic ethic in all its rigor.

  • Three approaches to faith and works

    In continuing the tradition of outsourcing quality theological reflection to my betters, allow me to link to this weighty post from Christopher on justification, sanctification and the various kinds of legalisms and antinomianisms that afflict the left and right.

    The way I’ve learned to think about faith and works was that we are saved – i.e. restored to a right relationship with God – sheely by grace on account of Christ received through faith. This is the Reformation view shared by Lutherans, Calvinists, and many Anglicans.

    But there’s a divergence about what role sanctification, or growth in the Christian life, means. Lutherans tend to say (at least when they’re being good Lutherans) that being continually rooted and re-rooted in faith will “naturally” produce good works (cf. Luther’s Freedom of a Christian). However, Luther, being the realist that he was, also recognized that our sinful impulses aren’t going to disappear until the consummation of all things, so in the interim we have the law to act as a check on them. I think this is properly described as the “civil” or first use of the law, not the much controverted third use.

    Calvinists, by contrast, tend to have a more positive view of the law as a guide to Christian living and see sanctification as on ongoing process of being empowered by grace to obey God’s law. Naturally as a Lutheran I think the danger here is legalism and instrospectiveness; Calvinists would no doubt say that Lutheranism courts antinomianism.

    An interesting third view, suggested as a distinctively Anglican one, is offered by Louis Weil in an essay called “The Gospel in Anglicanism,” found in an anthology The Study of Anglicanism, edited by Stephen Sykes and John Booty (1st ed.). Weil contends that Anglicanism, as it’s expressed in the prayer book and Articles of Religion, agrees with the Reformers on justification, but has a more sacramental understanding of sanctification:

    While clearly within the Reformation tradition in its understanding of justification, Anglicanism distanced itself from both Calvin and Luther in ways which have been presented here. It is particularly with regard to the role of the sacraments as instruments of grace that Anglicanism maintained its own middle way: as Hooker wrote, ‘Sacraments serve as the instruments of God.’ They are thus God’s actions toward mankind, occasions in which through participation in the outward forms, men and women are involved in an active response to the grace of God. (p. 71)

    In Weil’s view, the Anglican ethos sees sacramental and liturgical worship as the means by which God’s sanctifying grace is communicated to us. Through worship we participate in the mysteries of the faith and are linked to God’s purposes for the world. It is the primary means by which we are incorporated into the Body of Christ. Sanctification, then, has its roots in this incorporation; it is a key part of acquiring the “mind of Christ” from which good works flow. If good works are the fruit of faith, perhaps we can see this as “watering the plant.” This is one of the aspects of Anglicanism that I came to appreciate and cherish during last year’s sojourn among the Anglo-Catholics in Boston.

    In theory Lutherans (I can’t speak for our Calvinist/Reformed brethren) ought to have a similar sacramental piety. After all, Lutheranism was the “conservative” branch of the Reformation that maintained much of the Catholic practice that the more radical elements of the Reformation rejected outright. However, my sense among ELCA Lutherans at any rate is that this sense of participating sacramentally in the reality of the paschal mystery is not very common.

    My heart’s with the Lutherans in insisting that we can never merit our relationship with God. Our righteousness is always a gift that comes from outside (extra nos) and there’s nothing we can or need do to add to it. However, I also like the Anglican emphasis on being incorporated into Christ through participation in sacramental worship. Or, to put it more simply, learning to love Jesus by spending time with him. It seems to me that this offers the promise of helping to give a shape to the Christian life that sometimes seems to be lacking in Lutheranism, but without reducing it to sheer moralism.

  • Predestination with a human face

    Marvin has taken back up his series on “essential tenets of the Reformed faith” with posts on divine sovereignty and predestination. I commend the second one in particular. Though, I suppose you’re either destined to read it or not. 😉

  • Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway on the current Anglican unpleasantness

    I don’t typically comment on the doings of the Anglican Communion (I’m at best a part-time Episcopalian and you can get plenty of that stuff elsewhere), but I thought this address by the Primate of the Scottish Episcopal Church was good. Maybe it’s just the Scotsman in me that’s partial to it. 😉

  • God’s glory is etched on his creation

    I’ve been reading this abridged Institutes of the Christian Religion that I referred to in the last post and liked this passage quite a bit:

    Since complete happiness is knowing God, in order that no one should be prevented from finding that happiness, he has kindly put in our minds the seed of true religion we have already spoken of and has also displayed his perfection in the whole structure of the universe. So he is constantly in our view and we cannot open our eyes without being made to see him. His nature is incomprehensible, far beyond all human thought, but his glory is etched on his creation so brightly, clearly and gloriously, that no one however obtuse and illiterate can plead ignorance as an excuse. So with absolute truth the Psalmist exclaims, ‘He wraps himself in light as with a garment’ (Ps. 104:2). It is as though he was saying that when God created the world for the first time he put on outer clothes. He hung up gorgeous banners on which we see his perfection clearly portrayed. In the same place the Psalmist aptly compares the spread of the heavens with God’s royal tent and says he ‘lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind’ (Ps. 104:3): sending out the wind and lightning as his swift messengers. Because the glory of his power and wisdom is more ablaze in the heavens it is frequently called his palace. Wherever you look, there is no part of the world however small that does not show at least some glimmer of beauty; it is impossible to gaze at the vast expanses of the universe without being overwhelmed by such tremendous beauty. So the author of the epistle to the Hebrews sensitively describes the visible world as an image of the invisible (Heb. 11:3). The superb structure of the world acts as a sort of mirror in which we may see God, who would otherwise be invisible. (pp. 32-33)

  • Calvin on the Atonement and God’s wrath

    One of the problems with penal substitutionary theories of the Atonement, at least as sometimes presented, is that, on the one hand, they present God the Father as being unable to be reconciled to humanity until his wrath is spent, but on the other hand, the Bible is very clear that the work of Christ is initiated and carried out by God the Father and the Son, not the Son acting on the Father as it were.

    John Calvin, who is often regarded as one of the fathers of this understanding of the Atonement writes (in my heavily abridged version of the Institutes):

    Before we go any further, we must try to see how God, who goes before us in mercy, was our enemy until he was reconciled to us by Christ. But how could he have given us that unique seal of his love — the gift of his only begotten Son — if he had not already freely embraced us in his favour? (p. 129)

    What Calvin goes on to say seems to me to be that God has to make us understand how horrible our sin is, and that part of the reason why Jesus has to be crucified is to show this. “If it was not stated clearly that divine wrath and vengeance and eternal death hang over us, we would be less aware of our condemnation without the mercy of God, and less likely to value the blessings of salvation” (p. 129).

    But what’s not clear to me is whether Calvin is saying that God is truly merciful but has to “put on a show” of being wrathful in order to impress upon us the awfulness of our sins. Or is he actually saying that Jesus’ death propitiates God’s wrath, objectively speaking? This seems to be implied by what he says later about the “guilt which made us liable to punishment was transferred to the head of the Son of God” (p. 131), but if so, then it seems to me that he hasn’t really addressed the apparent contradiction of God being our enemy but also acting to reconcile himself to us (and it’s interesting that Calvin says that God is was reconciled to us (p. 129), whereas Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Is this significant?).

    It could well be that I’m just missing enough of the text that the argument isn’t spelled out more explicitly. Any Calvin-philes out there want to clear this up? Is the wrath for Calvin our perception which God alters by offering his Son, or does the Son objectively “satifsy” the wrath? Or both?

  • Theologians, take heed!

    The medieval philosophy and theology blog Scholasticus has posted a fantastic quote from philosopher Peter Van Inwagen:

    One advantage philosophers bring to theology is that they know too much about philosophy to be overly impressed by the fact that a particular philosopher has said this or that. Philosophers of the present day know what Thomas Aquinas and Professor Bultmann did not know: that no philosopher is an authority. Philosophers know that if you want to pronounce on, say, the project of natural theology, you cannot simply appeal to what Kant has established about natural theology. You cannot do this for the very good reason that Kant has established nothing about natural theology. Kant has only offered arguments, and the cogency of these arguments can be (and is daily) disputed.

    That’s from Van Inwagen’s collection of essays God, Knowledge & Mystery, a real gem that I picked up several years back for a song at Half Price Books in Indianapolis, if I recall correctly.

    When I was in graduate school I took a class on “postmodern concepts of God.” It was good in that I read stuff that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise (Levinas, Marion), but I was continually irritated by the literary deconstructionist types who would appeal to Heidegger or Derrida or whoever as authorities for dismissing large swaths of the philosophical tradition. It just doesn’t work that way!

    There’s a real problem at work here too. Theologians obviously want to make use of philosophical work but don’t necessarily have the time, training, or inclination to work through all the arguments and counterarguments. I’ve noticed, for instance, that Wittgenstein looms large in a lot of contemporary theology, often functioning in a similar appeal to authority kind of way (“As Wittgenstein has shown us…” etc.).

    After all, argument has to stop at some point since you can’t justify every premise in your reasoning – as Aristotle has shown us! 😉 – but philosophers and others are understandably unimpressed by theology that takes controversial philosophical claims as given.

  • Wolterstorff on religion, liberty, and democracy

    The other day I was browsing my iTunes library and came across this talk by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff on religious grounds for political liberty and democracy that I had apparently downloaded and then promptly forgot about. So I finally listened to it and it’s quite good. One of the points that Wolterstorff makes which, I think, bears repeating, is that “neo-traditionalist” critiques of liberalism (he specifically calls out MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank) often seem to be aiming at a certain theory of liberalism (e.g. Rawls’) and not life as it is actually lived in liberal democratic socieities. Wolterstorff argues that they consequently miss the mark a lot of the time and that a justification for liberal democracy can be given that isn’t committed to a theory like Rawls’.

    It’s a bit long, but also free.

  • Bernard and the Reformers

    Interesting post (via Brandon) on Bernard of Clairvaux’s influence on Luther. See also this post on Bernard and Calvin at the same site.