A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Hopeful Christocentric universalism

    I’ve been re-reading Carl Braaten’s Principles of Lutheran Theology – it’s really a good read and a great encapsulation of some classic Lutheran themes.

    One of the best chapters is the one on The Christocentric Principle. Here Braaten discusses the work of Christ and its implications.

    He recognizes that soteriology has fallen on hard times, especially with a shift from an otherworldly to a more this-wordly focus. Liberation and other political theologies have taken their cue from the story of the Hebrews in the OT, especially the Exodus, as the paradigmatic act of God’s liberation for his people.

    However valid this insight might be, Braaten thinks that it is at best a partial account of salvation and shortchanges the gospel. Liberation, understood as political praxis has two major shortcomings: it shifts the burden of providing salvation from God to human beings. It is at best synergisitc and at wost Pelagian. Secondly, it doesn’t sufficiently reckon with the enemies of human life and flourishing that go beyond the structural injustice and political oppression. “[F]or all the liberating praxis in history can do nothing to produce love and freedom and can do nothing about human bondage to sin and death” (p. 78).

    Instead, Braaten contends, Christians need to hold on to the cosmic and universal signficance of Jesus. “The most important notion, common to preaching, piety, and dogmatics, is that ‘Christ died for us.’ This is the sin qua non of every doctrine of atonement.”

    He goes on to say:

    In dying for us, Jesus did not die instead of us, for we all still have to die. In suffering for us, he did not suffer instead of us, for we all have to suffer. Yet he represents us before God. He speaks for us when we are silenced by death. He claims that each one of us is unique, indispensable, and absolutely irreplaceable even though the world treats us as expendable and exchangeable and as mere statistical units. Here we have the solid ground of personal identity free of charge, while people are madly searching for security in a supermarket full of answers with high price tags. In this world in which the value of individual human beings is becoming infinitesimally low, Jesus is our representative in his life and in his vicarious death and in his victorious resurrection.

    Faith is an act of letting Jesus be our representative. Because he died for us, we never die alone without representation, without hope for personal identity beyond the grave. We will never have to die alone on a Godforsaken hill outside the gate. We can die in a communion of his love, in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins, with undying hope for resurrectoin and eternal life. Because Jesus died the death of the sinner as the sinless one, assuming our lot by his love, he can be our representative. Because he died the death under the law as the man of love, full of life to share and taking time for others, he can be our representative. He can be our representative because, in being raised from the dead, he was approved by God as having the right credentials to be the ambassador of the human race. (pp. 72-3)

    This seems similar to what some theologians have described as “inclusive substitution.” Jesus doesn’t die instead of us so much as he enters into our condition and transforms it. We still have to die, but death has been transformed; it need no longer be a source of terror and hopelessness.

    Braaten goes on to discuss the universal implications of Jesus’ saving death and resurrection. He acknowledges that Christians have to take account of the other great religions of the world in a way that wasn’t always clear to Christians in the past. However, he also doesn’t think that Christians can sacrifice the uniqueness of Jesus as God’s “only saving bridge to the world.”

    He identifies two unsatisfactory positions about salvation. There’s the old-fashioned view which requires as a condition of salvation that one be a member of the Church in good standing (the traditional Catholic view) or that one have explicit faith in Jesus (the conservative Protestant view). Both of these variations consign possibly the majority of the human race to eternal damnation by God’s sovereign decree. Then there’s the modern pluralism that sees all the great religions of the world as equally valid means of attaining salvation (the position of someone like John Hick).

    Braaten points out that the first view, held by traditionalist Catholics and conservative Protestants has already been forced to create various loopholes (for infants, virtuous pagans, the Old Testament patriarchs, etc.) and thus isn’t as rigorous as it first appears.

    The second view frankly sacrifices the universal significance of Jesus, treating him essentially as one potential savior among many. This is hardly compatible with the main thrust of the New Testament witness, which sees Jesus not simply as the savior of a small band of followers, but as the cosmic Christ and Lord of all.

    Parenthetically, it’s always seemed to me that the “hard pluralist” position claims to know a lot more about the divine than seems to be justified. If particular religious traditions are relativized in their truth claims, on what grounds does the pluralist claim to know that God/the divine can be reached by any of these channels? It seems to me, rather, that Christian assurance of God’s good will is rooted firmly in the revelation of God in Jesus, which requires the kind of robust Christology and doctrine of the Atonement that is anathema to pluralists.

    In Braaten’s view, a Christian hope for the salvation for all people has to be firmly rooted in the person and work of Christ. “The Christian hope for salvation, whether for the believing few or the unbelieving many, is grounded in the person and meaning of Christ alone–not in the potential of the world’s religions to save or in the moral seriousness of humanists and people of goodwill or even in the good works of pious Christians and church people, who perhaps are compulsively believing too many things and going to church more than is good for them[!]” (p. 82).

    It’s important to note, I think, that Braaten is also ruling out what we might call the modern “inclusive” Christian view that wants to hold on to the uniqueness of Jesus, but nevertheless holds that everyone who “does their best” can be saved. This ends up being semi-Pelagian at best. If all I need to do is the best I can, what need is there for a savior in the first place? This is precisely the attitude that Luther railed against – the view that God would give his grace to those who “do what is in them.”

    Lutherans have traditionally not followed Calvinists in holding to double predestination and limited atonement. However, there is an unresolved tension there in that the implication of monergism (human beings don’t contribute to their salvation; all is a gift from God) and unlimited atonement would seem to be some form of universalism. After all, if Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for the sins of all, and we can do nothing to secure that salvation for ourselves, and God doesn’t predestine to reprobation, then it seems like all will be saved.

    The traditional response has been to say that God predestines for salvation but not perdition. But it’s far from clear that this is more than a verbal distinction. What we might say, though, is that the mysteries of the divine will remain permanently inscutable to us, at least conernign these matters.

    Braaten writes:

    Will, then, all people be saved in the end? We do not already know the answer. The final answer is stored up in the mystery of God’s own future. All he has let us know in advance is that he will judge the world according to the measure of his grace and love made known in Jesus Christ, which is ultimately greater than the fierceness of his wrath or the hideousness of our sin. (p. 84)

    This has always seemed to me like the best answer. We hope that all will be saved, but that hope rests in Christ, not in us.

  • Home in DC and Back to Wittenberg?

    We’ve successfully made the move from Boston to Washington DC! Actually, we’ve been here since last Saturday. Our place is a scant seven blocks or so from the Capitol and in a very cool neighborhood. My wife is starting a new job next week, hence the move. Yours truly has now joined the ranks of the “telecommuting.”

    I’m looking forward to getting to know DC, a city I’ve always enjoyed visiting. And as someone who has a bit of a love-hate relationship with politics it should be stimulating to live here during the next year or so.

    This Sunday I imagine we’ll start visiting churches. Despite our good experiences over the last year with the Anglicans I think we’ll probably initially scout out some of the local ELCA congregations. I don’t think Anglo-Catholicism quite “took” for either one of us, though I do feel like I’ve benefited greatly from certain aspects of Anglo-Catholic spirituality. In particular I’ve developed a budding devotion to the Blessed Virgin, not something that Lutheran churches tend to be very big on!

    Still, the Christ-and-gospel-centeredness of Lutheranism at its best, along with the distinctive Lutheran themes of justification by faith, simul justus et peccator, and the Law/Gospel dialectic still seem to me to best capture a lot of what I think Christianity is all about. Of course, most people don’t find a church home based exclusively or even primarily on theology, but I’m hoping we can find a sound Lutheran community here.

    Finally, we are, alas, still running on a dial-up connection until next week, so no Friday metal today.

  • Who is my neighbor?

    *Christopher has posted the text of a talk he recently gave on Christianity and the environment. It’s terrific stuff, with a very Lutheran and Benedictine flavor.

    I think that rooting our ethics (including our environmental ethics) in our response to what God has first done for us is exactly right and it’s one of the insights of Reformational Christianity that I resonate the most with.

    Andrew Linzey has written that one of the things that Christians can contribute to the movements for animal and environmental well-being is a sense of our solidarity in sin and our dependence upon grace. This can provide a powerful counterweight to temptations toward self-righteousness, as well as a motivation for doing good without falling into despair or utopianism.

  • Fraser: against centralization

    Giles Fraser writes (perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek?) about his recent “turn to the Right”:

    Over the past few months, I have had something of a conversion to the Right. I no longer believe that the Left is capable of delivering on its progressive promises. I no longer trust the Left to sustain an inclusive vision of human togetherness. The culture wars in global Anglicanism have brought me to this.

    The trouble with the Left is that it is always looking for the big picture, the overarching narrative of human community ā€” hence big government. The problem is that the grand plan frequently involves casualties and betrayals. Ordinary people are squashed in the search for a utopia. But, because the cause is so noble, the casualties are easily justified. There is nothing more dangerous than people who are convinced of their own virtue.

    The latest grand plan for Anglicanism is called the Covenant. The Primates of the Communion have fallen out, and have refused to share communion with each other. Their answer to this situation is that we vote them more decision-making power. It is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. But, because these Primates have whipped up an atmosphere of panic, they are persuading some people that theological martial law needs to be imposed.

    My turn to the Right persuades me that Anglicanism does not need bigger church government. It does not need a new internationalism imposing uniformity top-down from a committee of Primates. My text is 1 Samuel 8: God instructs Samuel to tell his people that if they put too much power in one place, it will return to bite them. ā€œWhen that day comes, you will cry out because of the king that you have chosen; but the Lord will not answer you.ā€

    To the extent that I take an interest in intra-Anglican ecclesiastical conflicts (which is to say: not that much), I’m generally with Fraser here. I’m very cautious of imposing some kind of ecclesiastical “big government” as he puts it. And it strikes me as more than a little bit ironic that Anglicans would be in a rush to institute a centralized form of church governance given the origins of Anglicanism.

    It’s also ironic, however, that, at least in recent US history, the nominal party of the Right has been characterized by increasing centralization. I was very much convniced by the kind of anti-centralization arguments offered by conservative and libertarian thinkers when I was first exposed to their ideas. It’s just that I don’t see that understanding much reflected in the current GOP.

  • Economics as if people (and other living things) mattered

    I’m in Indianapolis visiting family, and one of the things I like to do whenever I’m here is make a trip to Half Price Books.

    Yesterday I picked up a copy of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by World Bank economist Herman Daly and process theologian John Cobb.

    My views on economics have been in flux for the past few years. I was at one time attracted to the libertarian exaltation of the free market, but I’ve become increasingly convinced of the limitations of that view.

    The conservative side of me is skeptical that a system based on acquisitiveness can really be conducive to virtue, especially as the logic of the market threatens to take over more and more areas of life. The liberal side of me is unconvinced that the rising tide will really lift all boats, at least at a rate fast enough to forestall ecological disaster. As I’ve become more interested in environmental issues I’ve been exposed to the arguments of those who maintain that unlimited growth is a dead end, literally.

    Daly and Cobb seem to be following in the footsteps of thinkers like E.F. Schumacher. They embrace the market and recognize that central planning is unworkable, but they also want to situate the market within a social and moral framework that respects the integrity of communities, both national and more local ones.

    In this respect their project seems to hark back to the decentralized “humane economy” of conservative Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, a thinker I admire a lot. Their goal is to rethink economic policy in a way that treats human beings as more than an abstract homo economicus, as well as being sensitive to what, following Wendell Berry, they call the “Great Economy” of all life on Earth.

    I’ve only read the introduction, but I’m eager to see where Daly and Cobb go with their project and will probably post more on these ideas as I go.

  • Creatures of the Same God

    I’m excited to see that Anglican theologian Andrew Linzey is publishing a new book by this name. It looks like it will build on his earlier work on animal theology and develop it in some new ways.

    Unfortunately, I don’t see any indication that it will be available here in the US upon publication, and it appears to be a fairly pricey university press publication.

    I reviewed Linzey’s Animal Theology here.

  • Eugene McCarraher on Hitchens

    I wrote a while back that I’d like to see Christopher Hitchens debate a serious Christian thinker. We may have found our man.

  • “May the Force be with you.” “And also with you!”

    Last night I gave a presentation on “The Gospel According to Star Wars” under the auspices of our parish’s “Theology on Tap” series. This barmy idea was cooked up by me and our curate after a couple of beers at last summer’s parish picnic, but I think it went well all things considered. The people attending seemed to enjoy it and there was some good discussion afterwards.

    You can see the text I used as the basis of my presentation here. Regular readers with good memories may recognize some of the ideas as having germinated in this post.

  • On almost being liturgically indifferent

    See here for a well-informed (my comment excepted) discussion on things liturgical in light of the rumored forthcoming liberalization of the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass in the RCC. Obviously Protestants don’t directly have a horse in this race, but as Derek points out what the RCC does tends to affect Protestant bodies.

    I admit that I am still quite the liturgical philistine. As a parishoner at what is widely considered to be the flagship parish of Anglo-Catholicism in America it’s still very much a matter of casting pearls before swine in my case. šŸ˜‰

    We still gravitate toward the Rite II Sung Mass rather than the High Mass in Rite I, due to the greater prevalence of congregational singing and participation. Maybe the sign of a true Protestant is that you have a hard time imagining a church service without lots of hymn-singing! I’ve certainly met some people whom I affectionately refer to as “liturgical fascists” – they genuinely seem to believe that the High Mass is objectively superior to any other possible service.

    For my part I think C.S. Lewis’ self-description fits me pretty well:

    [M]y whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is being snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to acquire the trained habit — habito dell’arte. (Letters to Malcolm, p. 5)

    Of course Lewis didn’t live to see some of the more banal, not to mention heretical, liturgies that have been inflicted on long-suffering Christian people in the last thirty years or so. Still, I can’t get too excited about arguments over liturgy, though of course I want worship to be reverent, reflect sound doctrine, etc. I definitely have my preferences – I probably feel most at home in a highish traditional Lutheran service that many Anglicans would probably consider pretty middle-of-the-road. But it’s not a hill I’m particularly willing to die on.

    I am glad that there are smart people like Derek, et al. who give this stuff serious thought since they’ll be the ones influencing the shape of worship for the rest of us in the future!

  • Modest natural theology and epistemic pluralism

    At the suggestion of Andy and Thomas I started reading some John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, this weekend. I picked up his Belief in God in an Age of Science, the only title of his they had at our library. It’s a collection of lectures Polkinghorne gave at Yale in 1996, with some additional material and so far (only twelve pages in) it’s good stuff.

    In the first chapter Polkinghorne discusses what he calls the “new natural theology.” There are two aspects of the physical world, Polkinghorne thinks, that provide “hints” of the existence of God. The first is the fact that our minds are fitted to understand the deep structure of the physical universe and that this structure can be expressed in elegant mathematical forumlas. “This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty” (p. 2).

    Polkinghorne rejects as implausible the view that our ability to comprehend the fabric of the physical world and express it in the language of mathematics is a mere by-product of our evolutionary development:

    No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have moulded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded by pressures for survival. Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life. (p. 2-3)

    He likewise rejects any “constructivist” account of knowledge which says that we merely project our preference for mathematical reasoning onto the physical world. “Nature is not so plastic as to be subject to our whim in this way” (p. 3). The great discoveries of physics, however aesthetically pleasing they may be, depend on the belief that it is nature speaking to us in revealing aspects of its deep structure.

    The second aspect of the physical world that Polkinghorne holds up as a hint of God’s existence is the purpose displayed in the development of the cosmos as a whole. He concedes that evolutionary biology has seriously undermined the old-fashioned design argument, but points out that the development of the physical world itself seems favorable to the emergence of life at a very deep fundamental level. This is the so-called Anthropic Principle, which refers to the fact that if certain very fundamental physical variables were even slightly different, life, much less intelligent life, would not have developed:

    What we have come to understand is that if this process is to be fruitful on a cosmic scale, then necessity has to take a very specific, carefully prescribed form. Any old world will not do. Most universes that we can imagine would prove boring and sterile in their development, however long their history were to be subjected to the interplay of chance with their specific form of lawful necessity. It is a particular kind of universe which alone is capable of producing systems of the complexity sufficient to sustain conscious life. (p. 6)

    As with the phenomenon of the universe’s “rational transparency,” Polkinghorne recognizes that there are alternative explanations for the life-friendly structure of our universe. One popular way of avoiding recourse to God is to opt for some version of a many-world hypothesis that posits the existence of multiple – or even infinite – universes originating from a single point. On this hypothesis the existence of life-sustaining universes won’t seem special or noteworthy since every possibility will be realized. Polkinghorne rejects various versions of this account on a variety of grounds, regarding the most plausible versions to be insufficient for the job and the others increasingly speculative and ad hoc (see pp. 8-10).

    It’s important to be clear on what kind of status Polkinghorne is claiming for this new natural theology. He writes that “the theistic conclusion is not logically coercive, but it can claim serious consideration as an intellectually satisfying understanding of what would otherwise be unintelligible good fortune” (p. 10). Unlike the older versions of natural theology which sometimes claimed to offer deductive proofs of God’s existence, this more modest version is content to exhibit the “rumors of divine purpose” contained in the physical world. It also, unlike some of the older design arguments, appeals to global, rather than particular, features of the cosmos, on the “character of the physical fabric of the world, which is the necessary ground for the possibility of any occurence” (p. 10).

    Polkinghorne also observes an interesting divide here between physical scientists and biological scientists. “Physical scientists, conscious of the wonderful order and finely tuned fruitfulness of natural law, have shown significant sympathy with the attitude of the new natural theology. Biological scientists, on the other hand, have been much more reserved” (p. 11). He cites Richard Dawkins here, and it’s noteworthy that among the “new atheists,” Dawkins and Daniel Dennett prominently make their case against religious belief by appealing to biology.

    In fact, Keith Ward, in his Is Religion Dangerous? points out that critics of faith misfire a bit when they treat the traditional design argument as the primary reason for religious belief, thinking that in pointing out its shortcomings they are striking at the very heart of reasonable religious belief:

    There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were ‘proofs of God.’ The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where ‘faith’ means belief without any evidence). (p. 92)

    Replace “Immanuel Kant” with “Charles Darwin” and you get an account of one seemingly popular view about the status of faith in a post-Darwinian world. As Ward goes on to point out, there have always been a variety of views about the various arguments for God’s existence and what level of support they provide to belief in God. Plato and Kant himself both offered reasons for believing in a Supreme Good that had little to do with the kind of natural theology popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    Both Polkinghorne and Ward would, I think, refrain from claiming deductive or coercive certainty for the kinds of considerations they bring to bear in support of the view that the structure of the cosmos as we know it points to the existence of God. I suspect both would agree with Diogenes Allen who argues in his Christian Belief in a Postmodern World that “the fact that nature’s existence is unexplained by our sciences and philosophy should lead a thinking, inquiring person actively to consider the possibility that there is an answer to the question and indeed that God may be the answer” (p. 84).

    The thing is that there is rarely going to be a single knock-down argument that is going to convince a person of important, life-altering truths, in religion or elsewhere for that matter. In ethics, or politics, or just in our own personal life decisions and relationships we often rely on converging lines of evidence and consideration rather than a single conclusive line of reasoning. Ward makes this point when discussing the contestability of various worldviews (such as materialism, idealism, theism). Every worldview has advantages and disadvantages over against its competitors in terms of things like clarity, explanatory power, being adequate to our experience, simplicity, consistency with other beliefs, etc. Thereā€™s no single algorithm that can demonstrable show one to be superior to all the others. What we should aim for, he says, is to elaborate our worldviews in ā€œa critical and reflective way, using rational criteria for judgment that are always open to diverse interpretationsā€ (Is Religion Dangerous? p. 97).

    This isnā€™t relativism. Thereā€™s a truth about the way the world is that our beliefs aim at. But weā€™re not given a failsafe process for determining what that truth is. All our attempts rely to some extent on personal judgment in weighing different pieces of evidence, as well as value judgments about what is good and beautiful. There does seem to be an irreducible epistemic pluralism in that reasonable people can come to different conclusions on these matters, even though a realist epistemology affirms that there is a single truth about the way things are.