A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Pluralism and the work of Christ: 2

    In this post I suggested that there is a connection between one’s view of the work of Christ and one’s view of religious pluralism. My hypothesis was that holding a strongly “objectivist” view of Christ’s work tends to go with either an exclusivist or inclusivist position on other religions, while a more “subjectivist” account fit better with pluralist views.

    Thinking about it a little more, though, I think that might’ve been a bit simplistic. This is partly because it’s hard to cleanly categorize Atonement theories as either “objective” or “subjective.” Every account of the work of Christ has a “dipolar” character so to speak. There is the act on God’s part to effect Atonement and there is the response or appropriation of that work by human beings. It’s hard to see how an Atonement to which no one responded would in fact be atonement, or reconciliation at all. But no one denies that the initiative in reconciliation comes from God’s side. As Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes put it in the title of his book on the Atonement, it involves both a past event and a present salvation.

    Moreover, so-called subjectivist theories do create a “new situation” at least insofar as they understand the cross as the definitive revelation of God’s love and also of the horrors of human sin. This revelation makes possible reconciliation between God and humanity because the revelation of God’s love and its outpouring are taken to be two aspects of the same event. Part of the difference between objectivist and subjectivist theories is that they differ over who needs to be reconciled to whom. Is the problem that God needs to be reconciled to us, or needs to reconcile his justice with his mercy? Or is the problem that we have made ourselves God’s enemies and need to be reconciled to him? If the former, then Atonement will focus on payment, reparation, substitution and other related concepts. If the latter, then the focus will be on how God wins us back through the pouring out of his love and the revelation of our own self-centeredness. But “subjectivist” theories don’t deny the need for a new situation to be established in order to make reconciliation possible.

    However one comes down on this issue, I think both share equally in the view that reconciliation comes from God’s side. It’s not about the human ascent to divine truth by means of our own religious and/or ethical striving. Rather, God descends to us in order to restore the relationship broken by sin.

    Certain “hard pluralist” views, by contrast, which see all religions as the fruit of human spiritual experience, have a hard time coming to terms with a special action coming from the divine side in order to set the world to rights. Often the divine is viewed as almost inert, as a kind of ineffable sea of transcendence, which is more or less adequately limmed by the various beliefs and rituals of the world’s religions. Whatever can be said for this view, it seems to be at considerable variance from the living, dynamic God of the Bible, the “hound of heaven” who relentlessly seeks to win his faithless people back. The more important distinction, then, may be between a view which holds that the divine reveals itself to us, versus the view that we acquire saving knowledge of the divine by our own efforts.

    Even this distinction probably isn’t as hard and fast as it seems, though. For even our own best efforts to seek enlightenment can be seen as the fruits of prevenient grace. And a pluralist could accomodate the notion that the divine is active in seeking fellowship with us and still hold to a plurality of revelations. God may have many avenues by which he is seeking to reconcile the world to himself.

    So, I’m not sure how much ground we’ve really gained here. I’ve reconsidered the idea that a particular account of the Atonement will necessarily push one in a particular direction on the question of other religions. I then proposed a distinction between the idea that salvation is something initiated by God and one that holds salvation to be the fruit of human striving, but it seems that both views can be accomodated by exclusivists, inclusivists, and pluralists alike.

    Another thought, maybe to be taken up in another post: maybe it’s not so much differences over accounts of Christ’s work that are important, but over his person.

  • The perils of the “virtuous minority”

    Marvin continues his series on vegetarianism wth a post on the eschatological expectation that predation and violence are aspects of creation which will ultimately be done away with. Vegetarianism, then, can be seen as a “living into the kingdom,” a kind of anticipation of what is to come:

    In the present age one cannot dismiss eating meat out of hand, but one good rationale for vegetarianism is as a sign of the kingdom to come. Vegetarianism, like a commitment to non-violence, or a vow of celibacy, may be an appropriate witness to the new heavens and new earth that God will one day create.

    However, in comments to Marvin’s post, Jonathan of the Ivy Bush observes that some theologians, such as Karl Barth, have called vegetarianism a “wanton anticipation” of the eschaton, trying to live, as it were, beyond this present fallen age. But Jonathan, himself a committed pacifist, worries that this could cut against pacifism as well.

    I think that’s a good point. In fact, John Howard Yoder, in his book Nevertheless: Varieties of religious pacifism, discusses how “the pacifism of the virtuous minority” can end up marginalizing the pacifist witness. To relegate pacifism to the status of a special calling for a distinct minority, Yoder worries, can enable the majority to ignore the pacifist’s arguments:

    One normal implication of this minority stance is to approve by implication, for most people, the very position one rejects for oneself. The Catholic understanding of the monastic morality has no trouble with this. Those in this tradition do not identify the freely chosen Rule with everyone’s moral obligation. They tell Christians in the Historic Peace Churches to accept such minority status and be accepted in it. Thus the minority stance can be a special gadfly performance to keep the rest of society from being at peace with its compromises.

    This understanding of a vocational role for the peace churches has been fostered by the relativistic or pluralistic mood of modern denominationalism. The question of objective right and wrong is relativized by the acceptance of a great variety of traditions, each having its own claims to truth arising out of its own history. Each may be recognized as having a portion of the truth, on condition that none impose their view on another. (p. 81)

    Yoder continues:

    Various stances may be recognized as “valid” or “authentic” or “adequate,” but none specifically as true. In this spirit many nonpacifists since the 1930s have been willing to concede to the pacifists a prophetic or vocational role. Nonpacifists grant this recognition on condition that in turn the pacifists accept always being voted down by those who have to do the real (violent) work in the world. (pp. 81-82)

    Likewise, the view of vegetarianism as a special witness or calling to a creation without violence may also fall prey (pardon the expression) to this kind of relativism. And ultimately vegetarians could be similarly marginalized as harmless eccentrics who aren’t trying to make claims on the consciences of others.

    The two issues are somewhat disanalogous though. In one sense vegetarianism is more demanding than pacifism because, while war is a relatively exceptional event in the life of most societies, the use of animals is something that is woven into the very fabric of most societies, especially industrialized ones. On the other hand, the sacrifice of vegetarianism is ultimately less serious. People can live perfectly happy and healthy lives on a plant-based diet, so no one is being asked to sacrifice their life for the sake of animals. Pacifism, by contrast, requires that we be prepared to give up our lives rather than commit violence (though the blow may be softened by noting that war isn’t a very efficient means of getting what you want anyway).

    I would add that most vegetarians ure unlikely to say that meat-eating is always and everywhere wrong. It’s quite likely that there are times and places where killing animals for food is the only way for human beings to survive. In that sense one could devise an ethic of “just meat-eating” that allowed for exceptions for legitimate human need and health. It’s hard to see how that would justify the large-scale industrial production of meat that actually exists, though.

    The point is that vegetarians (and pacifists, and others with unusual moral views) shouldn’t refrain from making arguments to persuade others of the truth of their position. If one takes a moral view seriously, then I think one is committed to its universalizability: that is, that anyone in the relevantly similar circumstances ought to make the same choice.

    That said, I still personally wouldn’t want to try and make vegetarianism a litmus test for Christian discipleship. This is mainly because it’s not obvious that personal vegetarianism is the only, or even the best, way to address issues of animal mistreatment. And secondly because there is no “pure ground” to stand on where one has extricated themselves from involvement with industries and practices that abuse animals. If “ought implies can” it would be foolish to demand an unattainable level of moral purity.

    This is where I think the “Barthian caveat” is helpful. In our fallen world moral choice will always retain an element of ambiguity. And being aware of that will help one avoid pride and self-righteousness. Moreover, trying to live as an example, as proof that it’s possible to live a less violent life, may well end up being the most effective form of argument.

  • Pluralism and the work of Christ

    Any discussion of religious diversity and salvation (see last post) ultimately has to come to terms with what salvation means. It’s pointless to debate how people “get saved” if we don’t know what people are supposed to be saved from (or for).

    Following custom, I’ll distinguish between exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist views on religious diversity:

    Exclusivist: There is one correct religion, and in order to be saved, one must adhere to it.

    Inclusivist: There is one correct religion, but adherents to all religions can potentially be saved.

    Pluralist: There is no one correct religion; all religions (or sometimes all “higher” religions) are paths which can lead to salvation.

    (There is also a variation of pluralism which holds that “salvation” actually means different things in different religions, so they aren’t actually competing in providing the true path to salvation, but I’m going to ignore this option for the purposes of this post. In part that’s because I think it ultimately reduces to one of the other three options.)

    In Christian terms then, both the exclusivist and inclusivist hold that God in Jesus has accomplished something definitive for our salvation, where “salvation” means something like deliverance from sin and its consequences and communion with God which comes to ultimate fruition in the Beatific Vision along with the saints in heaven. How Jesus accomplishes this is, of course, a matter of great debate in the history of Christendom. But I think all traditional theories of the Atonement agree that there is an objective change in the situation of humans vis-a-vis God due to the life, passion, and resurrection of Jesus. The difference between the exclusivist and the inclusivist, then, is that the former holds that one must come into some conscious relationship with this event (in this present life) in order to be saved, whereas the inclusivist (or one kind of inclusivist) believes that it’s not necessary to be consciously aware of the work of Christ to benefit from it. As C.S. Lewis put it, to say that only Jesus saves doesn’t necessarily entail that only those who know him are saved by him.

    Contrast this with the view that says that Jesus simply reveals the nature of God, but doesn’t necessarily bring about some new state of affairs in the divine-human relationship. The God revealed by Jesus is what God has always been like: merciful, just, compassionate, etc., and the problem is that humans don’t sufficiently realize this. But, at least in theory, they could come to the same knowledge by routes other than the life and teachings of Jesus. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, etc. can come to a correct view on the benevolent nature of Ultimate Reality without believing in, or even being aware of Jesus. Salvation is the realization of the truth about the Divine along with the corresponding changes in one’s life from being self-centered to being “reality-centered” as the pluralist theologian John Hick likes to put it.

    This view can be given either an inclusivist or pluralist spin. An inclusivist can hold that the divine nature is best, or most clearly revealed, in Jesus while still holding that other religions can contain saving knowledge of the divine. The pluralist, meanwhile, can say that this knowledge is (at least potentially) equally present in all faiths, and whether any particular person finds that knowledge in a given religious tradition will depend on circumstances (such as their own upbringing, temparment, etc.).

    It’s worth pointing out, I think, that theologians who have a more subjective account of the Atonement also tend to lean more toward inclusivist or pluralist positions, whereas objectivist theories of the Atonement correlate with exclusivism and certain forms of inclusivism. And getting clear on religious diversity requires, I think, getting clear on what we think the work of Christ is and what it accomplishes.

  • 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?