A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology

  • Divine determinism and divine sovereignty

    Marvin argues that a doctrine of divine determinism–that everything that happens, even apparently horrible things like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, is an expression of God’s will–is actually a more comforting doctrine than people sometimes give it credit for:

    If this sounds harsh, and as I said last week, I am against harshness as a test of orthodoxy, then assuring people that God had nothing to do with the tsunami may be equally harsh. For then we live in a world where evils befall us from outside God’s will. And that raises a disturbing question: Is God’s arm, in fact, too short to save? Are we in fact in a s**t happens world where God wishes us well but can’t be counted on to do anything about it?

    My problem with this view (and I don’t know that Marvin is whole-heartedly endorsing it) is that it provokes an equally disturbing question: if nothing happens “outside” God’s will, then why does God visit us with so much (apparently) undeserved evil?

    It’s not just death, or premature death that poses the problem. Acute, prolonged pain and suffering are just as much of a problem, if not more so. And the suffering that happens, in many cases, goes well beyond any reasonable reformatory or punitive purposes that theologians may offer as explanations. As Clark Williamson argues, one criteria for doing contemporary theology is that you shouldn’t say anything you couldn’t say “in the presence of the burning children” of the Nazi death camps. Could we tell them that their suffering was part of God’s will for them?

    This isn’t to say that God’s arm is too short to save, but to offer a different understanding of divine sovereignty. Whatever else we know, we know that God doesn’t in fact save people from undeserved suffering or death (that is, unless you have such an intense doctrine of original sin that no amount of suffering would be undeserved). Instead, I’d propose that divine sovereignty is an eschatological concept: it means that God’s purposes will ultimately triumph, despite the best efforts of fragile and foolish human beings. That’s different from saying that God controls the outcome of every event. It means affirming with Paul that our present sufferings aren’t worth being compared with the future glory, or with the seer of Revelation that God will wipe away every tear. It means that, in God’s time and by God’s power, “all things will be well.”

    UPDATE:

    Doing a Google search, I came across this passage from evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz’s systematic theology:

    Strictly speaking God’s sovereignty is an eschatological concept. It refers to the bringing to pass of the final goal God has for the world. This situation will emerge at the end of the historical process. When viewed from the vantage point of the eschatological end, therefore, God is fully and obviously sovereign.

    When viewed from the perspective of present experience, however, it is not so obvious that God is sovereign. In fact, whether or not God is reigning over the world is presently an open question. In a sense, the present open-endedness of the divine sovereignty is implicit in the act of creation itself. The very existence of creation as a reality different from God raises the question of ultimate sovereignty: Is God sovereign over creation or is creation autonomous? (Theology for the Community of God, p. 106-7)

    Citing Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grenz goes on to argue that, during the present age, God’s sovereignty is contested by the forces that work against God’s purpose. But God acts in history to establish his Kingdom. The eschaton is the point at which God’s sovereignty will be fully manifested. “In the strict sense, then, God is sovereign from the vantage point of the eschatological future” (p. 108).

    I don’t know much about the context of Grenz’s overall theology (though I’m intrigued by this passage), but this sounds very similar to what I was trying to get at in this post.

    UPDATE 2:

    Marvin has a follow-up post here. Like him, I’m attracted both to classical theism and to more contemporary process- or narrative-oriented approaches. And I agree that the classical view has much more sophisticated and able exponents than the pop-Calvinists who dominate much of the theological debate among American Christians. (To Marvin’s list, I might add a more contemporary figure like Tillich, though I understand Marvin finds Tillich boring. :))

    I also agree with Marvin that there are no problem-free positions out there. There are theologies (such as some forms of process theology) that do seem to qualify God’s sovereignty to the point of impotence, or that make a fetish out of divine suffering. That’s part of the reason I’m attracted to a “neo-process” perspective like Clark Williamson’s, which incorporates some of the key insights of process theology without abandoning its commitment to tenets of traditional theology like creation ex nihilo and a strong view of God’s eschatological triumph. (Others who might fall into this broad middle ground: Keith Ward, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke.) Of course, such a position is open to criticisms from both the “left” and the “right” for being an unstable hybrid.

    I also think there’s a lot to be said for classical theism of the Augustinian variety, especially in its emphasis on the mystery and transcendence of God. The deity of some process and other contemporary theologies can seem a bit too personal and chummy. Theology needs to preserve a space for holy awe and that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom.

    Maybe what tips the scales for me is that I just find it impossible, on a gut, existential level, to affirm that God directly wills some of the terrible events that happen in the world. But it could be that it’s possible to square the circle and affirm traditional notions of divine sovereignty without being forced to that conclusion.

  • Making Sense of Evolution: God of the future

    John Haught concludes Making Sense of Evolution with some reflections on how an evolutionary picture of the world should inform–and even transform–our view of God. As we’ve seen, Haught thinks that evolutionary science reveals a creation that is unfinished and in process, analogous to an unfolding drama rather than a perfectly engineered machine. And how we think of creation has implications for how we should think of God.

    Specifically, he argues that we should think of God as the world’s “Absolute Future”–the power of new possibilities, of liberation and promise. God is not one cause among others within the world; rather, with classical theology, Haught affirms that God is the ground of all possible being, and the one who underlies and envelops the entire drama of cosmic evolution, drawing it toward its final consummation. As with any dramatic narrative, its meaning and significance can’t be fully grasped until the end. The world doesn’t point unambiguously to the omniscient designer of high-modernist natural theology; we can only discern meaning and direction partially because we are in medias res.

    Drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin, Haught proposes that God beckons or lures creation forward, continually presenting it with new possibilities for greater complexity and beauty.

    The ultimate explanation of evolution is the coming (or advent) of God into the world from out of an endlessly expansive future. For Christians, the God who comes from the future becomes incarnate in Christ; in the ongoing evolution of life, the Spirit of Christ–the Holy Spirit–animates the whole of creation so that all things anticipate a final convergence in the wide embrace of God the Father. In the depths of evolution and cosmic process, what is really going on, therefore, is the Trinitarian drama: God the Father speaks the Word that becomes the incarnate center and goal of the universe, and the whole universe is now being transformed into God’s bodily abode by the power of the Holy Spirit. (pp. 138-9)

    This story of “what is really going on” isn’t in conflict with the story that natural science tells, Haught maintains. Theology deals in ultimate explanations; science in penultimate ones. Evolutionary naturalists sometimes take Darwinian science to entail a materialistic worldview, but this is, Haught says, to confuse levels of explanation. He contrasts a “metaphysics of the past” with a “metaphysics of the future.” The former says that what’s “really real” are the basic physical particles, and everything else is to be explained as nothing but a rearrangement of these particles over time. A metaphysics of the future, however, sees the ultimate explanation of things as coming from their ultimate end–which is an increasing complexity. From the very beginning matter is latent with the potential for mind and spirit. “The domain of thought has its proper home in nature, and this places in doubt the evolutionary materialist’s assumption that the universe is essentially mindless and hence devoid of purpose” (p. 145). The idea of matter without mind or spirit is a kind of abstraction from the fullness of experienced reality. This inward, spiritual aspect is what allows the Spirit of God to call forth creation’s potential for new and richer forms of existence.

    If a theology of evolution questions the materialist dogma that only matter is “really real” while mind and spirit are essentially epiphenomena, it also takes issue with certain theologies that treat the physical world as at best a backdrop to the human story and at worst as a prison from which human souls need to be “harvested.” Whether in the lurid “Rapture” mythology of popular apocalypticism or in more sophisticated versions, this theology agrees with materialism that mind is essentially not at home in the universe. By contrast, Haught-ian evolutionary theology takes a much more holistic view. This has implications for spirituality and ethics: our task is not to maintain our moral or doctrinal purity so we can escape this perishing world into a heavenly afterlife. Instead, our task is to contribute, in our own small way, to what could be called the “divinization” of creation–“the noble enterprise of bringing a whole universe closer to unity and fulfillment in God” (p. 148).

    (Previous posts on John Haught’s Making Sense of Evolution: 1|2|3.)

  • Evolutionary theology as theology of the cross

    Though he doesn’t use the same language, John Haught argues, in effect, that Intelligent Design is an example of what Lutherans call the “theology of glory” because it purports to discern God in obvious and outward ways (in this case, by finding “scientific” evidence of design in nature). For a theology of the cross, by contrast, God is hidden and is most present under the signs of weakness and suffering, preeminently in the cross of Christ. Similarly, Haught argues that God can be discerned in the natural processes of evolution not in obvious instances of design, but as the abysmal depth that underlies or grounds the entire process–as the compassionate God who enters into solidarity with the sufferings and travails of creation. This requires a different kind of discernment than that offered by ID’s theology of glory:

    [D]epth has two faces. It is not just abyss but also ground, terrifying at first, but ultimately liberating and redemptive. Looking earnestly into the depth of everything involves a kind of death, but it also promises resurrection. The breakdown of our narrow human ideals of design, as the book of Job had already made clear, is an abysmal experience. Yet it is the first step toward a wider and deeper sense of creation’s beauty than we ever could have reached otherwise. Hence, challenges such as Darwin’s to our constricted religious and ethical ideals of design should not come as an insurmountable difficulty, at least to a biblically grounded spiritual vision.

    Christianity itself rose up from the ashes of a kind of design death. To his friends, Jesus’ own execution seemed, at least at first, to prove only the powerlessness of God to carry out the divine plan. Nevertheless, the early Christian community eventually came to interpret Jesus’ death by crucifixion as the decisive opening onto the final victory of life over death. The cross reveals to Christians, beneath all disillusionment with what we had taken to be a benign providential plan, the unsurpassable beauty of a self-sacrificing God, who draws near to the creation and embraces the struggles, failures, and achievements of design death, including that introduced by Darwin, as entry into the abyss of the cross that God also bears, the cross through which one can be brought to the deep experience of resurrection. In the context of Christian faith, the drama of evolution merges inseparably with the (abysmal) death and (grounding) resurrection of Jesus and, in him, with the eternal drama that is the Trinitarian life of God. (Making Sense of Evolution, p. 93)

    Creation doesn’t provide compelling evidence of a benevolent providence. But certain experiences can give us a glimpse of the inexhaustible depth at the root of the entire creative process. For Haught, when we give up the quest to demonstrate “design” in nature, we are freed to enter into a deeper engagement both with creation and with God.

  • Making Sense of Evolution: Design or drama?

    As we saw earlier, John Haught thinks it’s something of a category mistake to oppose natural selection to divine action, as though these were explanations operating on the same causal level. As he develops his theology of evolution, Haught emphasizes that a major source of this confusion is thinking of God as a “designer.” This conjures up images of creation as a perfectly engineered machine and God as an omniscient engineer. But as naturalists like Dawkins and Dennett are fond of pointing out, the natural world doesn’t look like a perfectly engineered piece of machinery. It’s far messier and apparently wasteful than anything a competent engineer would come up with, considering the vast stretches of time it’s taken for life to develop and the countless billions of organisms that have perished in the struggle for existence. For this engineering mentality, the idea that the world could be the creation of a wise and benevolent God seems incredible.

    Operating on similar assumptions, proponents of creationism or intelligent design try to salvage the reputation of God the engineer by rejecting the Darwinian account of life’s development, in part or in whole. If each species is a special creation of God, then we don’t need to posit the mind-boggling stretches of time and the vast waste that Darwinism seems to require. Once again, then, Haught argues that atheistic naturalism and creationism share a crucial premise: that God, if he exists, ought to resemble an omni-competent engineer. They differ only in whether the world can be seen as the product of such an engineering effort.

    Haught thinks we should reject this God-as-engineer image altogether. God doesn’t engineer the world according to some heavenly plan where every detail is planned out in advance. God is better thought of as establishing the conditions under which the world can unfold according to its own immanent principles. God makes the world to make itself. This allows us to see the evolutionary process as a much more open-ended affair than the design model permits. God, Haught says, is the world’s “Absolute Future,” the one who calls it into new stages and forms of being. The world is not established according to a pre-ordained plan, but instead by the interplay of continuity and novelty that occurs throughout vast stretches of time.

    Thus Haught proposes that we see evolution (including its cosmic preconditions) as analogous to a dramatic narrative unfolding “within” the being of God. Like a narrative, the meaning of the whole may not be evident until we reach the end. And like a narrative, the cosmic drama doesn’t necessarily take the shortest route between point A and point B, the way an engineer might prefer. The “waste” of evolution may in fact, Haught says, be the result of divine liberality. Life has taken the winding course it has, not because of a flawed or absent “design,” but because God allows creation to unfold according to its own principles.

    Haught contends that this picture is actually more biblical than the designer-god of creationism. The God of the Bible is a God of “liberation and promise rather than the imposition of design” (p. 64) and “whenever the idea of God is separated from the conjugate themes of freedom and futurity, it is an idolatrous distortion” (p. 65).

    A properly biblical theology of nature will view divine wisdom, providence, and compassion less as a guarantee of the world’s safety–as the idea of design encourages–than as an unbounded self-emptying graciousness that grants the world an open space and generous amount of time to become more, and in doing so gives it ample opportunity to participate in its own creative self-transformation. A God of freedom and promise invites, and does not compel, the creation to experiment with many possible ways of being, allowing it to make “mistakes” in the process. This is the God of evolution–one who honors and respects the indeterminacy and narrative openness of creation, and in this way ennobles it. (p. 65)

    This still leaves a lot of open questions, like the how God influences the ongoing drama of life, as well as the question of theodicy (both of which I hope Haught will address later in the book). But the overall picture is, I think, appealing. When Christian theology overemphasizes “design,” the specter of divine determinism is never far away. And this always seems to result in a distorted and morally disturbing view of God. On Haught’s view, God is at work in creation, but as the empowering source of creaturely freedom, not the all-determining cause of everything that happens.

  • Making Sense of Evolution: Multi-layered explanation

    I’m reading Catholic theologian John Haught’s Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life. Haught is a well-known advocate of “theistic evolution” and argues that theology hasn’t adequately come to grips with Darwin’s impact on our understanding of the world, which he thinks should have serious repercussions on key theological concepts.

    Theistic evolution represents the oft-neglected middle ground between atheistic naturalists and creationists or intelligent design proponents, who tend to hog all the attention. Despite their high profile in the science and religion debates, Haught contends that naturalists and creationists/IDers make the same kind of mistake in thinking about God and evolution. They both think that God and natural selection are providing the same kind of explanation for the development of life. Evolutionary naturalists conclude that since natural selection is scientifically well-supported, there’s no role for God to play in the unfolding drama of evolution. Creationists/IDers agree that natural selection excludes any role for God, so they try to attack natural selection as an insufficient explanation.

    According to Haught, treating God and natural selection as competing explanations is a confusion of different “levels” or “layers” of explanation. He uses the analogy of a printed page in a book, which can be explained at a number of levels: in terms of a chemical analysis of ink on paper, the mechanics of the printing press, the ideas that the author was trying to express, the intention of the publisher in publishing a book on a particular topic, etc. None of these explanations contradicts or excludes any of the others. They each operate at a different “layer” of explanation.

    Similarly, Haught argues, natural selection provides (to the best of our knowledge) a complete explanation for the development of life at its own level. But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for God. To the extent that God enters the picture, it’s at a different level or layer. An appropriate theology of evolution will deny the atheistic conclusion that evolution proves there’s no God and no role for divine providence in the development of life; but it will also avoid the “god of the gaps”-style arguments favored by creationists and IDers. Haught intends to flesh out his understanding of how God acts in a world of evolutionary change throughout the rest of the book. I’ll likely be blogging my thoughts on this as I go.

  • Friday links

    –Do extraterrestrials have original sin?

    –Brandon on Sam Harris’s argument for a science of morality

    –How to build a progressive tea party

    –Fox News thinks there’s only one English translation of the Bible

    –This critique of Mad Men from the New York Review of Books scores some points

    –A video (in two parts) featuring the late philosopher G.A. Cohen making the case against capitalism

    –Theo Hobson on the religious crisis of American liberalism

    –The case for casting Parks and Recreation’s Rashida Jones as Lois Lane in the upcoming Superman reboot

  • Doing without Adam and Eve

    One argument you sometimes hear for the necessity of a “historical” fall and a “historical” Adam and Eve goes like this: if there was no historical first couple and fall into sin, then we are in no need of a savior and therefore the entire gospel loses its raison d’etre.

    This seems odd to me. That human beings need liberation from sin, guilt, anxiety, the threat of meaninglessness, the fear of death, and other forces that oppress and harass us–in short, our need for salvation in its most comprehensive sense–isn’t something we infer from the story of the Fall. It’s an evident fact about the world, one that we need only to look around us to discover.

    I see the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall as a vivid portrait of the human condition: our alienation from God, from each other, and from the world in which we live. This is why “Adam” is such a potent symbol in Paul’s theology: it encapsulates everything that’s wrong with us–everything that God in Christ comes to save us from. (Whether or not Paul himself thought of Adam as a historical person, it seems undeniable to me that “Adam” still functions in a more-than-historical way in Paul’s theology.) How we got the way we are is a distinct issue from that we are the way we are.

    I’m not saying anything here that others–like Reinhold Niebuhr–haven’t said better. And skepticism about the strictly factual-historical nature of the Genesis creation stories isn’t the only reason for rejecting this account of the Fall. Before Darwinism was even on the scene, a number of people had come to question the traditional interpretation. The idea that Adam’s sin and guilt was a quasi-physical substance that could be transmitted to all his descendents, or alternatively, that his guilt was somehow imputed to the rest of humanity down through the ages, had come to seem metaphysically fishy or morally objectionable. And it had consequences that even those committed to the traditional view found troubling, such as that unbaptized infants would be damned. This didn’t stop people from believing in the need for salvation though.

    By insisting on a historical Adam and Eve (even a semi-“demythologized” version), Christians risk backing themselves into the corner of denying well-established findings of biological science and preaching a gospel that many people will find unintelligible.

  • Christopher on “marriage as discipleship”

    Christopher makes some important points here, offering a corrective, I think, to some of the things I said here. For Christians, marriage isn’t just about “happiness,” but as Christopher rightly points out, it’s also a way of living out our discipleship. Or in Lutheran terms, it’s a vocation that allows us to learn to love the neighbor in a particular context. This doesn’t refer just to loving our spouses and children (if any), but also making our households blessings for the larger community. A household turned in on itself–concerned solely for its own prosperity and happiness, say–falls short of what Christians are called to. This may be a particularly countercultural word that the Christian understanding of marriage offers today.

  • Saved from God or saved by God?

    Michael Westmoreland-White points to the website and blog of Ted Grimsrud, a professor of theology and religion at Eastern Mennonite University. Both sites focus on Christian pacifism in the Anabaptist tradition, particularly as represented by John Howard Yoder.

    Prof. Grimsrud also has a series of essays on his site looking at core Christian doctrines. I read the chapter on salvation and really liked the way he framed the problem:

    The theology I was first taught as a Christian implicitly told me that it was God from whom I needed to be saved. God is furious at each of us because of our sin. So we are doomed—and we fully deserve our doom. Our only way out is through Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross. God visits upon Jesus the violence we deserve because God must punish sin. Jesus is our substitute who saves us by paying the price required to satisfy God’s righteous anger.

    I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but this really pinpoints the problem with what often passes for “traditional” atonement doctrine: it portrays Jesus as saving us from an angry God rather than portraying God in Christ as the origin and agent of our salvation.

    Prof. Grimsrud goes on to argue that we aren’t saved from God, but saved by God. More specifically, God is not bound to some cosmic cycle of retributive violence that requires inflicting punishment on Jesus in order for God to forgive us, but instead seeks to heal us from the damage we inflict on others and ourselves when we turn away from trusting in God and put our trust in various idols.

    He sees the salvation taught by Jesus as fully continuous with the salvation story of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. God acts to save without needing to be appeased, sacrificed to, or otherwise bought off, because it’s God’s nature to be merciful. “Contrary to many Christian soteriologies, for Jesus the salvation story of the Old Testament remains fully valid. He does not tell a different story, but proclaims the truthfulness of the old story.”

    Jesus’s ministry of healing, forgiving, and proclaiming God’s love (exemplified in parables like the story of the prodigal son) leads to his death on the cross, but the cross is not a necessary condition for God being willing to save us:

    Jesus’ death adds nothing to the means of salvation—God’s mercy saves, from the calling of Abraham on. Rather, Jesus’ death reveals the depth of the rebellion of the Powers, especially the political and religious human institutions that line up to execute Jesus. Even more so, Jesus’ death reveals the power of God’s love. Jesus’ death does indeed profoundly heighten our understanding of salvation. It reveals that the logic of retribution is an instrument of evil and that God’s love prevails even over the most extreme expression of (demonic) retribution.

    Trusting in God’s love–the love revealed in the story of Israel and in Jesus–frees us to break the cycle of retributive violence (shades of Girard) and to live a life of celebration and “creative and healing nonconformity.”

    This view also strikes me as being very similar to that of Clark Williamson, who argues that the salvation we receive through Jesus is the self-same salvation present in God’s covenant with Israel. Jesus does not make possible salvation, but re-presents God’s universal saving will. This universal, unmerited love of God and the ever-expanding love of neighbor it elicits are the two foci around which the Christian life revolves.

  • New social ethics blog

    Readers may be interested in this new(ish) blog: The Moral Mindfield. The about page says that it is “intended as an open forum for the discussion of the ethical dimensions of society and culture. …informed by philosophy, theology, and social theory, as well as other academic disciplines.” If I’ve got this right, the contributers are students at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and include Marilyn of Left at the Altar. Worth checking out.