A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • 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?

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

    The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

    I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

    Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

    “Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

    “…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

    “Am I a Conservative?”

    To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

    This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

    On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

    Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

  • The penal state

    I finally got around to reading this Glenn Loury piece on our scandalous rates of punitive and discriminatory incarceration. Very powerful stuff.

    The theologian William Placher has written some very good stuff on this often-neglected topic. In his book Jesus the Savior he writes:

    Practices like visiting prisoners grew out of the core of Christian faith. After all, Jesus was a crucified criminal. He was not merely punished, one important strand of Christian theology has maintained–he was guilty, for he had taken on our guilt. “For our sake,” Paul wrote, God made Christ “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21)

    […]

    Christ takes our sin, and frees us from it. Some of us may have a more immediate need of rehabilitation, or more need to be prevented from doing harm to others in the short run, but according to Christian faith it makes no sense to think of “distinguishing the innocent from the guilty.” Apart from Christ, we are all guilty. In Christ, we can all be found innocent. We may need to be helped, both by being protected from doing further wrong, and by being helped to be better, but there is no reason to punish anyone. (pp. 153-4)

    If God in Jesus assumes solidarity not only with victims, but also with perpetrators, Christians should be the last ones to adopt the attitude of “Lock ’em up, throw away the key, and forget about ’em!”

  • Pacifism and just war in The Mission

    Last night I re-watched The Mission, one of my all-time favorite movies (with screenplay written by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay of one of my other all-time faves, A Man For All Seasons). Like A Man for All Seasons, The Mission is about conscience and the way we respond to injustice.

    The Mission is the true story of Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America trying to protect the Indians to whom they’re ministering from the unscrupulous machinations of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, with the papacy stuck in the middle

    Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is an idealistic young priest who founds a mission in the high country above an enormous waterfall in a remote part of the jungle. He’s joined by his brother priests including Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert DeNiro), a reformed mercenary and slave-trader who accompanied the Jesuits to the mission as a kind of self-imposed penance for killing his brother (Aidan Quinn) in a fit of jealous rage. Mendoza ultimately has a dramatic conversion experience and becomes a Jesuit, finding a new kind of happiness among the Guaraní Indians.

    The Indians are running self-sufficient communal plantations where the profits are shared and reinvested in the community, but have a somewhat precarious existence under the protection of the church. The Portuguese would like nothing better than to expropriate the Guarani’s lands and enslave them. As it happens, the missions exist in a dusputed territory recently ceded to the Portuguese by the Spanish, but this means the Guararni are at risk of being subject to Portuguese slavers unless the papal emissary,Altamirano, rules in their favor.

    Unfortunately, the precarious position of the church in Europe, which would only be exacerbated by the Jesuits interfering with the secular powers, leads Altamirano to reluctantly conclude that the missions should be closed down and that all the Jesuits should leave. This, of course, means dispossession and enslavement for the Guarani unless the manage to disappear back into the jungle whence they came.

    Fathers Gabriel and Mendoza both vow to stay with the Guarani, but diverge sharply over their responses to the imminent invasion of the mission by a combined Spanish-Portuguese force. While Gabriel insists that fidelty to their vocations requires Christ-like non-resistance, Mendoza reverts to his military ways, organizing the Guarani for an armed response against the invaders.

    When Mendoza comes to Gabriel to renounce his vows as a priest, Gabriel counters with the theological rationale for not fighting:

    Gabriel: What do you want, captain, an honorable death?

    Mendoza: They want to live, Father. They say that God has left them,
    he’s deserted them. Has he?

    Gabriel: You shouldn’t have become a priest.

    Mendoza: But I am, and they need me.

    Gabriel: Then help them as a priest! If you die with blood on your hands, you betray everything we’ve done. You promised your life to God. And God is love!

    Later, when Mendoza comes to Gabriel asking him to bless his fight, Gabriel responds:

    If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.

    Ultimately (SPOILER) both Mendoza and Gabriel meet their deaths at the hands of the invaders, the former felled in battle, the latter killed while leading his flock in a Eucharistic Procession. Those Guarani who aren’t killed or captured disappear back into the jungle.

    It takes no great leap of insight to recognize that Gabriel and Rodrigo represent two divergent and contrasting Christian approaches to the problem of violence. Gabriel represents Christian pacifism: because God is love, as shown in the example of Christ, Christians can’t shed blood even in what may be a just cause. Rodrigo represents the “just war” ethos: force can be used to defend the innocent when their rights are being aggressed against. There’s no question that the Guarani are innocent and well within their rights, as far as natural justice is concerned, in defending themselves against the European invaders.

    Of course, neither one of these approaches prevails in any concrete historical sense. The armed uprising is crushed and the pacifist priest is slaughtered. Force doesn’t stop the invaders and love doesn’t change their hearts (though there is one scene where even the hardened conquistadors hesitate momentarily before setting fire to a church full of men, women, and children).

    You could say that Rodrigo ignores a cardinal tenet of just war theory: that war should only be waged when there is a reasonable likelihood of success. Unlike the pagan ideal of a noble death, the Christian just war tradition finds no virtue in fighting for a lost cause (Being martyred, of course, is another matter). The ragtag band of Indians, accompanied by three renegade priests, hardly seems likely to fend off a combined invasion by two of the world’s superpowers.

    And yet, at least as the movie portrays it, Rodrigo’s response is understandable, if not justifiable. He sees massive injustice about to be inflicted on the people he loves and wants to fight back and to defend them. And this ideal is hardly unknown in Christendom. Rodrigo could be seen as a kind of knight-errant who, after repenting of his evil ways as a mercenary, uses his skills to champion the cause of the poor and oppressed.

    But the movie’s heart seems to be with Gabriel and his Christ-like non-resistance. The image of him, dressed in white surplice, bearing the monstrance with the Host, leading his flock into the hail of gunfire has a special kind of power. It suggests, at least, that there is a power that love has when it refuses to hate, even if it is trampled underfoot by the world. Rodrigo gives in to the temptation to use violence, and fails anyway. Gabriel refuses to hate or strike back and that does seem to give him a kind of victory. It’s not some sentimental notion that you can love your enemy into loving you back, but that precisely by refusing to hate, love overcomes the powers of this world.

    Bonus trivia: The radical priest Daniel Berrigan has a cameo as Sebastian, one of the priests at the missoin.

  • “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You”: St. Augustine

    Today is St. Augustine’s feast day. He remains one of the most influential, as well as controversial, figures in the history of Christianity. Some blame him for all that’s wrong with “Western” Christianity: its alleged obsession with sin, legalism, hangups about sex, the frightful predestinarian picture of God, etc. Some of these charges are caricatures, others have (IMO) some truth to them.

    augustine11.jpg

    But, despite his mixed legacy, Augustine made more lasting contributions to the church than virtually any other single theologian. He formulated a truly Christian metaphysics that made the distinction between created and uncreated being (rather than, say, spirit and matter) the fundamental ontological distinction, while insisting that creation is fundamentally good. He struggled for the priority of grace over Donatist legalism and Pelagian moralism. He accepted some of the best insights of Platonism and other pagan learning, but more thoroughly Christianized them than many of his predecessors. He worked out a comprehensive (for its time) Christian vision of history. And he set the template for much “Latin” theorizing about the Trinity.

    Here’s the collect for the day:

    O Lord God, the light of the minds that know you, the Life of the souls that love you, and the strength of the hearts that serve you: Help us, following the example of your servant Augustine of Hippo, so to know you that we may truly love you, and so to love you that we may fully serve you, whom to serve is perfect freedom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

    I did a series on Augustine’s Enchiridion early this year.

  • Doubt and atheism aren’t the same thing

    Thomas has an excellent riposte to some of the truly insipid things being said about Mother Teresa in light of some recently publicized letters that make it clear that she (like many, many other saints) struggled with doubt and a feeling of God’s absence.

    Of course, this won’t be news to anyone who read Carol Zaleski’s “The Dark Night of Mother Teresa,” published in that notorious skeptic rag First Things over four years ago. What is surprising is that some atheists have such a shallow understanding of religious faith that they can’t fathom how it can coexist with doubt. Indeed, you might think that someone who could persist in the kind of ministry Mother Teresa was engaged in, even in the absence of the kind of experiential awareness of God she had experienced earlier, was displaying even greater faith.

  • Jesus as sacrament

    It’s not uncommon for theologians to try and explain, or at least illuminate, the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion by making an analogy with the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the Person of Jesus.

    Whether or not this is a case of trying to explain the obscure by the even more obscure, I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to shed some light on the meaning of the Incarnation by making an analogy with the Sacrament.

    For instance, we don’t think of a sacrament as a transaction whereby we receive a certain amount of something called “grace.” Or if we do, there’s a good chance we have an excessively mechanical, or perhaps magical, understanding of what a sacrament is.

    The Book of Common Prayer defines sacraments, of course, as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace” (BCP 857). Grace, in turn, is understood as “God’s favor towards, us, unearned and undeserved,” by which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills” (858). The concrete, visible things – the bread and wine and water – are signs of God’s grace, but not in a merely symbolic way. They actually communicate it.

    So could the Incarnation and Atonement be understood in an analogous way? It’s no secret that theological explanations of the Person and Work of Christ have sometimes been excessively mechanical and transactional, and perhaps thinking in “sacramental” terms could help correct that.

    It is sometimes suggested, at least implicitly, that there has to be some transaction (between God and the Devil, or the Father and the Son) before human beings can be received back into God’s favor. And the way this takes place is sometimes couched in equally transactional terms (the paying of a ransom or debt; the receiving of punishment).

    This view seems to imply, much like the magical or mechanical view of the sacraments, that God must inject grace into the world where it was formerly lacking or absent. But what if we were to re-think the work of Christ along the lines suggested by the BCP‘s understanding of what a sacrament is?

    There is no indication, for instance, that God’s favor is absent from us prior to the sacrament. Rather the sacrament is the means by which God has chosen to make his already existing favor effectually present to us.

    Likewise, we could see the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a sacrament of God’s grace. It’s not as though that grace was absent from the world prior to the Incarnation; the Bible describes Jesus as the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. This would seem to suggest that God’s grace was “there” all along, but that Jesus is the “outward and visible sign” of this grace.

    At first sight this might seem to be a merely “exemplarist” view of the work of Christ – that Jesus is a “mere” symbol of some eternal truth about God’s love. But this is no more necessary than viewing the sacrament as a memorial or symbol of Christ’s presence.

    Most Christians historically have seen the sacrament as the means by which God’s love and favor is specially communicated to us and in which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” And so, in Jesus God does the very same thing: communicates God’s gracious, forgiving, enlightening, and empowering love to us.

    Seeing Jesus as a sacrament may also give us some inkling as to why the Incarnation was in some sense “necessary.” One of the aspects of sacramental Christianity that I’ve always found especially appealing is that it recognizes our status as fleshly, embodied beings.

    The way we enter into fellowship with God is not by some spiritual “flight of the alone to the alone,” leaving behind the encumbrances of bodily existence. Rather, God graciously descends to be with us in a visible, tangible way, albeit in a way that confounds our expectations of what is proper for the Divine Majesty.

    It may be, as Gerhard Forde has said, that as an abstraction God is always a terror to us. Only when God becomes concrete, through God’s self-enfleshment in Jesus, can we receive grace. This doesn’t necessarily mean that God isn’t gracious “outside” of or “before” Jesus; we recognize that other earthly things can be channels of grace besides the dominical sacraments.

    But we believe by faith that God has promised to be present, to communicate grace to us in the bread, wine, and water. And similarly we believe that God has specially communicated the divine love to us in Jesus, even though it may well be possible that grace is available to those who have never heard of Jesus, or who, for whatever reason, have been unable to accept the Gospel.

    I assume some actual theologian may have already tried to explain things along these lines. If so, I hope a reader more theologically informed than I am will let me know (as well as if this is total b.s. ;-))