That’s the only conclusion I can come to after reading things like this.
“Richard Dawkins” is obviously a pseudonym of someone seeking to discredit atheism by associating it with the most ridiculous and childish “arguments” available.
(HT: Richard at Connexions, who insists on perpetuating this charade by responding to “Dawkins” in a reasonable and intelligent manner.)
Eric tipped me off to a great new theology blog, Ipsum Esse, written by a Catholic layman, David Walsh. David recently had two posts that generated some good discussion, one on evolution and the other on the idea of a “cosmic fall.”
Longtime ATR readers will know that these are topics near and dear to my heart. What we might call our “theology of nature” rests at the intersection of a lot of important and fascinating issues (theodicy, human nature, animal suffering, eschatology, creation, etc.!). Most of what follows is an expansion of some comments I left over at David’s site.
In his posts David suggests that the idea of a “cosmic fall” might provide a more satisfying account of the suffering and disorder we seem to see in the natural world. This is because such “natural evil” understood as an inherent feature of reality seems, at least on its face, incompatible with the existence of the loving God Christians believe in. With Ivan Karamazov and David Hart he wants to reject the idea that the evil of the world is instrumental to the acheivement of a greater good. This would seem to make God complicit in, if not the creator of, evil in that God would be choosing evil means to attain his ends.
This flies in the face of a many modern theodicies that take the evolutionary development of the cosmos and life to be a given, resulting in a rejection of some traditional theolgical notions such as death and suffering as the consequence of sin. The evolutionary process is instead seen as the means by which God realizes certain goods, such as the existence of persons who can enter into relationships with God. Consequently, death, predation, and suffering are part of the very fabric of life, at least as it has developed so far.
The “cosmic fall” view, endorsed by Hart, C.S. Lewis, and others, holds that the present state of things is at least in part a result of the malicious acts of supernatural agents who rebelled against God. Somehow they were able to tamper with the fabric of the physical world in such a way that it became diseased and disordered, ceasing to perfectly reflect God’s original intentions for it. Thus the evil in the natural world, such as suffering and death, isn’t God’s fault, but the fault of rebellious angels.
I’ve worried that this view, if taken seriously enough, leads to a kind of quasi-gnosticism. My reasoning is that if what appear to be such fundamental aspects of the natural world are actually the results of a fall, then in what sense can any of creation as we know it be said to be an expression of God’s will? For instance, a cat who isn’t a carnivore would have to have a radically different nature from the one she in fact has. Being a carnivore is part of her “catness.” So, can we say that God created cats? (I realize some readers will be all too ready to agree that cats are creatures of the devil.)
Needless to say, the same applies to people. An evolutionary process that didn’t involve predation, death, and suffering (assuming such a thing could be imagined) would be so radically different from the one we think took place that it’s not clear in what sense we can say that the existence of human beings was intended by God if we accept the cosmic fall hypothesis. Depending on how far back in cosmic history you think such a fall ocurred, virtually everything that currently exists would be a manifestation of a radically distorted nature.
Further, I’m not sure the cosmic fall even works as advertised in getting rid of the need to construct theodicies. David quotes John Milbank as saying “I definitely line up with the die-hards who think that death comes into the world after the fall. And I agree with the nut cases who say, ‘If you abandon that, you abandon Christianity.’ In fact, if you abandon that, then Christianity becomes really a rather nasty sort of doctrine in some ways that is going to get into all sorts of peculiar theodicies and so forth.”
However, it seems to me, that even if death and suffering weren’t part of God’s original plan for creation, we’re still faced with the fact that he has permitted death and suffering to go on for a long time. And in explaining this, aren’t we going to ultimately have recourse to some traditional theodicy strategy, such as the free will or greater good defense? Now, it may be that God is less culpable for permitting evils than choosing them, though at the level of omnipotence this distinction starts to appear less compelling. So, I guess I’m not convinced that the cosmic fall hypothesis, leaving aside what appears to many as its implausibility, even gets God off the hook, so to speak.
But this doesn’t mean that I don’t think there’s a problem here. In the next part I’ll try and dig into this a little more.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
A Thinking Reed 