A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology

  • Lutheranism for beginners

    I have a good friend who just joined a Lutheran church. He’s been reading the collection of Luther’s basic theological writings edited by Timothy Lull, et al., but he asked me for some suggestions for further reading on Lutheranism and Lutheran theology. This is the list I sent him, which, while shaped by my own interests and certainly not exhaustive, fairly represents mainstream Lutheranism I think.

    Background:

    The Book of Concord collects all the official confessions and other documents of the Reformation-era Lutheran church (the Augsburg Confession, Luther’s Large and Small catechisms, etc.) that virtually all modern Lutheran bodies subscribe to in some way or another. Fortress Press publishes a nice hardback version.

    General introductions to Lutheranism:

    Carl E. Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology

    Gerhard O. Forde, Where God Meets Man: Luther’s Down-to-Earth Approach to the Gospel

    Robert Jenson and Eric Gritsch, Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and its Confessional Writings

    Secondary sources on Luther’s theology:

    Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther

    Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross

    Giants of 20th century Lutheran theology:

    Paul Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations

    Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison

    Specialized topics:

    Carl Braaten, Justification: The Article by which the Church Stands or Falls

    Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel

    Bradley Hanson, A Graceful Life: Lutheran Spirituality for Today

    Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World

    Deanna Thompson, Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross (I haven’t read this, but I wanted to include some feminist theology on the list, and this is the only one I really know of.)

    Any glaring omissions? Additional suggestions?

  • Theology of the cross as incarnational theology

    Christopher has a powerful meditation on the incarnational emphasis in both Anglicanism and Lutheranism that is very consistent with the “theology of the cross” as Douglas John Hall understands it. Christopher notes that both the emphasis on incarnation in Anglican theology and the Lutheran insistence on the theology of the cross take in the full sweep of God’s self-giving in Christ. “This is what Anglicans have tended to call ‘incarnational,’ that notion, that because God has become a creature, nothing creaturely is outside the purview of God’s concern.”

    As Hall points out in The Cross and Our Context, a theology of the cross is sometimes contrasted with, or even pitted against, a “theology of incarnation.” If our incarnational theology is limited to what we might call “Christmas-piety,” he says, it risks missing the point of the theologia crucis. God “descending” to share our creaturehood is indeed wondrous, but the human predicament isn’t creatureliness as such. Rather, it’s the sin, anxiety, and fear of death that prevent us from living authentically human lives. This is why, Hall argues, the cross is the consummation of the incarnation, so to speak: God enters into the very lowest depths of the human condition in order to transform it from within. And therefore the theology of the cross is the incarnational theology par excellence. And this incarnational movement gives shape to the life of discipleship; we are freed to be human (not angels, gods, or beasts)–and sent into the world to show the same kind of love for our fellow creatures that God in Jesus has shown for us. Or, as Christopher says, we learn a new humility–a word that relates both to humaneness and earthiness–that sends us into the world of flesh to love and serve, not away from it into a realm of bodiless “spirituality.”

    (Previous posts on Hall’s theology of the cross here and here)

  • The great refusal: against the theology of glory

    I recently started reading Douglas John Hall’s The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, which is an application of the “theology of the cross” (see previous post) to the main topics of Christian theology. Hall begins with an introductory chapter that tries to identify just what the theology of the cross–as understood by Luther and others–is.

    Hall proposes to do this by means of the via negativa–the theology of the cross can be understood in light of what it rejects. This is the “theology of glory.” Hall identifies the theology of glory with the triumphalist attitude characteristic of Christendom (i.e., the established status–both formal and informal–that Christian churches have enjoyed for much of Western history).

    He defines triumphalism as “the tendency in all strongly held worldviews, whether religious or secular, to present themselves as full and complete accounts of reality” (p. 17). It leads to a sense of certainty and of having mastered reality by apprehending it through a neatly delineated conceptual prism. In theological terms, it translates into the belief that we have a complete and accurate theological system that limns the nature of God and provides a ready-made answer to every question. Because of the closed nature of such a system, doubt and outside perspectives need not be entertained (or, in extremis, even tolerated).

    The theologia gloriae confuses and distorts because it presents divine revelation in a straightforward, undialectical, and authoritarian manner that silences argument, silences doubt–silences, therefore, real humanity. It overwhelms the human with its brilliance, its incontestability, its certitude. Yet just in this it confuses and distorts because God’s object in the divine self-manifestation is precisely not to overwhelm but to befriend. (p. 20)

    In contrast, Luther’s theology of the cross takes the fragility of humanity with the utmost seriousness:

    Though he was trained in the humanist tradition, as were Phillip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin, [Luther] manifests a human and worldly orientation that is at least as profound as the humanists. I would even argue that it is more profound than most humanism, because it is grounded not in a vain boast of human potentiality but in a deep sympathy with human weakness and wretchedness….(p. 21)

    “Because for Luther,” Hall continues, “human existence is a frail and uncertain business, divinity for him is not first of all sovereign omnipotence (as it was for Calvin) but astonishing compassion” (p. 22). God’s self-revelation is preeminently “in, with, and under” (to borrow terms Lutherans often apply to the Eucharist) human weakness and suffering. And God’s glory, in the perspective of the theology of the cross, is to effect the well-being and flourishing of God’s creatures. This is in sharp contrast to the triumphalism of Christendom, which tried to justify the claims of Christianity in terms of worldly power and glory.

    Because of its dialectical nature, the theology of the cross is “anti-ideological.” That is, it is opposed to all closed intellectual schemes that try to fit reality into a set of a priori categories instead of facing it–with all its attendant evil and suffering–squarely. Theology must be submitted to the test of experience in that doctrine should not force us to lie about life. (Think, for example, of many popular theodicies.)

    It is easy enough to devise theories in which everything has been “finished”–all sins forgiven, all evils banished, death itself victoriously overcome. But to believe such theories one has to pay a high price: the price of substituting credulity for faith, doctrine for truth, ideology for thought. (p. 29)

    Hall concludes this chapter by proposing that we can understand the three classic theological virtues as each negating an aspect of the theology of glory. We walk by faith (not sight, that is certitude or straightforward knowledge), we hope for God’s final victory (but do not now experience that consummation in its fullness, either in our personal lives or in the world at large), and we love God, others, and creation (rather than exercising a dominating form of power).

    The cross is the ongoing sign that God does not conquer through force majeure, but attracts through love and works to renew creation through participation in the world’s suffering. The theology of the cross calls disciples of Jesus “to follow the crucified God into the heart of the world’s darkness, into the very kingdom of death, and to look for the light that shines in the darkness, the life that is given beyond the baptismal brush with death–and only there” (p. 33).

  • On the theology of the cross

    Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall is well known for his exposition and advocacy of a “theology of the cross”–that “thin tradition” (as he calls it) that was first named by Martin Luther, but which represents a minority report throughout Christian history. In short, it’s an anti-triumphalist ethos that serves to puncture the pretensions of the church whenever it tries to secure its being or worth through anything other than the radical grace of God manifested and enacted in the cross of Jesus.

    In this lecture–“The Theology of the Cross: A Usable Past“–Hall provides a helpful overview of the theologia crucis as he understands it. It is, he says, “not a specific and objectifiable set of teachings or dogmas; not ‘a theology’–it is, rather, a spirit and a method that one brings to all one’s reflections on all the various areas and facets of Christian faith and life” (p. 2). He does nevertheless identify a set of “informing or overarching principles” that characterize the theology of the cross, which I’ll set down in abbreviated form:

    1. The compassion and solidarity of God. This means taking seriously the biblical and christological affirmation that God was in Christ. God is present with God’s creatures and suffers with them; and this is exemplified preeminently in the cross of Jesus. This view denies that classic position that God is “absolute in power and transcendence, and therefore free of contamination by earthly involvements and passions” (p. 3).

    2. The cross as world-commitment. The cross shows that God is implacably determined to be for the world. “The cross is at once, for Christians, the ultimate statement of humankind’s movement away from God and of God’s gracious movement towards fallen mankind” (p. 4). Far from offering a path of “ascent” out of the world to some eternal hereafter, Christianity speaks of God’s descent into the very depths of created being. And this precisely because “God so loved the world.”

    3. Honesty about experience (Christian Realism). As Luther says in his Heidelberg Disputation theses, the theologian of the cross is one “who calls things by their proper name.” In other words, she takes a frank and stark look at the evil and suffering in the world and does not pretend that they’re really good. Even the cross is not good in itself, but only as a sign of “God’s concealed presence and determination to mend the creation from within” (p. 5). Christians aren’t supposed be happy shiny people who never dwell on evil or suffering; that sort of forced cheerfulness often manifests itself as insensitivity to suffering and injustice.

    4. The contextual character of theology. A theology of the cross, Hall argues, is always alive to the particular context in which it is situated. This is in part a consequence of a historical consciousness that recognizes the conditioned and partial nature of all our speculations. It also grows out of a theological impetus for practicality. “It is not interested in pure theory. It is inherently critical of ideology. It drives always towards incarnation, towards enactment” (p. 6).

    5. The refusal of finality. In contrast to a “theology of glory,” a theology of the cross recognizes that final redemption is still a future reality and that we as yet see through a glass darkly. Cognitively, this means we live without certainty; ethically, it means that we should beware of perfectionism or a sense of having arrived at our destination. Further, it issues in “human and ethical solidarity with all who suffer,” (p. 7) because the entire creation yet groans in anticipation of its liberation from bondage.

    It may seem, says Hall, that those who stand in this tradition are too pessimistic or that they deny the reality or the power of the Resurrection. He responds:

    Contrary to many critics of the theology of the cross, this theology does not overlook or downplay the victory of the third day; what it critiques is the use, or rather the misuse, of the resurrection in order to render the cross null and void. And that misuse is by no means a minor thing. Especially in North American popular Christianity the resurrection–or what I call resurrection-ism–functions to turn the religious away from the cross as a thing well and truly overcome. And that means not only the cross of Jesus, but the cross of reality; so that the religion thus mythically bolstered becomes a primary factor in the deadening of otherwise sensitive people to the pain of God in the world. I suspect there is no greater theological task in North America today than to refuse and redirect this false and dangerous functioning of Easter in this society. Rightly to grasp the meaning of Christ’s resurrection is to be turned towards the cross, with understanding, not away from it. (p. 7)

    This kind of ethos represents what I think is the Lutheran tradition (broadly conceived, which means it’s not the property of officially “Lutheran” churches) at its best, and a big part of why I find it a compelling interpretation of Christianity and human experience. I just ordered Hall’s book, The Cross in Our Context, and will likely blog more about this.

  • Scandal of particularity

    There were some good comments on the previous post, moving away to some extent from the value of John Dominic Crossan’s work in particular to the relevance of “historical Jesus” scholarship more broadly.

    Christopher‘s and Derek‘s comments in particular have got me thinking that there is a tension here. On the one hand, it’s true that the historical data about Jesus are (relatively) scanty and what we do have is filtered through the theological prism of the early church’s witness. On the other hand, it strikes me as important that we have access to the shape of Jesus’s life as a particular kind of life. Otherwise, we run the risk of seeing the Incarnation as simply an affirmation of our humanity that doesn’t call us to a particular (cruci)form of discipleship. (John Howard Yoder–who in many ways would I think dissent from the assumptions made by much of the recent historical Jesus stuff–makes a similar point in The Politics of Jesus.)

    So, I guess one thing I find valuable about the efforts of folks like Borg, Crossan, etc. is the attempt to situate Jesus in his historical context. Even if we grant that the (heavily interpreted and theologized) New Testament portraits of Jesus are as close as we will ever come to the “historical” person behind them, understanding the context matters to how we interpret those portraits. Too often, I think, Christians have been tempted to read the Jesus of the gospels either as offering a set of timeless moral platitudes (a lot of liberal Christianity) or as living exclusively for the sake of dying on the cross to atone for sin (conservative Christianity). What historical Jesus scholarship can remind us of is that Jesus had a particular mission and ministry to a particular people at a particular time and place. Of course, as a Christian, I want to affirm the universal significance of that mission, but I think we have to start with the particular before moving to the universal, and historical scholarship, properly done, can help with that.

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • Power, state, and Reformation

    Leaving aside the anti-Catholic animus (as well as what seem to be some dubious historical assertions) this is an interesting piece by British journalist Rod Liddle on the deep connections between English culture and Protestant Christianity.

    There has been a revisionist view, popularized by Eamon Duffy in particular, that Catholicism represented the authentic religion of the English people which was stripped away by the heavy hand of Henry VIII and the English state. Liddle is here taking the more traditional view that it was a matter of England throwing off the shackles of Roman tyranny.

    As it happens, I’ve just finished Own Chadwick’s history of the Reformation (Owen, brother of Henry, edited the Penguin series on the History of the Church in which Henry’s volume on the early church also appears). Chadwick takes more of a middle of the road view. He sees the decline in the church’s power in relation to the state as something that happened across the board, in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, and probably necessary for a more modern and rational form of government to emerge. Chadwick, in other words, takes a somewhat “Whiggish” view of the Reformation.

    Chadwick also contends that, while reform could hardly be called a populist movement in England, the people accepted it fairly readily, and even among conservatives those calling for a restoration of the pope’s authority were a minority (of course, Chadwick’s book, having been written some time ago, doesn’t take Duffy’s scholarship into account). One of the virtues of Chadwick’s book is that he takes “reform” to be something that took place throughout Europe, but took different forms in different countries. This enables him to see the “counter” Reformation as more than simply a reaction to Protestantism, but also as a genuine Catholic response to the drive toward reform.

    There’s a lot of interest in using this history polemically. Not just Roman Catholics, but Anglo-Catholics tend to emphasize the “catholic” elements of English Christianity and even take a somewhat dim view of the Reformation. One occasionally hears that Anglicanism has its theological and liturgical sources in the Fathers and the early church rather than in the Reformers (why not both?). On the other side, as in Liddle’s essay, Reformed Christianity is identified with English culture and nationhood, while Catholicism remains an essentially foreign, and somewhat menacing, force.

    Either way, history, by itself can’t settle theological disputes. It’s certainly possible that the Reformers were right in their main criticisms of the medieval church even if the Reformation often made progress by means of state power. (For that matter, Catholicism hardly foreswore the use of the sword.) Success doesn’t prove truth, but it doesn’t prove falsehood either.

  • Wright on the radio

    Via a friend who is a Calvin College grad, here’s a link to a lecture N.T. Wright gave there recently.

    Also, the lectures Bishop Wright gave at Harvard Memorial Church when he was here last fall are now available online.

    I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but thought I’d draw folks’ attention to them.

  • Romans 13 as death penalty proof-text

    There’ve been a variety of discussions and arguments among Christians in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s execution about whether it’s proper for them to support capital punishment. Invariably, someone trots out Romans 13 as a proof-text for the pro-death penalty side of the argument:

    Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

    Verse 4 in particular is frequently appealed to as the clincher: “for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”

    First off, I think there’s legitimate room for disagreement about what “bearing the sword” means in this context. Does it refer explicitly to capital punishment, or is “the sword” a more general symbol of earthly authority? Presumably this has been hashed out by people far better informed than me.

    But, even assuming that v. 4 does refer to capital punishment, are the folks who use this as an argument for Christian acceptance of the death penalty prepared to bite the bullett and accept the political stance that seems implied by the passage as a whole? As has often been pointed out, Rom. 13 seems to encourage a stance of extreme submission to the existing political authorities. At the very least this would seem to rule out any kind of armed rebellion against the state. Are we prepared to repudiate the American revolution, say, in order to endorse the principle of “be[ing] subject to the governing authorities”?

    Some theologians have argued that Paul is only referring to legitimate authorites whose rule is in harmony with the moral law, but that seems like a forced reading of the passage to say the least. So, it seems to me we’re forced, for the sake of consistency, not to appeal to it as a justification of capital punishment unless we’re prepared to assent to the teaching of the entire passage. I certainly don’t recall hearing too many pro-death penalty Christians repudiating the principles of 1776, but I’m open to correction.

    Moreover, the point of the passage hardly seems to be to encourage Christians to support the death penalty within the empire, or petition for its frequent use. It looks a lot more like Paul is telling the Roman Christians to live in such a way as to be blameless before men and God. It’s about how they should act, not how the state should organize its criminal justice system.

  • Jesus the Jew and Christian practice

    UPDATE: Welcome, readers of Theolog! I have responded to Jason Byassee’s comments here.

    Lutheran Zephyr and Derek the Ænglican already have good comments on this article by Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor Levine argues for a stronger recognition of the essential Jewishness of Jesus by the Christian community, and sharply criticizes practices and rhetoric that define Jesus over against Judaism.

    She is certainly right, I think, that a lot of Christian talk still lapses into a lazy caricature of “Judaism” as Jesus’ foil. And, as Prof. Levine points out, progressives, feminists, and liberation theologians aren’t exempt from this. It’s obscene, for instance, when extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, which at times borders on the anti-Semitic, is served up in the name of Jesus.

    However, I also think LZ and Derek are both right that she seems to focus on the “Jesus of history” as normative for Christian faith in ways that are far from problem free. For instance, what are we to make of the claim that “preserving the fact that Jesus wore fringes [symbolizing the 613 commandmetns of the Torah], 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”? Early on the church decided, for better or for worse, that keeping the Torah was not mandatory for Christians. So, it’s not clear what “mandting respect” for that practice would entail within the Christian community, apart from respecting the practices of our Jewish elder brothers and sisters in the faith.

    Or take Prof. Levine’s contention that “as for Jesus’ Jewish identity, neither he nor his Jewish associates would have mourned the loss of a herd of hogs—animals that are not kosher and that represent conspicuous consumption in that they cost more to raise than they produce in meat”? Does this mean that Christians, to take one of my personal hobbyhorses, are free to treat pigs and other un-kosher animals as having no dignity as creatures of God?

    What all of this gets at – and Derek, following Luke Timothy Johnson, highlights this point – is how difficult it is for Christians to simply take the “Jesus of history” (itself a problematic notion) as normative for their faith and practice in any straightforward way. First, as Derek also points out, the church has never confined Jesus’ influence to the example set by a historical figure 2,000 years ago, much less to the latest scholarly reconstruction. For Christian faith Jesus is first and foremost the living Lord whose Spirit continues to guide the church. Of course, that faith would be a mirage if the Jesus of history didn’t do and say the kinds of things recorded in the gospel accounts. But Christians aren’t committed to slavishly imitating all the details of Jesus’ life, even the religious details. That much was made clear at the Council of Jerusalem.

    This doesn’t mean that Jesus’ Jewishness is unimportant, and 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. But 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.

    But, to say this also presents a challenge for contemporary Christians. Often the imitatio Christi is thought of in terms of simply copying the lifestyle of the historical Jesus (usually one favorite particular version), and this is sometimes presented as a superior alternative to the life of the institutional church. Or the Jesus of the gospels is treated as having ready-made answers to all of our moral dilemmas. If Christians believe in a risen Lord, though, attempting to mimic a 1st century Jewish rabbi, or wonder-working sage, or cynic philosopher, or whatever the Jesus du jour is, rather misses the point. One follows Jesus precisely by being incorporated into his body through partaking of the holy mysteries and hearing the Lord’s word. By being part of that body, we believe that we gradually, if haltingly, come to be formed according the pattern of Jesus, his life of self-giving service and love (again, I think L.T. Johnson is very good on this – see The Real Jesus and Living Jesus; both of these books had a big impact on me). In other words, why chase after a historical reconstruction when the living Jesus makes himself available to us here and now?