A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • 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.

  • A critical but substantive faith

    William Placher reviews Hitchens’ God Is Not Great at the Christian Century. He’s surprisingly appreciative, though he doesn’t shy from criticism (“The second frustration of reading this book [in addition to the factual errors], at least for a theologian, is that its author seems not to have read any modern theology, or even to know that it exists.”)

    Placher ends with a call for religious “moderates” (for lack of a better term) to make their presence felt:

    Many Americans today are scared of religion. Radical Islamic terrorists threaten the safety of major cities. George W. Bush assures us that God has led him to his Iraq policy. The local schools, under pressure, avoid teaching evolution. The Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles is selling off property to pay victims of priestly sexual abuse. One trembles to think that many people get their picture of faith from the “Christian channels” on television. No wonder religion has, in many quarters, a bad reputation.

    I think many of us—I do not mean just trained theologians, but ordinary folks in churches, mosques and synagogues as well—have found ways to be religious without being either stupid or homicidal. We are, as the cover of the Christian Century puts it, “thinking critically, living faithfully.” Not enough of our nonreligious neighbors know enough about what we believe. We need to speak up.

    Repeatedly Hitchens cites some horrible thing that some religious folks did or said and then notes that mainstream religious leaders did not criticize it. Although I do not always trust his claims, I suspect that in this case he is at least partly right. Too many of us have been too reluctant to denounce religious lunatics, and because of our reluctance we risk arousing the suspicion that we are partly on their side.

    Hitchens ends his book with an appeal to his readers to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars, . . . to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.” Shouldn’t one of the lessons of this book have been that comfortable intellectuals should be more careful of using words like fight? Fundamentalists of one sort or another, after all, urge their followers to fight the evils of secularism and atheism. As the battle lines are drawn between the two extremes, it seems to me that folks like those who read the Christian Century need to put aside our obsessively good manners and shout, “Hey! Those aren’t the only alternatives! We’re here too!”

    I think that mainliners often have an easier time articulating what they don’t believe (we’re not like those fundamentalists!) than what they do. We’re supposed to be “living the questions” as they say. But if Placher is right – and I think he is – this isn’t enough. There needs to be an attractive alternative to the extremes of fundamentalism and strident atheism that is committed to the classic center of Christian faith. Without that the church becomes little more than a weird kind of social club (the Kiwanis with crosses as I believe Chris put it recently), or a cut-rate social service organization.

  • The strangeness of the Bible

    I really liked this review article in Books & Culture of a new book about the Bible and sex. So often we treat the Bible as little more than window-dressing for our preconceived moral or political agendas that we often lose sight at the sheer weirdness of the text. The Bible rarely provides ready-made moral exemplars and tidy solutions. And maybe that’s the way it should be. After all: the Bible’s not about us, at least not directly. It’s about God. So it’s not surprising that we should find some of it rather bewildering. (And this isn’t confined to the Old Testament either as far as I’m concerned; there are plenty of parts of the Gospels that just leave me baffled.)

  • September reading notes

    Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying.

    Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said.

    Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant insights, I don’t think his Girardian analysis does justice to the entirety of the biblical witness. I also feel like he has an allergy to metaphysics and is forced to account for everything Christ does for us in sheerly psychological terms, which seems reductionistic to me.

    Picked up a copy of Gerhard Forde’s Justification by Faith – A Matter of Death and Life for a quarter at a church yard sale. This is vintage Forde – pithy, direct and committed above all to the Reformation insight of justification by faith. Forde stresses the language of death and resurrection as a necessary complement to the more forensic “legal” language we often use to talk about justification. I also read Carl Braaten’s Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls wherein Braaten makes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) robust defense of justification by faith alone. I say surprisingly because of what appeared to me to be his move to a more “catholic” position in recent years. Taken together these two books provide a good picture of what commitment to the principles of the Reformation can look like in the contemporary theological and ecumenical scene.

    Right now I’m working on Reza Aslan’s No god but God, which is both a history of Islam and an argument for a more pluralistic understanding of Islam. Extremely informative and well-written, though at times one does get the feeling that Aslan is whitewashing a bit. He essentially shrugs off Muhammad’s military conquests with “that’s the way things were done then” and gives a rather idyllic picture of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islamic rule. Still, a very interesting book and I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with his argument for why Islamic militants have Islam wrong.

  • Simple music, simple faith?

    I came across this in yesterday’s NY Times: Does Simple Music Form Simple Faith?

    I’m not really sure what to make of it, but I thought I’d pass it along. Essentially, the author asks if beautiful complex music (and other art) can actually be a hindrance to faith:

    The church has reason to fear great beauty, hence the effort to rescue our attention, through plainspoken and deliberately flat-footed modern texts, from the mesmerizing graces of the Latin Mass or the splendid poetry of the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer. I am one small example, having spent the Sunday mornings of my youth in the Episcopal Church allowing Thomas Cranmer’s magical imagery and liquid liturgical responses to roll off my tongue without a thought to God at all.

    It’s not always easy to distinguish the aesthetic and religious impulses, and I’ve met a fair number of Christians who identify refined spirituality with good taste. So, I wonder if he’s not on to something here.

  • By faith, not by sight

    Atheists sometimes describe faith as “believing something without evidence.” But is this the way religious believers understand faith? I don’t think so, but I do think that there’s a kernel of truth here and that it’s important to distinguish between faith and knowledge.

    First it should be noted that there often lurks a polemical and tendentious understanding of “evidence” behind this definition. The kind of evidence being appealed to is usually the sort of measurable, repeatable evidence appropriate to a scientific experiment (and, it has been well-argued that the scientific enterprise itself rests on a certain kind of faith). But much of our life proceeds on “evidence” in a much wider sense, and there’s no a priori reason to allow this kind of methodological imperialism to go unopposed.

    But there is a legitimate point poking out of this straw-man definition. We do distinguish between faith and knowledge, say. Kierkegaard described faith as “the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty” That’s a bit more paradoxical than I’d want to put it, skating toward Tertullian’s “I believe because it is absurd,” but it nicely illustrates the point that faith and knowledge are, in some respects, mutually exclusive. If we knew, we wouldn’t need faith.

    In the Bible, faith has little to do with belief in God’s existence. Mostly it involves trusting God’s promises, believing that God will be faithful and that he will be vindicated and his purposes fulfilled. Abraham is the archetype of faith because he believed God’s promise that he would be the father of a great nation and acted accordingly.

    Often, though, faith involves trusting in God even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Confining ourselves just to the Psalms we often see lamenting that God’s will doesn’t seem to be done on earth: the wicked prosper, the poor and orphaned are oppressed, and God’s people are dragged into exile. And Abraham believed in God’s promise, despite his and his wife’s advanced ages.

    So, in the biblical sense there is a distinction between faith and “sight.” We don’t see Gods’ purposes unambiguously realized in the world, but we trust that they will be, even if we can’t see how. Hebrews says that faith is “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” and St. Paul says that we walk by faith and not sight. But this doesn’t mean that we have no reason for our faith, rather it means that the world doesn’t yet reflect the presence of God in such a way as these things would be obvious to anyone. That state of affairs is associated with the end.

    And I do think that this tension between faith and sight can apply to the question of God’s existence. Some people claim that God’s existence can be proved (or disproved), but, whatever their merits, these arguments have failed to achieve universal assent, even among well-informed disputants. However, I think many people would agree that our experience of the world is religiously ambiguous.

    By this I mean that neither God’s existence nor nonexistence is overwhelmingly obvious. There are certain philosophical considerations that can point to the question of God, such as the sheer existence and order of the universe. There are also, to steal a term from Peter Berger, “signals of transcendence.” I would include here moral, aesthetic, and religious experience of various kinds. But, at least in most cases, these aren’t absolutely compelling on pain of irrationality.

    In other words, it’s possible to interpret the totality of our experience in a theistic or non-theistic way. And I think that in this ambiguous situation we find ourselves in it’s possible for reasonable people to differ on the best interpretation. Faith, in this aspect, is trust that there is a God, not in the absence of evidence, but in the face of evidence that is partial and ambiguous. Like the Psalmist who continues to trust in God even in the midst of the exile, the modern believer trusts in God in her exile in this world.

    Also, faith isn’t just a set of beliefs about the world, but a commitment to a way of life. It does have an essentially “practical” aspect. And, it can, I think, be reasonable to stick to this commitment even during those periods where the beliefs that undergird it seem doubtful (at least I hope so!). In fact, one strain of the Christian tradition has it that following the path of faith will lead to experiences of “sight” which partly confirm the direction that one is traveling in.

    I think that the justification of religious belief ends up being quite agent-relative. There is no algorithm for interpreting the totality of our experience, and each of us will have different particular experiences that we weigh differently, and not in some value-neutral way. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be reasonable debate between adherents of different perspectives, but faith remains (in the words of Keith Ward) “a practical commitment beyond what the evidence would compel any reasonable person to believe” (Pascal’s Fire, p. 223).

  • The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 2

    In the last post I expressed my unease with the notion of a cosmic fall, largely on the grounds that, for it to be radical enough to exculpate God from creating an order shot through with suffering, death, parasitism and predation it would risk creating a gulf between God and his creation. If fallen angels or other spiritual beings are responsible for much of the shape of the created order as we find it, then I worry that we come eerily close to attributing the shape of creation to a kind of malevolent demiurge with God floating distantly in the background.

    Not that I don’t think there’s a real problem here. How do we reconcile the existence of the world as we find it with the existence of a benevolent creator? In his post David refers to Andrew Linzey’s concern that if we take predation to be “natural” then we are less likely to be concerned about animal suffering. (David offers an illuminating comparison with Thomas Aquinas’ attitude toward animals.) And you know I’m a sucker for this stuff.

    And in fact Linzey himself does address this issue and emphasizes the importance of the fall as a reminder that creation isn’t as it should be and is groaning in bondage waiting for its redemption, just as we are. In his book Animal Gospel, Linzey says this:

    What is at stake in the question of the Fall is nothing less than our imagination, that faculty which can help us…to hold “in mind the completeness of a complex truth,” and at the same time our fidelity or–more often than not–infidelity to the moral insights to which it gives rise. In theological terms the complex truth to which this debate corresponds is the dual recognition that God as the Creator of all things must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process–and also the insight that parasitism and predation are unlovely, cruel, evil aspects of the world ultimately incapable of being reconciled with a God of love. (Animal Gospel, pp. 27-8)

    Linzey is right about this in my view. He points out that the denial of this complex truth can have morally abhorrent consequences such as the denial that there is evil in the natural world, that there is possible redemption for nature, that human beings have an obligation to cooperate with God in the redemption of nature, and even that there is a morally just God. If what is, is good, then we have sacrificed any moral standard existing over and above the empirical world to guide our actions.

    But Linzey also provides a hint here of a possible “third way” between merely accepting what is as good and positing a state of perfection “once upon a time.” It’s no secret that many of the ancients valued the notions of eternity and permanence and that more recent thought has emphasized becoming and process. The traditional creation account was often interpreted as God creating a perfect state of affairs whence there was nowhere to go but down. Adam and Eve were sometimes thought of as having virtually superhuman abilities, complete control of their physical faculties, and to enjoy blessedness in the presence of God. Likewise, nonhuman nature was understood to be endowed with fixed (and pacific) natures rather than being part of an ever-changing process.

    But if there’s one respect in which science has influenced a lot of contemporary theology it’s in taking the categories of change and process much more seriously. And this goes beyond process theology which, unwisely in my view, makes change an elemental aspect of God’s being, and thus seems to trap him in the flux of events. But you don’t have to accept the process view of God to recognize that it’s now much more common than it was in the ancient world, or even the world of the Enlightenment, to see nature as fundamentally a historical process.

    If nature is a process, then the idea of an initial state of perfection becomes much less intellgible. If modern cosmologists are right, the initial moments of creation consisted of a super dense infinitesimal speck. To realize the existence of the manifold variety of creatures that exist today required almost unimaginable stretches of time. And life on earth, we think, went through its own process of long development, with earlier lifeforms dying out to make space for later ones. There is no single slice of time that we could identify as the ideal state of unfallen creation. In other words, the universe has a history.

    It might be, then, that the inherently temporal nature of created reality means that its consummation could only occur by means of a temporal process that would necessarily contain states of lesser good. This is what I take Linzey to be getting at when he says that God “must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process….” As the title of the chapter from which the quote above comes from has it, creation is “unfinished and unredeemed.” Linzey is, I think, agnostic about whether there was a historical Fall, but he definitely sees Eden as a symbol of what creation is destined to be. Creation is inherently on its way toward something else.

    Of course, even if that’s right the obvious question is “was this trip really necessary?” Or why the long slog of blood, sweat, and tears to get to the New Jerusalem? And will all that suffering be seen to have been worth it – morally justifiable as Linzey says? Could God not have simply created a state of affairs all at once that was perfect and complete? Is the long arduous process of cosmic and terrestrial evolution necessary to get to where God wants the universe to be?

    Here we get into a very sticky wicket, for the question, in essence, is what kind of universe was it possible for God to create? This may sound like a silly question, for if God is omnipotent, then presumably he could’ve created any kind of universe he wanted. But the Christian tradition of thinking about these things has rarely held that God can do absolutely anything without qualification (though there is a minority report that seems to take this ultra-voluntarist line). It has usually been said instead that, for starters, God can’t do evil, since that is inconsistent with his nature. Also, that he can’t do the logically impossible, not because logic is “outside” of or “above” God but because what is logically impossible is simply not something coherently describable or thinkable.

    With respect to the physical world there is a legitimate question as to how many combinations of physical laws or fundamental physical facts are possible which would give rise to a universe ordered in such a way that the existence of life is possible (or likely). For instance, cosmologists hold, as I understand it, that, were certain fundamental physical constants even slightly different from what they are, the universe would’ve expanded either too rapidly or too slowly for life to develop. Our existence, in other words, is rather more closely tied to the fundamental facts about the physical universe than we might’ve thought. So, if God wanted to get us (not to mention all the other creatures that we know of), it may be that he had to choose a universe very much like the one we inhabit.

    Now you may say, dear reader, that God could simply have created us with a snap of the fingers, so to speak, without going to all that trouble. But I’m not sure that such creatures would in fact be human beings, as opposed to a very well-executed simulation of human beings. Our history and our interconnections to other forms of life on earth, and to the earth itself, are part of what we are as a species. It’s not clear to me that God could get us without the whole messy history that goes along with it. (Incidentally, it’s even more doubtful that he could get you and me specifically since our identities are tied pretty darn strongly to our particular histories.)

    I’m not at all confident that this is right. It may be that there are no constraints on the kind of world God could create and still get all the creatures he wanted in it. But I’m not confident it’s not right either. And if it is, we can at least begin to tell a coherent story where the only means available to God for realizing certain great goods (i.e. the existence of the myriad creatures that populate this universe, including us as intelligent personal ones capable of entering into a loving fellowship with their creator) involve some degree of suffering on the way to realizing those goods. This doesn’t involve God choosing evil means when he could’ve chosen good means, but choosing unavoidable evil as a necessary concommitant (or side-effect) of great good (perhaps not unlike the doctrine of double-effect).

    So, I’m not really sure where this leaves us. On the one hand, a doctrine of a cosmic fall saves God from complicity in evil, but at the cost (or so I maintain) of removing him from much of the process of creation, especially if modern science is correct in seeing all of life as inherently bound up with processes of decay, dissolution, suffering, and death. On the other hand, if we say that God was bound by a finite set of possibilities, thus limiting what kinds of universe he could actualize in choosing to create a universe with life, are we tying God’s hands and diminishing his omnipotence? I’m not totally happy with either option, frankly.