A Thinking Reed

Category: Uncategorized

  • Intolerable

    I was doing some online research on website development for a project I’m working on and came across this statement:

    It’s an established fact that Internet users today are increasingly impatient and intolerable.

    Indeed!

  • At the risk of becoming a one-note blog…

    I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be worth looking at where it goes wrong.

    The author, Russell Paul La Valle, writing about the Spanish Parliament’s impending protection of great apes, explains why animals can’t have rights:

    Should animals have rights? The quick and only logical answer is no. A “right” is a moral principle that governs one’s freedom of action in society. This concept is uniquely, and exclusively, human — man is the only being capable of grasping such an abstraction, understanding his actions within a principled framework and adjusting his behavior so as not to violate the rights of others. The source of rights is man himself, his nature and his capacity for rational thought. To give rights to creatures that are irrational, amoral and incapable of living in a rights-based environment makes a mockery of the very concept of rights and, ultimately, threatens man.

    For starters, it’s just not true that we only ascribe rights to beings capable of grasping abstractions, understanding their actions within a principled framework, and adjusting their behavior so as not to violate the rights of others. Infants, children, the severly mentally retarded, the comatose, and those suffering from dementia all have rights, but none of them meet this stringent set of conditions. They depend on others to press their claims and protect their legitimate interests, which doesn’t stop them from being rights-bearers. Why shouldn’t the same hold for animals?

    Personally, I’m not wedded to the language of rights. I think it serves some useful purposes, particularly in setting strong moral limits to what may be done to recognized rights-bearers. But the language of rights can easily be taken, as it seems to be here, to mean that morality is fundamentally an agreement between rational adults to respect certain limits in their treatment of each other for the purposes of furthering their self-interest. When morality is conceived of in these terms, “marginal” cases tend to be pushed to, well, the margins of moral concern. The weak, the mentally disabled, and those who don’t meet a certain level of “rationality” end up morally less important.

    This “contractualist” understanding of morality manages to ignore what are, for most of us, the lion’s share of our duties to others. Duties to family, friends, compatriots, ancestors, posterity, distant strangers, animals, the biosphere, and God don’t arise from agreements between self-interested parties. Giving undue prominence to quasi-contractual relationships seriously distorts the broader moral landscape.

    Furthermore, it’s contestable whether all animals are “irrational” and “immoral” if this is taken to mean that don’t exhibit these capacities to any degree. Evolutionary theory should lead us to expect that animals exhibit degrees of rational and moral behavior, and experience bears this out. “Rationality” is not something that appears, full-grown in all its majesty, only with human beings.

    Mr. La Valle continues:

    Unlike most mammals or other types of creatures, humans are not born with instinctual, inherited knowledge of how to survive. Rather, man’s survival is achieved through reason, which allows him to integrate the facts of his surroundings and apply this knowledge to use and shape the natural world for his preservation and advancement. This includes the use of animals, whether for food, shelter or other necessities.

    As the Nobel laureate Joseph Murray has observed, “Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacement, and all vaccinations.” Indeed, animal research and clinical study is paramount in the discovery of the causes, cures and treatments of countless diseases, including AIDS and cancer.

    Cruelty to animals is of course repugnant and morally indefensible. Yet we should not lose sight of who we are or of our place in the world. Yes, humans have a responsibility as stewards of our domain, but not at our own expense or with the mentality that a cat is a rat is a chimp is a person.

    Once again Mr. La Valle betrays an odd and extremely outdated view of animals’ lives. Modern studies of animals hardly support the idea that all non-human animals live solely according to instinct, and not by learning from their environment and applying that knowledge. Recent decades have seen an explosion in the understanding of the social and emotional lives of animals. La Valle, by contrast, seems to be operating with something like a Cartesian understanding of the difference between human and non-human animals.

    It’s also odd, to say the least, to infer that because human beings are superior in at least some ways to non-human animals that they are licensed to use animals for whatever purposes they deem necessary. One person who certainly didn’t hold to human/non-human egalitarianism, and who was philosophically light-years away from, say, Peter Singer, but opposed the heedless exploitation of animals was C.S. Lewis:

    We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector: that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us….If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, or capitalists for the same reasons. (“Vivisection,” from God in the Dock)

    It’s good, of course, to oppose cruelty to animals, but in practice this all too often means opposing cruelty only when no human interest (expansively defined) is at stake. For instance, if our animal cruelty laws don’t prevent factory farming or cutting open the brains of apes for research purposes, how sincere is our professed opposition to cruelty? If we hold that that any human interst, no matter how trivial, always trumps the vital interests of animals, how different is that really from “might makes right”? To talk about “animal rights” means, at the very least, that animals don’t exist for our sake, or as raw material for our purposes, but have their own lives to lead and a claim to being left alone to lead them.

  • A yankee’s lament

    I am so not cut out for these DC summers. It’s supposed to be 99 today. In frickin’ June. Seriously.

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).

    Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time even though I was in a very different place, religiously speaking.

    Faith, for N., has two aspects, the trust aspect and the loyalty aspect. To have faith in something is to trust it as a source of our worth and well-being. But it is also to have loyalty to that thing, to ally ourselves with it and take it up as our cause.

    N. distinguishes “radical” monotheism from polytheism and henotheism. The latter term referred, originally, to the worship of one god, but a god who is recognized as one among several. This god might be a national or tribal deity, but isn’t identified with the universal lord and creator. It’s generally agreed, as far as I’m aware, that the OT scriptures exhibit a mix of henotheism and monotheism.

    But N. wants to use both polytheism and henotheism in a more extended sense to refer to the ways in which we invest our trust and loyalty. For instance, if my loyalties are divided among devotion to work, family, community, leisure, etc. without any unifying or ordering principle, then I am a functional polytheist.

    N. is more interested in modern forms of henotheism, however, both because forms of henotheism are more significant and because they often masquerade as monotheism. A classic case is when our ultimate loyalty is given to our country. Goodness as such is identified with what is good for the nation. And this is often draped in the clothing of civil religion. The cause of god is identified with the cause of our society. Henotheism always involves elevating the penultimate to the place of the ultimate.

    By contrast, radical monotheism identifies the ultimate principle of value with the ultimate principle of being. Giving our loyalty to God as understood by radical monotheism means recognizing God as the bestower of existence and of worth. It also involves making God’s cause our cause:

    For radical monotheism the value-center is neither closed society nor the principle of such a society but the principle of being itself; its reference is to no one reality among the many but to One beyond all the many, whence all the many derive their being, and by participation in which they exist. As faith, it is reliance on the source of all being for the significance of the self and of all that exists. It is the assurance that because I am, I am valued, and because you are, you are beloved, and because whatever is has being,therefore it is worthy of love. It is the confidence that whatever is, is good, because it exists as one thing among the many which all have their origin and their being in the One–the principle of being which is also the principle of value. In Him we live and move and have our being not only as existent but as worthy of existence and worthy in existence. It is not a relation to any finite, natural or supernatural, value-center that confers value on self and some of its companions in being, but it is the value relation to the One to whom all being is related. Monotheism is less than radical if it makes a distinction between the principle of being and the principle of value; so that while all being is acknowledged as absolutely dependent for existence on the One, only some beings are valued as having worth for it; or if, speaking in religious language, the Creator and the God of grace are not identified. (p. 32)

    God’s “cause” or project is nothing less than all being. N. strikes an impeccably Augustinian note when he says that, for the radical monotheist, being qua being is good. God calls all that is into existence and calls it good. And wills its flourishing.

    This is why radical monotheism qualifies all partial loyalties, at least when they threaten to displace the whole. Even putatively monotheistic faiths like Judaism and Christianity aren’t immune from henotheistic tendencies. A Christian tribalism that confines its concern to “the brethren” or an ecclesiasticism that comes close to identifying the church with God is a betrayal of the principle of radical monotheism:

    In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (p. 58 )

    The ethical implication of this radical faith, according to N., is to make the cause of all being our cause. Radical monotheism breaks down the barriers between the sacred and profane. Rather than there being “holy” places, objects, and classes of people are “secularized.” “When the principle of being is God–i.e., the object of trust and loyalty–then he alone is holy and ultimate [and] sacredness must be denied to any special being” and a “Puritan iconoclasm has ever accompanied the rise of radical faith” (p. 52). But the flip side of this iconoclasm is “the sanctification of all things”:

    Now every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness; every living thing, on earth, in the heavens, and in the waters is his creation and points in its existence toward him; the whole earth is filled with his glory; the infinity of space is his temple where all creation is summoned to silence before him. Here is the basis then not only of a transformed ethics, founded on the recognition that whatever is, is good, but of transformed piety or religion, founded on the realization that every being is holy. (pp. 52-3)

    One thing that struck me is how N. follows his own logic to its rather non-anthropocentric end; non-human creation has its own intrinsic non-utilitarian value:

    How difficult the monotheistic reorganization of the sense of the holy is, the history of Western organized religion makes plain. In it we encounter ever new efforts to draw some new line of division between the holy and profane. A holy church is separated from a secular world; a sacred priesthood from an unhallowed laity; a holy history of salvation from the unsanctified course of human events; the sacredness of human personality, or of life, is maintained along with the acceptance of a purely utilitiarian valuation of animal existence or nonliving being. (p.53)

    N.’s Augustinian outlook provides a foundation for a theocentric worldview. As Christopher has recently blogged, Christianity is still stuck much of the time in an anthropocentric perspective, seeing God’s concern aimed primarily at us. For N. this would just be another form of henotheism; God is being used to prop up the human project.

    However, what N. doesn’t provide (which is perhaps understandable given the brevity of this book) is a criterion for ranking the importance of the needs of different kinds of beings. Are we too embrace a flat egalitarianism where all existents have the same value? That doesn’t seem right. And yet, any hierarchical ordering threatens to bring anthropocentrism in through the back door.

    What I’m inclined to say is that ethics have to be grounded in the nature of different beings and the needs that arise from those natures, along with their relationships with other beings. What’s good for x is what x needs to flourish as the kind of being it is.

    For instance, it’s sometimes absurdly claimed that proponents of animal rights want animals to have the same rights as human beings. But a right to vote or to an education, say, isn’t going to do a pig much good. Rather, what a pig needs arises out of her nature: room to root around, be social, to nest, and nurture offspring. If we are depriving our fellow creatures of the opportunity to express their essential natures, then that’s a good sign that we’ve overstepped the bounds of what we truly need to flourish. To attend to all being, then, doesn’t require us to reduce everything to the same level, but it may require us to curtail our own desires when they threaten the essential needs of other creatures.

    The most appealing version of this vision that I’ve come across is Stephen R. L. Clark’s “cosmic democracy,” where each kind of creature is provided with sufficient space to thrive. But this presupposes a couple of things, first that the world is set up in such a way to permit this (which is, in part, a question about providence) and second, and more pressing, that human beings can learn to see themselves as one species among many.

  • Bell’s Amber Ale

    I was in the mood to try something new the other day, and the guy at my local liquor store recommended this to me. It’s quite good. Brewed in Michigan, it’s got a nice hoppy flavor, but sweet and complex. Too many American microbrews these days seem to be trying to out-hop each other.

  • Clinton and Iraq

    Michael at Levellers expresses some well-justified outrage at Bill Clinton’s recent attempts to whitewash history and portray himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war. But as I mentioned in a comment to Michael’s post, not only did Clinton not oppose the war, his Iraq policy made it much more likely than it otherwise would’ve been.

    His administration did everything it could to hype the danger posed by Saddam’s regime, talked up the threat of WMDs, officially supported a policy of regime change, etc. After 9/11 happened Saddam was already poised as the Hitler du jour in the minds of most policymakers and pundits. Clinton did as much as anyone to promote the idea of Saddam as a great menace to the U.S. and world peace.

    Needless to say, this had numerous real-world consequences, such as the no-fly zone enforcement and the UN-approved sanctions regime. The human toll of this exercise in “soft power” is disputed, but no one denies that the people of Iraq suffered terribly, not least because they were prevented from rebuilding their country’s infrastructure which had been so badly damaged during the first Gulf War. So, far from being “opposed” to war with Iraq, the Clinton administration carried on a low-grade war against Iraq for nearly ten years.

  • Christ’s ambiguous reign and living in hope

    Yesterday, of course, was Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we head into Advent. The pastor at our church delivered an excellent sermon on the different aspects of Christ’s kingship and how we can become aware of them in our lives. Jesus reigns over all things, but he reigns as the crucified one – the one who transfigures the symbols of kingship and is present to us as the one who forgives our sins (the gospel text speaks to this with special power).

    This ambiguity in Christ’s lordship is one that I think we’re often tempted to eliminate in one direction or the other. The more common is to see Christ as an earthly ruler writ large, and to downplay, or ignore, the way he transfigures our ideas of kingship. On the other hand, in some recent theology, the emphasis has been laid so heavily on Christ’s weakness and his solidarity in suffering that the Resurrection and his triumphant reign seems to get lost.

    It doesn’t seem right to say that the Resurrection simply undoes the crucifixion, as though it didn’t reveal anything special or new about God. But it does imply that self-giving love is also backed up with ultimate power. The death of Christ isn’t simply a case of a beautiful soul ground under the wheels of an unforgiving universe: it reveals what the universe, at bottom, rests upon and what will ultimately triumph.

    Holding these two aspects of Christ’s sovereignty – power revealed in weakness and his status as the one for whom “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” – isn’t easily done. Maybe this is another facet of living in between the times, but it’s hard not to chafe at what looks for all the world like Christ’s failure to exercise his rule over our world. I don’t think it’s sufficient to say that Christ doesn’t exercise his power that way, since we believe that he will, in some mysterious and unimaginable way, end creation’s rebellion against his rule.

    Believing in Christ’s kingship means that we believe in both his present and future reigns, and yet those reigns are different, at least in the way things appear to us. In this age his reign appears partial at best, while creation groans for its redemption. And it’s hard for us (or at least for me) to believe in that reign, and to experience it, as a concrete reality. This is one more reason, I guess, why hope is a Christian virtue: we believe not merely in an unseen reality, but that this unseen reality will – someday – manifest itself in a final and definitive way.

  • The political Christian

    American Christians tend to be a bit schizophrenic about politics. They swing from utopian optimism (“Christianizing the social order,” “restoring America as a Christian nation”) to extreme pessimism when the inevitable disillusion sets in about the limits of what politics can accomplish. This recent post at the Christian Century blog by David Heim offers a more sober perspective:

    Skepticism about politics is always healthy. But it strikes me that [David] Kuo’s and [Gregory] Boyd’s comments reflect a broad, unhelpful tendency in American Christianity to oscillate between two poles: either a fervent engagement in politics for the sake of the gospel and the world, or an equally fervent detachment for the sake of the purity of the gospel and the health of the church. Isn’t there something between the two poles?

    Heim goes on to argue that Christians should see politics as a vocation that some have (and that all of us have some of the time) to participate in making improvements in the social order. He cautions against the churches corporately making pronouncements on specific political issues, but encourages individual Christians to be engaged in the public sphere:

    Meanwhile, however, individual Christians have their particular vocations. In a democracy, all people have the vocation of citizen and so are in some degree called to the work of politics. Beyond that, a certain number of individual Christians are called to a more specific vocation: to study, analyze or participate in the day-to-day workings of politics. They make arguments and pay attention to data. They look for affinities between the gospel and political philosophies and programs. They listen to what constituents say and arguments other people make. Their work is fallible, limited, pervaded by sin, always subject to revision—but so are lots of vocations.

    This decidedly non-utopian approach to politics would recognize that it’s about caring for the neighbor and making the social orde a place where all people can have a chance at leading decent lives. A backlash against “Constantinianism” has soured some Christians on any involvement in politics, but there’s no reason that a chastened political engagement that recognizes the fact of pluralism and the limits of what politics can accomplish isn’t a legitimate vocation for Christians.

    However, I think there’s still a role for the church acting corporately to equip its members for their various vocations in the world. While it doesn’t necessarily have the expertise to make judgments about particular issues, the church ought to form its members in a way that helps them approach politics with a gospel-shaped vision. For instance, I think it’s entirely appropriate for Chrisitans to evaluate public policy with an eye to how it affects the most vulnerable members of society. This kind of formation might come as a result of experience serving such vulnerable people by participating in the church’s corporal works of mercy.

    There’s also a long tradition of Chrisitan moral reflection that forbids certain means in the pursuit of even worthwhile ends. Just war theory is an example that applies to foreign affairs. In most cases these constraints probably won’t dictate a single policy, but they might rule out some options. Well-formed Christians are not going to support a military policy that targets innocent civilians, or acquiesces in torture.

    So, I agree with Heim that Christians can chart a middle course between Constantinianism and sectarianism. This involves seeking the good of the neighbor in a way that is shaped by an awareness of our own fallibility and the limits of politics, but is also formed by the gospel of God’s gracious love.

  • Alison on sin, wrath and the “deathlessness” of God

    I’ve been reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, and he has an interesting take on the relation between forgiveness, sin, and the wrath of God.

    Alison, as readers may know, is a follower of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and uses it as a key to understand what’s going on in the gospel stories, especially regarding Jesus’ death.

    The heart of Girard’s theory is that human psychology and culture is driven by a desire-based rivalry that threatens social peace. All our desire is other-directed in the sense that we learn to desire something by seeing someone else desire it. But this creates the conditions of rivalry, which threatens to turn violent. To defuse this violence, the community will unite and turn on a scapegoat – a victim – and, having spent its violence on the scapegoat it enables social peace to be restored.

    The paradoxical result is that the scapegoat is identified both as the source of conflict and the means by which peace is restored. Consequently, myths grow up that invest the victim with divine properites. And in the process, these myths occlude our complicity in the violence and victimization that we (mistakenly) believe to be necessary and justified.

    However, according to both Girard and Alison, the Bible gradually reverses this view by proclaiming the innocence of the vicitm and stripping the scapegoating mechanism of its mythical and religious shroud, exposing it for what it is: human violence directed against the other. This process culminates in the crucifixion of Jesus where an undeniably innocent man is put to death “for,” or, on account of, our sins. The scapegoating mechanism is revealed for the evil it is in the machinations of the various parties who collude to put Jesus to death as a threat to social peace.

    Alison’s particular emphasis is on the way that the Resurrection makes a new situation possible. Jesus returns from the dead, not as an aggrevied victim seeking vengeance, but as the forgiving victim. He is thus able to break the cycle of desire and scapegoating by making a new individual and social reality possible. Since, for Alison, human selves are formed by an other, Jesus provides us with a new self that makes a pacific (non-rivalrous) mimesis possible.

    This picture of what’s going on in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus leads Alison to deny that there is any violence or exclusion in God. Death and violence are human realities (though they’re not essential to being human: hence original sin), and we tend to project these on to God. But what Jesus reveals is a God for whom, according to Alison, death and violence aren’t even realities, properly speaking. And this leads him to rework the notions of wrath and judgment.

    Alison argues that this new revelation only made possible by Jesus’ death and resurrection has a subversive effect on existing religious categories and language. So, in the New Testament we see a gradual process of purifying the image of God from traces of violence. Paul, Alison thinks, usues much of the traditional language (wrath, sacrifice, etc.) but in a way that ironically inverts its meaning, as Alison attempts to show in a discussion of Romans:

    [T]he content of the wrath of God [for Paul] is itself a demystification of a vindictive account of God (whose righteousness has just been declared). For the content of the wrath is the handing over by God of us to ourselves. Three times in the following verses the content of the wrath is described in terms of handing over: 1:24; 1:26; and 1:28. That is to say, the wrath, rather than being an act of divine vengeance, is a divine nonresistance to human evil. However, I would suggest it is more than that. The world “handed over” (paredoken) has in primitive Christian sources a particularly subtle set of resonances. For God is described as handing over (paredoken) his own son to us in a text no further from our own than Romans 8:32. The handing over of the son to us and the handing over of ourselves to sin appear to be at the very least parallel. The same verb (paredothe) is used in 4:25, where Jesus was handed over for our trespasses and raised for our justification. I would suggest that it is the handing over of the son to our killing him that is in fact the same thing as handing us over to our own sins. Thus wrath is life in the sort of world which kills the son of God. (pp. 126-127).

    Alison contends that this comes to clearer expression in the Johannine writings, particularly in the identification in John’s gospel between the judgment of the world and Jesus crucifixion. The crucifixion of the Son of God is God’s judgment upon the world. Alison discusses the story of the man born blind as a way of illustrating this inversion of judgment:

    Jesus’ final comment, “For judgment I came into the world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind,” is his assessment of the whole story. In the first place, Jesus has carried out no active judgment at all. The only judgment related in the story has been that of the Pharisees, casting the man out. This is part of the ironic Johannine recasting of judgment: it is by being crucified that Jesus is the real judge of his judges. So because Jesus is the cause of the former blind man’s expulsion, the former blind man shares Jesus’ role as judge of those who have expelled him. It is not that Jesus simply abolishes the notion of judgment or is merely much more of a judge than the other judges: the sense in which Jesus is a judge is a subversion from within of the notion of judgment. The judgment that excluded the former blind man is revealed as the judgment (also discernment) that the expellers are really blind. (p. 121)

    What this judgment reveals, according to Alison, is that sin is essentially what he calls the “murderous lie.” We expell and victimize in order to maintain order and security, and then we lie to ourselves about what we’re doing and why we do it. This is why the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus provides the key to making a new way of living possible: the crucifixion, in being the murder of the innocent victim par excellence, reveals the scapegoating mechanism and our complicity in it as the lie that it is. But the resurrection of Jesus as the forgiving victim makes possible a new kind of life that is based on the truth and not a lie. Forgiveness presupposes that there is something to forgive: it doesn’t cover up what was done but makes it part of a past from which it becomes possible to move on in a different direction.

    God is then recast as the forgiving victim and wrath is seen as a projection of our violence onto God. In killing the son of God we bring judgment on ourselves, but he returns as if to say “Even if you kill me I’ll keep forgiving and loving you.” There is a kind of double revelation here. On the one hand the crucifixion of Jesus reveals the violent means by which we keep order, that death isn’t something that just happens, but is something that we visit upon others. On the other, it reveals God as characterized by “deathlessness.”

    This means, Alison says, that God is “indifferent” to death; it’s as though it’s not even a reality for him. God’s love carries on loving, even through death. And in raising Jesus specifically – the preacher of God’s love and forgiveness – God shows that he loves us. “It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us” (p. 118).

    So, we have human beings marked by death in that it structures their reality. But we also have God as deathless, as loving through and beyond death. The third piece of the picture is that human life is not essentially entwined by death, but that it’s a contingent fact about us. “If God can raise someone from the dead in the middle of human history, the very fact reveals that death, which up till this point had marked human history as simply something inevitable, part of what it is to be a human being, is not inevitable” (p. 118). The doctrine of original sin has always walked a tightrope in that it posits a primal human sin that has infected the entire race, but denies that this was in any way inevitable or a necessary aspect of human or creaturely existence. What Alison is arguing is that original sin is to be understood “backwards” from the resurrection. That only in Jesus’ death and resurrection do we begin to understand the nature of our predicament and how God acts to free us from it.

    This post is already too long, but I’ll try to offer some more thoughts on this once I’ve made it through the rest of the book.

  • About 80% Lutheran

    Here are my results from the Eucharistic Theology quiz that’s been going around:

    You scored as a Luther
    You are Martin Luther. You’ll stick with the words of Scripture, and defend this with earthy expressions. You believe this is a necessary consequence of an orthodox Christology. You believe that the bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Christ, but aren’t too sure about where he goes after the meal, and so you don’t accept reservation of the Blessed Sacrament or Eucharistic devotions.

    Luther: 81%
    Orthodox: 69%
    Catholic: 63%
    Calvin: 50%
    Zwingli: 50%
    Unitarian: 0%

    The main thing I learned from this is that I don’t have particularly strong or well-formed views on what happens in the Eucharist – I believe Jesus is really present and that we’re united to him by partaking, but I’m happy to leave the metaphysics of it a mystery. Oh, and I also learned that whoever made this quiz really doesn’t like Unitarians.

    I’m also not necessarily opposed to Eucharistic devotions. The Reformers were probably right to oppose them if they were being used as a substitute for frequent reception of the sacrament among the laity. But in churches where communion is frequent (and perhaps even too casual at times) they could potentially be powerful reminders of the presence of Christ in the Sacrament. I found the one Benediction service I attended very effective in this respect .