A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Bishop Hanson on the salvation of non-Christians

    This is interesting: an ELCA blogger wrote to Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson about his take on Episcopal Presiding Bishop Schori’s controversial (at least in the hothouse of the blogosphere) remarks on the salvation of non-Christians (via I Am a Christian Too). And Bp. Hanson actually wrote back.

    Bishop Hanson’s reply is very sensible – you can read it here – and he expresses himself with a certain forthrightness and clarity that seem to have been lacking in some of Bp. Shori’s comments.

    But then again, Lutherans have always been better at theology than Episcopalians. 😉

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 9: Redemption, grace and free will

    Having discussed the fall, Augustine begins to turn his attention to redemption. He makes an interesting suggestion at the beginning of Chapter 9 (later echoed by Anselm in Cur Deus Homo) that there is something fitting or even necessary that the angels who fell and are permanently banished from heaven should be replaced by a corresponding number of redeemed human beings. “From the other part of rational creation–that is, mankind–although it had perished as a whole through sins and punishments, both original and personal, God had determined that a portion of it would be restored and would fill up the loss which that diabolical disaster had caused in the angelic society.”

    The problem, naturally, is how a ceratin portion of fallen humanity is to be restored and redeemed. The first point to be established is that human beings are not able to redeem or restore themselves by the exercise of their own free will. This is because, while sin was freely chosen by our first parents, the consequences of that sin have rendered all subsequent generations incapable of exercising their free will to choose the Supreme Good. “For it was in the evil use of his free will that man destroyed himself and his will at the same time.” Humans are in bondage to sin and must be freed by some outside power if they are to avoid sin:

    He serves freely who freely does the will of his master. Accordingly he who is slave to sin is free to sin. But thereafter he will not be free to do right unless he is delivered from the bondage of sin and begins to be the servant of righteousness. This, then, is true liberty: the joy that comes in doing what is right. At the same time, it is also devoted service in obedience to righteous precept.

    Let’s stop here to note that Augustine has distinguished two different senses of freedom at this point. The first is what we might call metaphysical freedom or the “freedom of indifference;” this is the freedom to choose A or B, right or wrong. This is the freedom Adam and Eve had which they misused and consequently lost (along with the rest of humankind). Fallen human beings are no longer free, on Augustine’s view, to choose the good, but can only choose to sin.

    The second kind of freedom — “true liberty” — is the freedom of a self that is oriented toward the Supreme Good and thus takes joy in doing the right thing. It’s one thing to choose the right thing against countervailing inclinations, but another to wholeheartedly will the good, without even, we might say, the possibility of choosing evil. This is presumably the kind of freedom that the angels and saints in heaven enjoy.

    Our predicament, to which grace is the solution, then, is that we are incapable of moving from the state where our wills are broken and in bondage to sin to the state where we take joy in the good. On the one hand, Augustine writes, we have the witness of Scripture that “…it is God who is at work in you both to will and to do according to his good will” (Phil. 2.13) and “It is not therefore a matter of man’s willing, or of his running, but of God’s showing mercy” (Rom. 9.16) – all comes from God’s grace. And yet, “it is obvious that a man who is old enough to exercise his reason cannot believe, hope, or love unless he wills it, nor could he run for the prize of his high calling in God without a decision of his will.” It seems that everything depends on God and everything depends on our will.

    The resolution of this seeming impasse for Augustine is that it is ultimately God who disposes the human will. God’s mercy “predisposes a man before he wills, to prompt his willing.” In other words, whether we can believe, hope, and love depends upon a prior act of God, who mercifully turns the will of the elect away from sin. God doesn’t save sinners against their will, but through their will.

    The worry, of course, is that this risks making human beings mere puppets. If it depends on God to dispose my will in order for me to receive grace, then how can I possibly be blamed for not receiving it? But as we’ve already seen, Augustine holds that the entire human race is already justly held blameworthy for Adam’s sin and condemned to eternal death. So, God has no obligation, in strict justice, to save any human being. Therefore any mercy he shows is sheer gravy, so to speak.

    I imagine many readers would be very unhappy with this scenario. I certainly find it troubling. But I think we should try and understand why Augustine takes this position. Clearly one major factor is Scripture. Like it or not, the God of the Bible does not seem to adhere to liberal egalitarian notions of justice. He chooses to save some and not others, he hardens hearts, he heals people not because they deserve it, but in order to manifest his glory. He is no respecter of persons.

    Another factor, I think, is Augustine’s strong notion of God’s sovereignty. This is related to his anti-dualism and anti-Manichieism. There is no factor in creation which constrains God to act in one way or the other. God disposes events the way he sees fit. Modern theology, acting out of a liberal-humanistic impulse, has often sought to qualify God’s sovereignty in some way to avoid some of the harsher implications of Augustinian predestinarianism (as well as to provide a more adequate theodicy). Process theology is the clearest example of this: in order to make room for human freedom God’s power is limited. Whether this can be squared with the Christian witness is another matter.

    Other contemporary theologians like William Placher and Kathryn Tanner have tried to articulate an understanding of God’s sovereignty that is “noncompetitive” with the agency of finite beings. If God is thought of as creatures’ power of being rather than an agent acting within the same causal nexus as those beings, it becomes possible to affirm both divine sovereignty and creaturely freedom. Thus the relation between creature and creator needn’t be seen as some kind of zero-sum game.

    I can’t do justice to this position here, but one worry I have is that this view has difficulty articulating what it might mean for God to act in creation in a special or extraordinary way, i.e. if every event is a manifestation of the divine power, what distinguishes events of particular religious significance? Tanner, for instance, in her brief systematic theology, has very little to say about the Resurrection, and I wonder if part of the reason is that she has trouble fitting “mighty acts of God” into her conceptual scheme.

    Getting back to Augustine, though, one of his lasting contributions is to locate the source of sin in the human will. For much ancient thought the source of evil was ignorance and/or the weight of the material world dragging down the spritual soul. Augustine’s view, by contrast, firmly defines sin as a spiritual malady. It is precisely our “higher” spiritual nature that is capable of the greatest evil. The “sins of the flesh” look pretty mundane in comparison. Our predicament goes much deeper than any shallow self-help gospel can reach.

  • ISG museum

    This Saturday we went with some friends to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum here in Boston. I was very taken with this piece by Fra Angelico of the Death and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Unfortunately the image doesn’t do justice to it – the gold and blue are so bright and vibrant – really lovely. Here’s a fairly decent detail.

    Interestingly, it also turns out that Mrs. Gardner donated the stone reredos behind the High Altar of our parish.

  • My beef with “My Beef with Vegetarianism”

    It’s no secret that vegetarians and animal rights proponents usually don’t get much respect. I recently saw a “60 Minutes” segment featuring Andy Rooney, that embodiment of crusty old conventional wisdom, where he began by saying “Like most people, I think vegetarians are crazy.” And in fairness that stereotype may even be somewhat justified.

    Even on the Left, home of unpopular causes on behalf of marginalized and oppressed beings, animal rights folks are often the red-headed stepchildren. Case in point is this review in the Nation of a new book on the history of vegetarianism which repeats several standard anti-vegetarian arguments that fall apart under examination.

    After reviewing the book’s discussion of the history of vegetarianism in Europe, the reviewer, Daniel Lazare, writes:

    Unfortunately for vegetarianism, however, it was also during the Enlightenment that the ideology’s shortcomings grew more obvious. The most difficult had to do with ethics. Vegetarianism is most fundamentally about the importance of not taking life other than under the most extreme circumstances. But cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler. A tiger or wolf does not knock its prey senseless with a single blow to the forehead and then painlessly slit its jugular; rather, it tears it to pieces with its teeth. Freeing an animal so that it could return to its natural habitat meant subjecting it to a life of greater pain rather than less. This was disconcerting because it suggested that animals might be better off on a farm even if they were to be slaughtered in the end. There was also the fact that human agriculture created life that would not otherwise exist. If people stopped eating meat, the population of pigs, cattle and sheep would plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish. This was enough to persuade the Comte de Buffon, a freethinker and naturalist, to declare in 1753 that man “seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice” animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place.

    Vegetarians were unsure how to respond. Benjamin Franklin turned anti-meat at one point and for a time regarded “the taking of every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder.” But he had a change of heart when he noticed the many small fish inside the stomach of a freshly caught cod: “Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” But Franklin’s contemporary, the radical English vegetarian Joseph Ritson, wrestled with the same problem only to reach the opposite conclusion. He railed against “sanguinary and ferocious” felines, and when his nephew killed a neighbor’s cat on the grounds that it had just murdered a mouse, he sent the boy a note of congratulations: “Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity.” Vegetarians wanted to knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature’s furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more “humane” regime.

    There are several of the standard arguments hinted at in this passage, but let’s try to separate them out:

    1. The nature is crueler than captivity argument (“cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler”).     Undoubtedly some animals raised in captivity may be better off than they would be in the wild. Although, in the case of factory farmed animals, this isn’t as clear as it might seem. But the main point is that no one I’m aware of is proposing that cows, pigs, and chickens be released back into the wild. It’s true that these animals have been bred to the point that they would likely not survive in the wild; but what most animal rights proponents who favor complete abolition of meat-eating envision is a gradual reduction in the number of these animals as the practices of meat-eating are phased out over time. Despite what the connotations of the term “animal liberation” might seem to imply, I’m not aware of anyone who simply wants to empty all the farms and send the animals into the wild.

    2. The “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it argument” (“man ‘seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice’ animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place”).
    Employed by angry parents everywhere, this argument is so transparently fallacious that I’m surprised people still use it. In having children, you bring into existence life that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Does that give you the right to do whatever you want to them, including killing them if you see a good reason? With respect to animals, it almost certainly doesn’t entail the right to subject them to brief lives of more or less unrelieved suffering.

    Again, regarding the population of farm animals that would would “plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish” if meat-eating were abandoned, this assumes a) the general validity of a utilitarian ethic and b) that the lives of farmed animals actually contain an excess of happiness over suffering, a dubious claim in the case of factory farmed animals. More to the point, it seems to imply an obligation to bring more farm animals into existence, if by doing that one would increase the sum total of happiness. But this seems like a counterintuitive result (and, I would say, shows up one of the weaknesses of utilitarianism).

    There is also the point to be made that what matters is the well-being of individual creatures. Philosopher Mark Rowlands puts it this way:

    One of the consequences of widespread vegetarianism would be a massive reduction in the numbers of these animals. But what’s wrong with this? If, say, there are only 400 cows in the world instead of, say, 400 milliion, why should this matter? In particular, how does it harm any one of the 400 cows? Answer: it does not. Whether it harms any of these cows depends on the individual interests of each cow, and there is no reason to suppose that the interests of an individual cow in any way involve the numbers of others of its kind, at least not as long as there are enough of these others around to provide it with companionship in a normal social setting. […]

    It might be true that the elimination of a species or sub-species is a cause for regret, even if that species has been artificially created by a eugenic selective-breeding regime. But vegetarianism does not require the elimination of species. If we are worried about this, then we can always turn over areas of land — maintained by public funds — for grazing by animals that we currently eat. (Rowlands, Animals Like Us, p. 120)

    3. Finally, the “nature red in tooth and claw” argument (“if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you”). This is a curious argument in that in almost no other area do we find serious, morally sensitive people arguing that human beings should model their behavior on the animal kingdom. However, if that’s not enough to discredit it, it’s worth pointing out that nearly all, if not all, animal carnivores have to eat meat in order to survive, including Ritson’s “sanguinary and ferocious felines.” Human beings, on the other hand, can do quite well on a plant-based diet. So in our case we don’t even have the excuse of necessity (at least in the prosperous West for the most part; I’m not going to argue that there aren’t times and places where human beings might have to eat meat to survive).

    And the notion that vegetarians want “knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature’s furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more ‘humane’ regime,” while perhaps true of some eccentric thinkers, is a rather unimpressive straw man when applied to the majority of vegetarians. I know of no serious contemporary theorist or animal rights group that wants human beings to patrol nature and force the lion to lie down with the lamb. This would be a very silly thing to do since, as I just pointed out, predators have to prey to survive.

    What separates human beings from other animals, by contrast, is that we can choose not to inflict unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures simply to enjoy certain pleasures of the palate. This is reinforced by a point that Lazare makes toward the end of his essay:

    The idea is that instead of reigning supreme over nature, humanity should take its place within nature alongside its fellow animals. Instead of domination, this implies sharing, harmony and other New Age virtues. But the trouble with sovereignty is that it cannot be fragmented or reduced; either it’s supreme and indivisible or it’s not, in which case it’s no longer sovereignty. Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even–dare we say it–to improve nature as well.

    This is true as far as it goes. But it only prompts the inevitable question of what kind of sovereignty humans are to exercies. We certainly have a de facto sovereignty in view of our power to affect and alter the environment (though we may come to see that nature has her own ways of limiting our sovereignty which we might not find too pleasant). And Christians have traditionally believed that we have a de jure sovereignty as God’s viceroys in this world. But insofar as that’s true, the model of sovereignty is none other than God himself, especially as revealed in Jesus, who came to serve rather than be served. Our sovereignty doesn’t exist solely for the sake of our own needs, but for the well-being of all creatures.

    Whether this entails strict vegetarianism is, as far as I can tell, an open question. It seems to me that the argument against industrial or factory-type farming is pretty much open and shut. It’s extremely hard to see what moral calculus can justify inflicting that kind and amount of suffering on animals for the sake of cheap meat.

    Lazare seems to concede this point, but I’m not sure if he sees the implications. He writes:

    No sane person favors unsustainably produced meat. But, tellingly, Stuart [the author of the book under review] does not consider the possibility of meat that is sustainably produced in accordance with the strictest environmental standards. Should we eat less of that also? Or more? Perhaps the issue should not be quantity but quality–not whether we should eat more or less but whether we should eat better, which is to say chicken that tastes like something other than cardboard, turkey that tastes like something other than Styrofoam and so on. Maybe the solution is to reject bland industrial products and demand meat with character, the kind that comes from animals that have not spent their lives in industrial feedlots but have had an opportunity to walk around and develop their muscles.

    What this ignores is the distinct possibility that if we were seriously committed to eating only meat raised sustainably, there would be far less of it available. This is because both that it may not be physically possible to raise nearly the same number of animals in a sustainable fashion and that the resulting meat would almost certainly be more expensive. So “better” would probably also mean “less,” at least for most people.

    This is all quite apart from the question of whether it’s all right to kill animals for food even if, for the sake of argument they’re raised humanely (and let’s also leave aside for the moment the fact that even humanely raised animals very often meet grisly ends in slaughterhouses which are a far cry from receiving a “single blow to the forehead and then painlessly [having] its jugular [slit]”). This hinges, at least in part, on whether animals can be said to be harmed by being killed. We certainly think human beings are harmed by being killed (well, most of us think that), so granting that the permissibility of killing animals for food would seem to depend on whether they are so different from humans that killing them cannot be said to be a harm or that the harm is so inconsequential as to be outweighed by the benefits of tasty meat for us. I think this is a genuinely difficult question, but probably one we should take more seriously than we do.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 8: The Fall and its Consequences

    Chapter 8 of Augustine’s Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love delves into one of the most influential, but also controversial, aspects of Augustine’s theology/philosophy: his doctrine of the Fall.

    Remember that a cardinal principle of Augustine’s thought is the essential goodness of creation. All things are, considered in themselves and their essential natures, good. Creation is the product of a supremely good God, and Augustine doesn’t seek to explain the existence of evil by positing a demiurge or an intractabile quality of matter that makes it an inferior reflection of the Good.

    However, while created things are good, they are also changeable. This means that their goodness can be diminished, so there is at least an opening for evil in the world. But the only thing that can direct things toward a diminshment of their good is a rational will. “The cause of evil is the defection of the will of a being who is mutably good from the Good which is mutable.”

    This happened first in the case of angels who rebelled against God, and secondly in the case of human beings. Augustine doesn’t discuss here why rational creatures defected from their supreme Good, and this does create some problems for his account. If rational creatures are good by their very nature, it’s hard to understand why they would choose to turn away from the supreme Good. On the other hand, any explanation of why they would do so risks pushing the source of evil back into the very nature of created being itself. Augustine has to maintain a strongly indeterminist account of free will (at least for unfallen rational natures) to maintain the essential goodness of creation. But indeterminist accounts of free will have a hard time making free will not look arbitrary or random.

    That difficulty noted, let’s move on to what Augustine takes the consequences of the fall to be. “In train of this [the ‘primal lapse of the rational nature’] there crept in, even without his [i.e. man] willing it, ignorance of the right things to do and also an appetite for noxious things. And these brought along with them, as their companions, error and misery.”

    Recall that for Augustine the soul finds its proper end in having its loves rightly ordered. This means, above all, loving God for his own sake. Only when we love God, the supreme and immutable Good, can our loves for finite and mutable goods be properly oriented. When God is not at the center of our universe, so to speak, finite things are no longer in their natural orbit and we developed distorted forms of love for them. So, if the primal fall was a turning away from the love of God, it makes sense on Augustine’s terms that ignorance about what is right and desires for what is wrong would follow. “From these tainted springs of action–moved by the lash of appetite rather than a feeling of plenty–there flows out every kind of misery which is now the lot of rational creatures.”

    There is, however, a further consequence of this defection of the will, namely death. Death is the penalty which God has inflicted upon man for his disobedience. The threat of death had been intended by God to deter human beings from disobedience and the forfeiture of blessedness that entails.

    Moreover, the penalty is passed from our first parents to all succeeding generations. Here we find one of the most troubling aspects of Augustinian theology, at least to modern sensibilities:

    From this state, after he had sinned, man was banished, and through his sin he subjected his descendants to the punishment of sin and damnation, for he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by his sinning. As a consequence of all this, all those descended from him and his wife (who had prompted him to sin and who was condemned along with him at the same time)–all those born through carnal lust, on whom the same penalty is visited as for disobedience–all these entered into the inheritance of original sin.

    The phrase “he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by his sinning” seems to hint at the idea that the entire human race, being containted potentially in Adam, was somehow corrupted in their very nature by his sin. This could be understood in a fairly straightforward quasi-physical sense: that Adam’s “seed” became corrupted. It could also be understood by seeing “Adam” as a stand in for human nature itself which somehow became corrupted and which all individual human beings participate in a quasi-Platonic sense. The latter view, however, suggests a non-historical fall in some sort of ur-time, whereas Augustine appears to think of the Fall as a historical event involving particular individuals.

    Part of the difficulty many Christians have had with Augustine’s account of the Fall is that it involves both a hereditary corruption or propensity to sin and a hereditary guilt. The former notion can be made sense of in a variety of ways. We can see, without too much difficulty, how being born as a human being in human society makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid sin (I discussed one such account here) and how the choices of our forbears constrain our own freedom.

    However, the idea of hereditary guilt is far more troubling. It conflicts with various intuitions most of us have about moral culpability. How can it be just for God to impute Adam’s guilt to all his descendants, to the extent of inflicting death and damnation as fitting punishment? The best answer to this that I’m aware of is simply to say that God’s ways are not our ways and his justice is inscrutable. Or to say that the creature is in no position to make demands of justice against the Creator. The only other way to reconcile this that I can think of is to argue for some account of moral culpability that is compatible with the doctrine of inherited and imputed guilt.

    Whatever we may think of the idea of inherited guilt, it plays an essential part in reconciling Augustine’s predestinarianism with the justice of God:

    This, then, was the situation: the whole mass of the human race stood condemned, lying ruined and wallowing in evil, being plunged from evil into evil and, having joined causes with the angels who had sinned, it was paying the fully deserved penalty for impious desertion. … And if [God] had willed that there should be no reformation in the case of men, as there is none for the wicked angels, would it not have been just if the nature that deserted God and, through the evil use of his powers, trampled and transgressed the precepts of his Creator, which could have been easily kept–the same creature who stubbornly turned away from His Light and violated the image of the Creator in himself, who had in the evil use of his free will broken away from the wholesome discipline of God’s law–would it not have been just if such a being had been abandoned by God wholly and forever and laid under the everlasting punishment which he deserved? Clearly God would have done this if he were only just and not also merciful and if he had not willed to show far more striking evidence of his mercy by pardoning some who were unworthy of it.

    The rhetorical power of this passage notwithstanding, the force of the argument rests on the guilt imputed to Adam’s descendents. Barring a good reason to think that guilt can properly be transferred/inherited in this way, it’s hard not to see God’s mercy as a fairly abitrary and minor mitigation of a much graver injustice. Much has been made of Augustine’s use of Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned…” and whether this is to be read as implying a sinful nature or predisposition that passed from Adam to his descendents or whether this inheritance also included Adam’s guilt. My impression is that many, if not most exegetes now think that this passage doesn’t refer to inherited guilt, but I could be wrong about that.

    Leaving aside exegetical questions, the view that I’m most sympathetic to is that, due to the actions or our distant anscestors, we are all born into a historical/cultural matrix which makes a relational alienation from God a virtual certainty. This fundamental disposition of the self – turned away from God – is “original sin.” This disposition gives rise to “acutal sin,” or discrete sinful actions. The connection between sin and (spiritual) death is not that death is imposed as an extrinsic punishment for sin, but rather that there is an intrinsic connection between a self “curved in on itself” and death. A soul that is turned away from the source of its being is already on a path which, without intervention, leads to a state where it collapses in on itself, sort of like a spiritual black hole. Death is the natural consequence of sin, or alienation from God. Thus it can make sense to talk about death being a consequence of sin without having to accept the notion of imputed/inherited guilt.

    Whether or not one finds the Augustinian doctrine of the Fall credible, it has to be said that he has provided one of the most influential accounts in Western Christendom, one that was later largely picked up by Luther and Calvin among others. I think some of the enduring truths in his account are: 1. The goodness of creation, 2. The source of evil in the will of rational creatures rather than in some inherent defect in created being, 3. The severity of human beings’ alienation from God which occurs as a result of sin, and 4. The need for God’s grace to redeem us from our predicament.

  • Jesus and Judaism revisited

    Jason Byassee of the Christian Century has taken issue with the comments offered by several bloggers (including your scribe, in a previous incarnation) on this article by Professor Amy-Jill Levine, which sharply criticized the Christian church for “divorcing Jesus from Judaism” (via Marvin).

    Mr. Byassee is certainly right to oppose “shear[ing] Jesus of his Jewishness,” which he accuses us blogospheric malcontents of wanting to do. Of course, I’m equally sure that neither the Lutheran Zephyr, nor Derek, nor I intend any such thing (were it in our power to do so!). I wrote that “Prof. Levine is correct to warn against the kind of crypto-Marcionism that seems to be a recurrent temptation in the church. The Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament constitute the matrix out of which Jesus came and out of which our faith comes.” It’s also clear that there has been a deplorable trend in “historical Jesus” studies (especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries) to disregard Jesus’s Jewishness (though the pendelum seems to have swung the other way more recently, e.g. in the work of folks like E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright). But I think my qualification stands: “the ongoing tradition and experience of the church isn’t necessarily bound by the details of the Judaism of Jesus’ day, anymore than contemporary Rabbinic Judaism has to ape the Judaism of the 1st century.”

    My point, in citing Luke Timothy Johnson, was not to downplay Jesus’ Jewishness, but that, as Johnson puts it, “historical reconstructions are by their very nature fragile and in constant need of revision. They cannot sustain the commitment of the human heart and life. … Christian faith as a living religious response is simply not directed at those historical facts about Jesus, or at a historical reconstruction of Jesus. Christian faith is directed to a living person” (The Real Jesus, p. 141, paperback ed.). All I take this principle to do is to block any simple deductions of the form “The ‘historical Jesus’ did x, therefore Christians should do x.” There’s nothing wrong, as a scholarly enterprise, with trying to get at “the historical Jesus” (though many such attempts appear driven by agendas other than that of pure disinterested scholarship), but the point is that these attempts cannot by themselves be normative for Christian faith, though they might inform it in various ways.

    Prof. Levine is certainly right that in order to understand the Jesus of the New Testament we have to understand the 1st-century Jewish context of his life and that the historical caricatures of Judaism perpetuated by the church are to be deplored. My questions about Prof. Levine’s article, which were genuine questions not simply rhetorical point-scoring questions, have to do with what she takes the implications to be for Christian faith and pracitce if they are to respect the Jewishness of Jesus. When she writes that “the New Testament mandates that respect for Jewish custom be maintained and that Jesus’ own Jewish practices be honored, even by the gentile church, which does not follow those customs,” it’s just not clear to me what this means in practice, which, in fairness, probably couldn’t be spelled out in the space of a brief article.

    None of that, of course, precludes a greater knowledge and appreciation by Christians of Judaism, both as it was practiced in Jesus’ day and as it’s practiced today, as well as a correction of the erroneous and vicious views about Jews and Judaism that Christians have often harbored. Such improved understanding is greatly to be desired. So, speaking only for myself of course, I happily agree with Byassee that “We gentile Christians certainly do not follow Jewish practices, as the Council of Jerusalem makes clear. We must, however, respect them, as we often have not. And we must recognize them in our Jewish savior, whose Jewishness is inscribed into his very Jewish flesh, now seated at the right hand of the Father.”

    One last point, though: Byassee writes:

    Levine’s piece is unique in the way it shows Christians on the theological and political left are not immune from the old, anti-Semitic habits that we pride ourselves for having left behind. Anyone who’s preached the sermon from Mark 6 will know what she means: Jesus is kind to the hemorrhaging woman and the dead girl, unlike the misogynist Judaism that kept women isolated and repressed. When I preach such passages in the future I will work to be clear that whatever is good in Jesus is also Jewish, and not anything he invented. “Jesus does not have to be unique in all cases in order to be profound,” Levine writes.

    What I wonder here is whether Jesus is ever to be allowed to be unique. Is it true that “whatever is good in Jesus is also Jewish, and not anything he invented”? I mean, in some sense this is true by definition. Jesus is/was Jewish, so everything about him is Jewish.* But is Jesus and/or the Christian church never to speak a critical word about Judaism or Jewish practices? And is their nothing in Jesus’ person or message that goes beyond the Judaism of his day, even if it would be preferable to see it more as its fulfillment rather than in stark opposition to it? If not, then the split between church and synagogue starts to look incomprehensible. Granted that the messages of Jesus, Paul and the early church have often been interpreted in polemically anti-Jewish senses, mustn’t there have been some important difference and critique implied? This is obviously a touchy subject, and it may be that given our shameful history Christians have simply forfeited the right to be critical of Judaism. But I don’t know that Christians can adopt that stance with theological integrity. After all, if everything good about Jesus is contained in Judaism, it’s not clear there’s much point in being a Christian.

    It may be that we still have a long way to go in understanding the proper relationship between the two faiths, in which case it’s salutary to be reminded that this tension exsits. Almost all contemporary Christians agree in repudiating supersessionism, but there’s much less agreement on what should replace it. Some Christians propose a “two covenants” theory whereby Jews are brought into God’s family through the Old Covenant and gentiles through the New, so no competition is implied. Others advert to a more general religious pluralism in which all the “great” religions are seen as roads to the same Truth. No doubt one of the major challenges for Christians in the 21st century is religious pluralism, but another is surely to reconnect with Judaism in ways that are historically and theologically appropriate.

    I’m certainly open to correction on any of this, and reader thoughts are welcome.
    ——————————————————
    *Leaving aside here the question about to what extent Jesus may have also been influenced by the Hellenistic and Roman cultural currents of his day. Or, for that matter, how 1st century Judaism(s) were so influenced.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion, 5, 6, & 7

    In these three chapters Augustine deals with the questions of error, lying, and certainty, especially with respect to matters of faith. In particular, Augustine here seems concerned with what later philosophers have dubbed the “ethics of belief.” In other words, he’s focusing more on what our moral duties are with respect to belief rather than how we actually form true beliefs, which is the traditional concern of epistemology.

    Error, Augustine writes, is clearly undesirable, but it’s also at times unavoidable, for “it is impossible not to be ignorant of many things.” However, some error is morally culpable. “If someone thinks he knows what he does not know, if he approves as true what is actually false, this then is error, in the proper sense of the term.” This seems to imply that there can be a moral dimension to error, perhaps because we are careless in forming our beliefs, or engage in wishful thinking, etc.

    While there may be cases where being mistaken or in error about something may actually benefit us (e.g. we may feel happier not knowing the truth about something, or we may be mistakenly led into fortuitous circumstances), considered in itself error is bad because it goes against the nature of our minds. “To err means nothing more than to judge as true what is in fact false, and as false what is true. It means to be certain about the uncertain, uncertain about the certain, whether it be certainly true or certainly false. This sort of error in the mind is deforming and improper, since the fitting and proper thing would be to be able to say, in speech or judgment: ‘Yes, yes. No, no.’”

    However, worse than to be deceived, either innocently or by our own carelessness or epistemic failure, is to intend to deceive someone else. Augustine takes an uncompromising view of lying. If being in error deforms the soul by diverting it from its proper end of grasping truth, lying intentionally misuses language, whose primary function is to act as “a medium through which a man could communicate his thought to others. Wherefore to use language in order to deceive, and not as it was designed to be used, is a sin.”

    Augustine concedes that lies may have good consequences as well as that some lies are worse than others, but these circumstances don’t alter the essential nature of the lie. He is clearly taking a deontological view that certain acts are wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. Adultery, theft, and lying are wrong even if we can imagine circumstances where we could help someone by engaging in them:

    That men have made progress toward the good, when they will not lie save for the sake of human values, is not to be denied. But what is rightly praised in such a forward step, and perhaps even rewarded, is their good will and not their deceit. The deceit may be pardoned, but certainly ought not to be praised, especially among the heirs of the New Covenant to whom it has been said, “Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no: for what is more than this comes from evil.” Yet because of what this evil does, never ceasing to subvert this mortality of ours, even the joint heirs of Christ themselves pray, “Forgive us our debts.”

    To understand this it’s illuminating to note that earlier Augustine writes that “the liar thinks he does not deceive himself and that he deceives only those who believe him. Indeed, he does not err in his lying, if he himself knows what the truth is. But he is deceived in this, that he supposes that his lie does no harm to himself, when actually every sin harms the one who commits it more that it does the one who suffers it” [emphasis added].

    The suggestion here seems to be that the effect that vice or sin has on the soul of the one who commits them is actually worse than the external effects it may have on others. This harks back to Socrates’ view, in light of being condemned to death by the Athenians, that no evil can truly befall a good man. This is because virtue is the life of the soul and, to borrow a phrase, we should fear that which can kill the soul (i.e. vice) rather than that which can kill the body.

    And if truth is also the life of the soul (and, indeed, that Truth from which all truth comes), then it makes sense for Augustine to say that departing from truth actually harms him who lies more than the victims of his deceit. Does this mean, however, that we should be indifferent to the consequences of our actions? Augustine’s account of the wrongness of lying is here couched entirely in terms of its violation of the nature of language (or what it’s for: to communicate thought). Most of us, I suspect, find a blanket prohibition on lying pretty tough to swallow, not just because we may think that “white lies” act as a kind of social lubricant, or get us out of difficult situations, but because we can imagine situations where it is not only permissible, but obligatory to lie, such as the archetypal case of the Nazis at the door seeking Jews hiding in your attic whom they will cart off to the ovens if you don’t lie. In other words, lying in such a case seems not only a forgivable offense, but no offense at all, and in fact not to lie would be the offense in this case.

    Whether this is right or not, Augustine certainly has something valuable to say to Christians, “heirs of the New Covenant to whom it has been said, ‘Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no: for what is more than this comes from evil.’” How seriously do most of us take the dominical injunctions to be truthful in our speech?

  • Some good contemporary theology – one layman’s opinion

    This meme asking for nominations for the best contemporary (=published in the last 25 years) theology books has been making the rounds of many of the blogs I read regularly.

    I’m not learned enough in theology to nominate books that are, objectively speaking, the best theology or the most influential, but I’ll mention some books that have had a big impact on the way I think about theology. (Not coincidentally, these tend to be on the more “popular” side of the ledger rather than strict academic theology):

    1. William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence. Placher attempts to retrieve a premodern understanding of God by means of a re-examination of the thought of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, and argues that many contemporary criticisms of “classical theism” such as those made by process thought or deconstructionism simply miss the mark. He also shows how grace is radically subversive of our constant attempts to contain it in some kind of moralism or pietism. Also worthy of note is his Jesus the Savior, a kind of Christology for laypeople. Placher is a model of clear theological writing for the church rather than for the academic guild.

    2. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus. Not only is this a brilliant polemic against the “historical Jesus” industry, Johnson’s book shows how the living Jesus is presented to us in the Gospel accounts, the NT letters, and the ongoing life of the church. His follow-up book, Living Jesus is a worthy successor in exploring how Christians live into the mind of Christ.

    3. Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology. People are probably sick of me flogging this book, but I think in many ways Christians have just begun to scratch the surface in thinking about our fellow creatures. Even a lot of liberal and progressive theology remains steadfastly anthropocentric. Bonus Linzey book: Animal Gospel.

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 3 & 4

    Chapters 3 and 4 are compact but rich summaries of the heart of Augustine’s metaphysics. He deals here with God, creation, the goodness of created things and the problem of evil. It’s surely one of Augustine’s great accomplishments as a thinker to clearly establish the basic outline of a sound Christian metaphysics.

    While Augustine clearly remains influenced by neo-Platonism, he sharpens its metaphysics and brings it into closer conformity with biblical religion. The primary metaphysical distinction for Augustine isn’t between sensible and intelligible being or mind and body, but between created and uncreated being. God is uncreated being and everything else is created being. It’s not necessary, he says, for Christians to be expertly versed in philosophy or natural science, but it is necessary for them to grasp this elemental truth:

    For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God. Further, the Christian believes that nothing exists save God himself and what comes from him; and he believes that God is triune, i.e., the Father, and the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the same Father, but one and the same Spirit of the Father and the Son.

    This statement is an implicit rebuke to the various forms of gnosticism and manicheism floating around, which Augustine was all too familiar with, that held the material world to be the product of an evil force or lesser deity. But it also stakes out a position against a kind of neo-Platonic view that sees creation as “emanating” from God as a kind of effulgence rather than as the result of God’s gracious will.

    Having established that creation is the product of a good God, he moves on to the affirmation of the goodness of creation itself:

    By this Trinity, supremely and equally and immutably good, were all things created. But they were not created supremely, equally, nor immutably good. Still, each single created thing is good, and taken as a whole they are very good, because together they constitute a universe of admirable beauty.

    This is a clear and beautiful summary of the Christian doctrine of creation. Creation is the gratuitous gift of a supremely good Creator and is itself a real, though lesser, good. It’s good because it is the handiwork of the Supreme Good.

    But of course this leads ineluctably to the problem of evil. If creation is the good creation of a supremely good Creator, whence evil? “For the Omnipotent God, whom even the heathen acknowledge as the Supreme Power over all, would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, as the Supreme Good, he is able to bring forth good out of evil.”

    Here we get Augustine’s justly famous doctrine of evil as privation. That is, considered in itself, evil is no-thing, but a lack or corruption in a being which is essentially good:

    All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be, the good which is its “nature” cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed.

    This implies that, as good as creation is, it has an inherent vulnerability to evil. This is because created things are changeable, and therefore their goodness can be diminished. Only God is entirely impervious to evil. But that doesn’t change the fact that every being, no matter how corrupted it may become, remains good considered in itself as an entity. Augustine’s dictum that “every being, in so far as it is a being, is good” is a watchword for this metaphysic. “Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity. Therefore, there can be nothing evil except something good. Absurd as this sounds, nevertheless the logical connections of the argument compel us to it as inevitable.”

    However, we still don’t know how, if creation is a real, though lesser, good, how evil arises in the first place. Augustine contends that only an evil will, itself the product of a good nature, whether human or angelic, can be the source of evil.

    From a human nature there can spring forth either a good or an evil will. There was no other place from whence evil could have arisen in the first place except from the nature–good in itself–of an angel or a man. This is what our Lord himself most clearly shows in the passage about the trees and the fruits, for he said: “Make the tree good and the fruits will be good, or make the tree bad and its fruits will be bad.” This is warning enough that bad fruit cannot grow on a good tree nor good fruit on a bad one. Yet from that same earth to which he was referring, both sorts of trees can grow.

    This leads to Augustine’s difficult doctrine of the Fall, which will come up in later chapters. For now, I just want to point out that what seems to be implied by his view of creation is that the evil will, at least in the beginning, is a kind of radical disruption of the good creation. And it’s something that seems radically undetermined by the nature of the being who posseses it, whether that’s a human being or an angel. Augustine has to hold this in order to be consistent with his view that the natures of created things are good in themselves. Otherwise, evil gets a kind of ontological foothold in creation.

  • Ivy Bush throwdown!

    Ok, not really. But current Ivy Bush blogger Jonathan and former Ivy Bush blogger Marvin are both blogging about the vexed question of the church’s attitude toward gay and lesbian Christians (see here, here, and here). They come down in different places (to the extent that either are definitively “coming down” anywhere), but both are models of reasoned and charitable discourse on the issue, which seems pretty rare these days.