A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Lutheran Forum online

    Pastor Clint Schnekloth of Lutheran Confessions alerts us to the new website of Lutheran Forum, “an independent theological quarterly for clergy and laity” with authors “belong[ing] to the ELCA and LCMS, as well as Lutheran church bodies across the world.”

    I thought this article by Philip H. Pfatteicher on the new ELCA and LCMS worship books was interesting. Alas, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, which I’ve yet to experience, sounds distinctly inferior to the perfectly good Lutheran Book of Worship. In fact, the LBW isn’t even that old – was a new book really necessary?

    UPDATE: Christopher offers the first of a series of comparisons of ELW and LBW here.

    On a personal note, as we’ve not yet settled on a church home here in DC we’ve attended a Lutheran Church the past two weekends. I have a hunch they are using texts from ELW in the service though there are no books in the pews since some of the language is unfamiliar to me (the liturgy is printed in a bulletin). I don’t have too many complaints so far except there seems to be an excessive allergy to masculine terms for God and a certain flattening of the language of some of the prayers (e.g. referring to God at the Eucharistic prayer as “Source and Goal” – is this kind of abstraction really preferable to the rich, personal language of the Bible? Reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ remark that some of the abstract language about God that came from modern theologians led him to think of God as a vast amorphous force, something like tapioca pudding).

    Another Update: Chris (a.k.a. The Lutheran Zephyr) has some thoughts on ELW and takes issue with Pfatteicher’s criticisms.

  • Questions for Lutherans (and others)

    Thomas at Without Authority posted recently on the raison d’etre of Protestant denominations. He raised the idea, favored by Lutheran theologians like Jenson and Braaten that Lutheranism is, in essence, a reforming movement within the church catholic.

    My question, especially to Lutheran readers, is this: Do you still regard the gospel of justification by faith as the “article by which the church stands or falls”? If so, how do you understand that? And do you see this being lived out in your church (or the church at large)?

    I ask because if the purpose of Lutheranism, as a reforming movement, is to share this insight with the rest of the church, I am by no means convinced that this is what most Lutheran churches are doing, or see themselves doing. And if they’re not, what is the justification (pardon the pun) for their existence? (I should note that I’m speaking here mostly about ELCA churches because those are the ones I’m familiar with, but I’d also be interested in hearing the observations of LCMS or other Lutheran readers.)

  • God and the evolving universe

    I’m glad to see that First Things made Avery Dulles’ article on God and evolution available as this month’s free article.

    Dulles distinguishes three (non-creationist) approaches to evolution: theistic evolutionism which sees the process of evolution as the outworking of inherent properties of the universe established by God, Intelligent design, which claims that certain particular facets of the evolutionary process are inexplicable without reference to a divine intelligence, and what we might call “holism” which maintains that the behavior of higher existents (such as organisms) isn’t reducible to or fully explicable by the laws governing lower ones (such as the laws of chemistry or physics).

    Dulles cites John Polkinghorne as an example of someone in this third school of thought. In his recent book Exploring Reality Polkinghorne makes that interesting suggestion that the human mind’s access to a realm of intelligible universals such as mathematics and logic, goodness and beauty, could itself be a factor in human evolution. That is, he wants to expand the relevant sense of “environment” to include the non-physical “environment” of the intelligible world.

    Polkinghorne writes:

    Once one accepts the enrichment beyond the merely material of the context within which human life is lived, one is no longer restricted to the notion of Darwinian survival necessity as providing the sole engine driving hominid development. In these noetic realms of rational skill, moral imperative, and aesthetic delight–of encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful–other forces are at work to draw out and enhance distinctive human potentialities. (p. 56)

    Obviously Polkinghorne isn’t suggesting that our cognitive access to the non-material intelligible realm alters the individual genetic structure that is passed on to one’s descendants. Rather, it creates

    a language-based Lamarckian ability to transfer information from one generation to the next through a process whose efficiency vastly exceeded the slow and uncertain Darwinian method of differential propagation. It is in these ways that a recognition of the many-layered character of reality, and the variety of modes of response to it, make intelligible the rapid development of the remarkable distinctiveness of human nature. (p. 57)

    The idea here is that human development is explained, at least in part, by the responses we make to this more comprehensive “environment” that includes the realm of intelligible truth, goodness, and beauty and thus isn’t reducible to more materialistic accounts.

    Dulles cautions against the “God of the gaps” thinking that seems to characterize the Intelligent Design school, but he also warns that “Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic colleagues.”

    They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this ­fashion.

    The kind of holism championed by thinkers like Polkinghorne (I’d also place Keith Ward somewhere in this school) seeks to show how God can influence the process of evolution without resorting to the kind of tinkering that ID theorists seem to imply. Some process thinkers, for instance, describe God as “luring” creation toward certain states of being. Polkinghorne (as well as Ward, I think) wants to say that God intervenes in more direct ways too. But I have to say that I find Polkinghorne’s concept of “downward” causation as the input of information by which he tries to explain God’s action in the world pretty darn obscure, at least as it pertains to action on non-living/non-intelligent things.*

    What Polkinghorne, et al. are up to here, it seems to me, is trying to thread a third way between the deism of the theistic evolution crowd and the God-of-the-gaps tinkering of the ID crowd. They base this partly on the idea that modern science has shown the physical universe to have a “looser” causal structure than that imagined by classic Newtonian physics (and more to the point its philosophical popularizers). If physical events are underdetermined by preceding ones, then there appears to be room for God to exert some kind of influence without “violating” the laws of nature. The trick, or so it seems, is to give some account of how God exerts that influence without conceiving of it in some kind of quasi-physical infusion of energy. That’s what I take Polkinghorne to be getting at in talking about causation by means of “information.”
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    *I note that next month the Templeton Foundation Press is reissuing Ward’s Divine Action which seeks to address these questions. That’s one that’s probably worth checking out.

  • Scapegoats, sacrifice, and the “violence” of God

    In addition to the other books I’ve been juggling, this weekend I started reading James Alison’s Raising Abel, which carries the subtitle “Recovering the Eschatological Imagination.”

    Alison is a great writer and offers some startling insights that bring new life to seemingly obscure theological concepts, but here I want to think a little bit about his Girard-inspired reimagining of God.

    For those who don’t know, Rene Girard is a literary critic and anthropological theorist who has been very influential in certain theological circles. Girard’s most well-known contibutions revolve arround his account of human desire, violence, and scapegoating.

    Girard holds that all human desire is mimetic, that is, we desire something because we see someone else desiring it. Our selves are “socially constructed” in that we model ourselves after others, prior to even being aware of it.

    But it’s easy to see how the process of mimesis can breed conflict. If A and B both desire some good which only one can possess, competition and conflict are ready to hand.

    In Girard’s account, the way that conflict and the “war of each against all” is defused is by (subconsciously) directing the violence it creates against an innocent person – the scapegoat. But in order to hide the murder human beings tell stories about why it was necessary for this person to be expelled from the community in order to maintain/restore order. Thus, the way human beings run thing is inevitably tainted by violence against the innocent.

    Girard has applied these insights to the Gospel stories, arguing that in the New Testament we see, for the first time, a scapegoat who is recognized to be innocent. Thus the “scapegoating mechanism” is unmasked and the possibility of living non-violently is made a reality.

    Alison picks up on these Girardian themes and applies them more generally to the biblical story. For Alison, the revelation that comes to us in the Bible, albeit gradually and piecemeal, is that of God as entriely without violence.

    Though there are certainly passages aplenty that seem to involve God in violence, Alison argues that the overall trajectory, culminating in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is toward a vision of God who is utterly “deathless,” that is, has nothing to do with death and violence.

    And Jesus, in living a human life whose imagination is utterly possessed by this vision of God, makes it possible for us to live without reference to death. The reason this is so important is because all our violence is aimed ultimately at securing ourselves against the threat of death. Only when that fear is dispelled (by Jesus’ resurrection) can we begin to live non-violently.

    As I discussed briefly here, Alison sees this “Girardian” reading of the biblical text as having revolutionary implications for our understanding of Atonement. In some accounts of the Atonement the death of Jesus is taken to “satisfy” God’s wrath.

    There is some difference of opinion about whether God’s “wrath” should be understood as a personal anger against sin or more of an impersonal “force” – the inevitable consequences of human sin. But Alison contends that God has nothing to do with wrath.

    “Wrath” in Alison’s telling is our violence. We falsely attribute the violence that seems necessary to maintain order and security to the divine will. To say that Jesus experienced wrath is really to say that, in living a life of love perfectly infused with the vision of God, he fell afoul of our violence, the way by which we maintain order in this world. As I quoted Alison previously:

    God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

    In large part, what the death of Christ accomplishes is a change in our perception. Instead of thinking that the death of the “outsider” is necessary to maintain good order (which is identified with the will of God), the manifest innocence of this victim allows us to see that God is without wrath and that order of death and violence by which we run things here is our creation.

    It’s difficult to deny the power in Alison’s revisioning of traditional theological motifs, however I do worry that, in applying the Girardian interpretive grid to the Bible, he ends up seeing a God that fits the Girardian spectacles. In other words, is the Bible really saying what he says it’s saying? I, at any rate, find it tough to expunge the New Testament of more traditional renderings of “sacrifice” and the idea of God’s wrath.

    Part of what’s going on here is a broader argument in contemporary theology about whether there is any “violence” in God. Much of the criticism of “Anselmian” atonement theologies (often bearing little resemblance to what Anselm actually said), for instance, insists that they picture a God who inflicts, or at least approves of, violence.

    Of course, “violence” is a loaded term and it might be more helpful to talk about “force” and when force may or may not be justified. Also, in some circles, the concept of violence has become absurdly inflated to the point where any exercise of power or influence is deemed “violent.”

    But, even with all these qualifications, it still remains to ask whether the Bible and Christian tradition attibute “violence” to God (understood as some kind of opposition, exclusion, or expulsion) or whether God is characterized simply by unconditional acceptance. In his book Free of Charge, contemporary theologian Miroslav Volf writes about how the events in his homeland in the former Yugoslavia convinced him of the reality of God’s wrath:

    My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. (Volf, Free of Charge, pp. 138-9)

    Volf goes on immediately to point out that, of course, we can’t exempt ourselves from being subject to God’s judgment without inconsistency. The perpetrator isn’t “the other,” but all have sinned and fallen short. And therefore all fall under just condemnation.

    However, contrary to what some modern critics maintain, a properly “Anselmian” account of redemption is more restorative than retributive. Human beings, according to Anselm, are made for felicity with God, but sin necessarily cuts us off from that. Our sin mars God’s creation and so we properly fall under God’s wrath, as Volf says.

    But God doesn’t want to punish us, according to Anselm. Punishment would be a decidedly second-best outcome, and Anselm’s God never does what is second-best. So God, in order to bring to completion his intentions for creation restores fallen humanity in the person of Jesus. This restored humanity is no longer the object of God’s wrath and the same goes for any who are incorporated into it (by “pleading Christ’s sacrifice”).

    And yet, there is no question that God opposes those things which distort or destroy the proper ends of his creatures. The difference is that God will go to whatever lengths are necessary to see his creation brought to fulfillment. So, it is perhaps possible to speak of God’s “violence” in that God will exclude from creation all that which threatens to destroy it.

    Whether or not this is a pernicious form of violence is, of course, disputable. But it seems to me that “non-violence” shouldn’t be an a priori axiom that dictates the shape of theology, but rather theology should shape our understanding of violence and when, if ever, violence is justifiable.

    I’m not sure Alison is guilty of this kind of “a priorism” (for starters, I’m only half-way through the book!), but it does seem to be a danger for theologians when they use an interpretive scheme to sift what counts as a genuine revelation of God.

  • All dogs go to heaven

    Well, Luther thought so.

  • August reading notes

    Some highlights from the past month:

    I blogged a bit about Keith Ward’s latest, Re-Thinking Christianity here, here and here. Ward continues his streak of intelligent, accessible theology that straddles the popular and the academic. The takeaway lesson from RC is that there isn’t exactly an unchanging core of doctrine, but that Christianity has changed throughout its history, sometimes in quite radical ways. And yet, Ward doesn’t draw the conclusion that therefore Christianity is a sham; he maintains that the history of Christianity is properly seen as an ongoing response to the God disclosed and incarnate in Jesus.

    Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals is an earlier work (published in the late 80s) that anticipates many of the themes in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel, but it delves more into the underlying assumptions of his theology: creation as gift with intrinsic value, God as fellow-sufferer and redeemer of all creation, animals as bearers of “theos-rights.” As such it’s a bit more systematic and synoptic, while being a relatively easy read. A good place to start for someone looking for an “animal-friendly” take on Christianity, though the conclusions Linzey draws are quite radical.

    I’m still working my way through George Monbiot’s Heat. Monbiot is both extremely pessimistic about the dangers of climate change and optimistic that it’s possible to actually cut our carbon emissions by the requisite 90% or so while still retaining something like a modern industrial economy. Monbiot is a very engaging writer, willing to admit when he’s not sure about something, unafraid to take on shibboleths, including those of environmentalists, and passionate about his cause. I may post some more about this in the near future.

  • Subverting sacrifice

    In comments here Rick Ritchie and I were discussing the ways in which the Christian story may or may not subvert or transform conventional notions of “sacrifice.”

    Part of what I find so appealing about Christianity is the way it turns upside-down our “natural” expectations about the meanings of things like power, glory, love, etc. Instead of a God who lords it over us from a distant heaven above, we’re shown a God who comes down to us in the form of a “suffering servant.” Sometimes we forget what a radical concept that is and try to shoehorn this story into more conventional “religious” categories. This is what I at any rate understand Luther to be getting at when he talks about the “theology of the cross.”

    Anyway, my thinking and reading on the matter has led me to the same conclusion when it comes to the question of “sacrifice.” The “religious” idea of sacrifice is that we humans provide something satisfying to God in order to get into his good graces. This can be understood in “primitive” terms (literal sacrifices – human or animal) or in more “refined” ethical terms (we’re good so God rewards us).

    But Christianity turns this on its head in a number of ways: God initiates the sacrifice by coming to rescue us from our sin and folly, much like the gracious father who rushes out to embrace his prodigal son. And God, rather than demanding sacrifice from us as the “price of admission” to his love, actually sacrifices himself. He “takes our place.” Rather than insisting that sinners be made into saints before entering into fellowship with them, he enters into fellowship with them resulting in their sanctification (Anders Nygren says this is the essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, but I’m sure that’s not entirely fair), paying the price for creating the possibility of fellowship himself.

    Now, clearly certain Christians have tried to apply the standard “religious” idea of sacrifice to what happens in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is, God is pictured as requiring a sacrifice before he can forgive our sins, and this sacrifice is provided by the death of Jesus. But, as many have pointed out, since this sacrifice originates in the will of God and in God’s love for us, it’s far from clear it was “required” in the sense of a prerequisite for forgiveness.

    Moreover, is this “religious” view of sacrifice sufficiently radical in appreciating what God does? I’ve been meaning for a while to dig into the work of Catholic theologian James Alison. He came up again in a sermon I heard this weekend, and yesterday I finally sat down and read his article “Some thoughts on the Atonement.” Alison, building on the thought of Rene Girard, contends that God’s work in Christ subverts and explodes what he calls the “Aztec” view of sacrifice (i.e. what I’ve been calling the standard “religious” view), and that this radical reconfiguring of sacrifice is presaged in the rite of Atonement from Leviticus.

    I can’t do justice to Alison’s argument, but I think what he’s getting at, if I understand him, does capture some of the radical topsy-turvyness that I’ve been talking about. Alison talks about the story of David handing over the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be executed as an expiation for their father’s sins against that people. He continues:

    The interesting thing about [this story] is that it reminds us of what we often forget: the language of expiation. Here King David is expiating something, offering propitiation to the Gibeonites. In other words, the Gibeonites have a right to demand vengeance. Can you remember where this passage comes into the NT? St Paul seems to know about this: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32) Do you see what St Paul is playing with there? St Paul is saying that God, unlike King David, did not seek someone else as a stand-in sacrifice to placate us, but gave his own son to be the expiation, putting forth the propitiation.

    In that text, who is propitiating whom? King David is propitiating the Gibeonites by means of Saul’s sons. God is propitiating us. In other words, who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. That is the purpose of the atonement. We are the angry divinity. We are the ones inclined to dwell in wrath and think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again. This turns on its head the Aztec understanding of the atonement. In fact it turns on its head what has passed as our penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which always presupposes that it is us satisfying God, that God needs satisfying, that there is vengeance in God. Whereas it is quite clear from the NT that what was really exciting to Paul was that it was quite clear from Jesus’ self-giving, and the “out-pouring of Jesus’ blood”, that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

    I’m not sure I’d go all the way with Alison’s Girardian analysis here, but this is the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote that “I wonder how much of that language [of sacrifice, expiation, etc.] has its meaning radically subverted by the event of God becoming incarnate and suffering? For instance, sacrifice is usually understood as humans offering something to God in order to assuage the divine anger. But here God provides the sacrifice, which seems to at least call into question the transactional connotations that the language of sacrifice often carries.”

  • Christ the center

    As I had the day off yesterday with nothing much to do, I decided to spend a couple of hours at the National Gallery of Art, just a 15 minute or so walk from our place. It’s always been one of my favorite places in DC, going back to when I used to come here on trips during college.

    One painting that particularly struck me this time around was “The Baptism of Christ” by “The Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altar,” sometimes referred to as the last Gothic painter of Cologne.

    As the informative web page for this painting says, the Master “combined the naturalism of artists in the Netherlands with the abstract, otherworldly qualities of earlier German painting.”

    One thing I love about this painting is the motley assortment of saints that surrounds the central image. You’ve got St. George perched on the corpse of his dragon, some monk-looking guy with a knife plunged into his back, some bearded ogre-looking dude with another weird little guy sitting on his shoulders. A nice reminder that the church truly is “catholic,” or “it takes all kinds.” Not to mention that the communion of saints is properly oriented around Christ as its center.

  • Catholicism, vegetarianism and the conscientious omnivore

    Bernard Prusak, who teaches at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, recently published a thoughtful article on Catholicism and vegetarianism at Commonweal (you can also read it at his website here). Dr. Prusak was a practicing vegetarian for a while, but gave it up partly because he became convinced that meat-eating was, if not necessary, at least conducive to human flourishing. “Even if we don’t strictly need meat in order to survive, it can help us flourish-and this, I cannot but believe, is good.” This is a more nuanced argument than the usual “eating meat is natural” argument.

    I’m not going to try and adjudicate the debate between which is healthier, vegetarianism or meat-eating and I wouldn’t want to try and lay down any hard-and-fast rules about out. Happily, though, there’s no dearth of resources for living as a healthy vegetarian. I found Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis’s Becoming Vegetarian a helpful resource on vegetarian nutrition.

    The rest of Prusak’s essay is a good examination of various moral arguments about the relative moral status of human and animal life. He’s surely right that Christians should resist arguments for animal well-being that rely on downgrading the moral status of human beings. In particular he engages with the late James Rachels’ argument from Darwinism – the idea that evolution has shown that human life isn’t particularly sacred and that we share more with non-human animals than traditionally thought.

    Prusak points out that one can accept the second of these claims without accepting the first. And, moreover, downgrading the significance of human exceptionalism might well lead us to stop taking morality as seriously as Rachels urges. “Rachels never considers whether there is a connection between belief in human dignity and commitment to the moral life.”

    Indeed, a sense that humans have a special calling to be good stewards of the earth can encourage greater respect for animal life and well-being. Vegetarians and conscientious omnivores can agree that legitimate stewardship requires, if nothing else, respecting the natures of our fellow-creatures. “If the justification for eating meat is that it is natural for us and helps us flourish, consistency requires that we respect in turn the natures of the animals we eat: chickens, pigs, cows, fish, sheep, turkeys, and many others.”

  • Spong’s Jesus

    Ben Myers at Faith and Theology reviews the new book Jesus for the Non-Religious by the notorious John Shelby Spong.

    Dr. Myers’ review is consistent with the impression I’ve long had of Spong’s work: in an attempt to be modern and relevant he evacuates Christianity of everything that makes it remotely interesting and weird and challenging. At that pont why not just sleep in on Sunday morning?