A Thinking Reed

Tag: Christianity

  • Is love always uncontrolling?

    I recently re-read Thomas Jay Oord’s 2015 book The Uncontrolling Love of God, which made a bit of a splash in certain circles when it first came out. While it’s a stimulating read, I found myself once again not fully convinced by the argument.

    In brief, Oord argues that God cannot — because of the divine nature itself — unilaterally act to guarantee certain outcomes in the world. According to Oord, God’s nature as “kenotic love” is inconsistent with the ability to act in a “coercive” manner. Rather, God’s activity is characterized by an “other-empowering” love that gives created beings the ability to act; however, God cannot, consistent with the loving divine nature, “override” creaturely activities to ensure that events take a particular course. God can act “persuasively” to woo creatures toward the good (similar to process theology) but cannot determine what they will do. In Oord’s view, this is the most satisfying solution to the problem of evil. This is because it allows us to see gratuitous evil as something God can’t prevent (in a very strong sense of “can’t”) rather than something God chooses not to prevent (much less directly wills or causes).

    It’s important to distinguish Oord’s view (and he is at great pains himself to distinguish it) from a family of views which holds that God voluntarily limits the divine power for the sake of creaturely freedom. Oord argues that this type of view leaves God vulnerable to the charge of permitting unnecessary evil because God could, on this view, intervene to prevent evil, but simply chooses not to, at least much of the time. On Oord’s view, by contrast, God cannot do this because the divine nature is such that God’s activity is always other-empowering and never coercive.

    While Oord does offer a strong critique of the “self-limitation” view, one point at which I remain unconvinced is that “kenotic love” must always rule out “coercion” or unilateral action by God. This has a certain plausibility when we’re talking about God’s relationship with human beings, who have (at least on Oord’s view) libertarian free will. In other words, it makes a certain sense to say that it would not be loving for God to unilaterally override my free will, and thus such an action is inconsistent with the divine nature as Oord understands it.

    Where this seems less plausible to me is when we’re talking about non-human creatures, and especially inanimate objects. Is it really the case that it would be a violation of love for God to unilaterally control the activities of creatures without free will (or even consciousness)? It’s far from obvious to me that it would be. It may be a great good for God to call into existence natural processes that by and large run according to their own immanent laws or principles; but would it necessarily be unloving for God to cause changes in these processes, even “coercively”? It’s just not clear to me that “coercion” has the same moral implications when we’re talking about non-human creation.

    Oord might respond that God’s nature simply requires a consistent approach to creatures of all kinds, whether conscious and/or free-will-having or not. But why should this be the case? Being loving doesn’t, at least on its face, seems to require treating everything the same way. It seems to me that God’s loving nature would only rule out unilateral action if such action were in violation of love. But why are we supposed to think this is the case when it comes to the non-human creation? I think the common moral connotations of “controlling” or “coercive” might be leading us to think there is a conflict with love in cases where there actually isn’t.

    Oord has an ancillary argument for why God can’t unilaterally determine any event – namely that God is an “omnipresent spirit” who lacks a localized body and therefore can’t physically intervene. But this seems to me to both prove too little and too much; for, if God can exert any causal influence on material objects (which on Oord’s view, God can, just not “coercive” influence), then why does God’s lack of a localized body mean that God can’t unilaterally determine outcomes? Either the lack of a localized body shows that God can’t exert any influence on physical processes, or it’s no barrier to God exerting influence of whatever kind.*

    In short, while I think Oord’s proposal is intriguing and original, I don’t think the concept of “kenotic love” does quite as much work as he wants it to. At the very least, I think more work would be needed to show that love necessarily rules out all unilateral or “coercive” divine action.

    *One possible solution to this would be to adopt a panpsychist view of creation which holds that all creatures have a mental or quasi-mental aspect. Then, one could perhaps say that God, as spirit, influences just this mental aspect of creatures.

  • Consider the beasts

    Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, Ronald E. Osborn (IVP Academic, 2014)

    Much traditional Christian theology has taught that death and suffering entered the world when Adam and Eve fell into sin. Prior to the fall, many theologians have assumed, the world was free from suffering, sickness and death — and this included the nonhuman world. The prelapsarian world, on this account, was free from predation, parasitism, natural disaster and anything else that causes suffering in the animal kingdom. It was humanity’s sin that, somehow, resulted in all of creation being cursed, leading to the widespread suffering and death that is so evident in nature.

    One advantage of this account is that it, at least ostensibly, exempts God from any moral blame for the suffering of the non-human world. If animal suffering is the result of human sin — either as a penalty or through some more metaphysical connection — then creation as originally made by God did not include these morally troublesome features. God made creation perfect; it was humans who messed it up.

    However, one of the downsides of the traditional view is that it seems to conflict with the well-established findings of modern science. Not only evolutionary biology, but geology, paleontology, and other disciplines, seem to have established beyond a reasonable doubt that death, along with predation, parasitism, natural disasters, and their attendant suffering, long preexisted the appearance of humans on the scene. Accordingly, any theology that wants to make its peace with evolutionary science seems to be presented with a heightened theodicy question: Why would a good God create a world that contains so much animal suffering?

    In Death Before the Fall, Ronald E. Osborn, a scholar and theologian working out of the Seventh-Day Adventist tradition, wrestles with the problem of animal suffering in the context of a rejection of biblical literalism and creationism. This may seem somewhat counterintuitive given the Adventist Church’s affirmation of a literal, six-day creation. But Osborn is one of a number of Adventist scholars who dissent from his church’s official teaching on this point.

    In fact, Osborn spends over half of the book critiquing young-earth creationism and the literalist-fundamentalist readings of the Bible that support it. He argues that creationism ironically adopts an enlightenment-modernist model of knowledge and expects Scripture to conform to the same canons of evidence and factuality as modern science. However, creationism proceeds in a deductive rather than inductive fashion: a literalist reading of the creation story is treated as an unassailable foundation that can’t be questioned. Any facts that seem to contradict it either need to be denied or explained away via increasingly byzantine auxiliary hypotheses.

    This is both bad philosophy and a bad reading of scripture, according to Osborn. For example, he highlights some of the mental gymnastics creationists resort to in order to render the two creation stories in the first chapters of Genesis into one seamless account. These are hardly the result of a “plain” reading of the text!

    Not only does Osborn critique the intellectual supports of creationism, but he also argues that it leads believers into a quasi-gnostic enclave mentality in which any dissent is treated as the first step on the slippery slope to apostasy.

    Osborn has a high view of the inspiration and authority of scripture, but he maintains that this is consistent with reading the creation stories as symbolic-metaphorical narratives (or “saga” to use Karl Barth’s term). He marshals witnesses from history — Augustine, Maimonides, Calvin and Barth — to show that faithful believers have had a range of views on how these stories should be interpreted.

    For me, this was mostly well trod ground since I’ve never been particularly tempted by biblical literalism or been part of a tradition that taught it. But Osborn’s thorough critique allows him to clear the ground for the problem of how, if we reject creationism and a “deathless” prelapsarian world, to reconcile the violence and suffering of nature with the goodness of God the creator.*

    Wisely, in my view, Osborn doesn’t claim to offer an airtight defense or a knock-down solution to the problem of evil. Rather, he points to resources in scripture and tradition that indicate an alternative way of thinking about God’s relationship to creation.

    These resources include the idea of a “cosmic” fall demonic powers as articulated by C.S. Lewis (which is at least in theory consistent with cosmic history as science tells it), the depiction of an untamed creation that is nevertheless loved by God in the book of Job, and the self-emptying life of Jesus as a clue to how God relates to creation. Readers will likely vary in how persuasive they find these responses — but I think the picture that emerges is broadly consistent and appealing. Osborn sees God as creating a “space” where creation can operate according to its own immanent principles, which allow for the possibility that suffering could emerge as a concomitant of these processes. Nevertheless, God works from within creation to draw it toward its fulfillment, and that action is characterize by the “cosuffering humility, nonviolent self-limitation and liberal self-donation” exemplified in Jesus.

    This could be described as a version of the “free process” defense (analogous to the “free will” defense) articulated by John Polkinghorne and others. Essentially, it says that creation has a real, albeit limited, autonomy because God recognizes that it is a great good for created beings to exercise their own causal powers, even if it may lead to consequences God doesn’t’ intend. Many readers will note affinities here with various strains of “open and relational” theology, which is not coincidental, based on some of the references in Osborn’s book. And, cards on the table, my own sympathies are largely with some version of that theology. Certainly, I find it more compelling than the omni-causal deterministic God found in some versions of reformed theology.

    Osborn concludes his book with some reflections on the ethical implications of his vision. One I found particularly interesting was his argument for a recovery of Sabbath-observance as a recognition that human beings are not masters of this world but were made to share in God’s own rest. The Adventist church is one of the few Christian denominations that has maintained observance of the Sabbath, and Osborn suggests that it is importantly distinct from celebrating the Lord’s Day and it could be one way of repenting of Christianity’s long history of anti-Judaism.

    More directly relevant to the topic of the book, he also offers a passionate call for improving our treatment of animals and the rest of God’s non-human creation (it’s worth noting that Adventists are generally expected to practice vegetarianism):

    Herein, it seems to me, lies the most pressing theological dilemma of our age–not the theodicy dilemma of evolutionary biology but the anthropodicy dilemma of late capitalism. Is it still possible to justify the existence of that species that has become a force of such destruction on the planet that it is no longer clear that other species will survive? Does the imago Dei remain, or shall we devour the earth that was left in our care without restraint until it is an utterly scorched desert? Any credible answer to these questions, which grow in urgency every day, must take the form not of the detached theologizing but of concrete and ethical action that brings sabbath peace to our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom. Their blood may or may not be upon God’s hands. On the third planet of the sun there can be no doubt that it is now upon our own. (p. 175)

    As I perhaps hinted above, I might’ve preferred if Osborn had spent less time critiquing creationism and biblical literalism and more time fleshing out his alternative approach. But that may just be a case of whishing an author wrote a different book than they did. (Readers interested in pursuing some of these ideas further might consult the volume The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, edited by John Polkinghorne.) That minor quibble aside, this was a thoroughly stimulating and largely compelling read on a topic that is crucial (and sadly still much neglected) for any credible Christian theology.

    ———————————-

    *It’s worth noting that creationism’s “solution” to the problem of animal suffering isn’t as straightforward as it seems. As Osborn points out, it’s far from clear that it’s just of God to condemn the entire animal creation to untold amounts of suffering as a “punishment” or “curse” resulting from the sin of human beings!

  • Best Theology Books I Read This Year

    Continuing the experiment of dusting off this creaky old blog, here are the best theology books I read this year (not necessarily published this year!):

    Teresa Morgan, Trust in Atonement: Teresa Morgan is a scholar of classical antiquity as well as New Testament and early Christianity, and she brings this perspective to bear in developing a new model of the atonement in this stimulating book. Taking the Greek pistis, with its connotations of “trust” and “trustworthiness,” Prof. Morgan argues that Christ is the one who God entrusts to create trust in human beings. In order to reconcile God and human beings, Jesus creates a “space” where trust can be (re-)established. God entrusts Jesus to us, even at our worst, in order to demonstrate that we can put our trust in God. This is an intriguing work that offers a genuinely fresh alternative to the typically rehearsed atonement models.

    St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: I decided to revisit Athanasius’ classic treatise this year, which remains one of the touchstones of classic Christian theology. One thing that struck me this time around was that, although Athanasius is sometimes presented as an alternative to “forensic,” “juridical” satisfaction theories of the atonement, there are elements of such accounts in his argument. For example, Athanasius says that in dying for us, Christ discharges a “debt” to God, which sounds positively Anselmian. Though it should be said that the emphasis remains on the ontological change effected through the incarnation. There are certainly arguments one could pick with Athanasius’ treatise (e.g. it says very little about Jesus’ earthly ministry and it’s not clear he has completely absorbed the point that Jesus is fully human), but it remains a lucid presentation of one of the essential truths of Christianity.

    Nijay Gupta, The Affections of Christ Jesus:When there is so much niche scholarship being published on Paul, it’s nice to see someone offer an original interpretation of his thought as a whole. Gupta, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, argues that, as the book’s subtitle has it, love is at the heart of Paul’s theology. He applies this insight to Paul’s gospel, his understanding of Christian community, and his ethics, among other topics. “Christianity is about love” may sound trite, but Gupta’s work throws fresh light on Paul’s theology and its relevance for us.

    Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love: I read and discussed this book a chapter at a time with one of my good friends, who is also a deacon in the United Methodist Church. Wynkoop was a Church of the Nazarene theologian in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition who tried to interpret the language of her tradition (“sanctification,” “perfection,” etc.) in ways that would make sense for contemporary people. One of her key insights is that doctrine has to connect with life in a meaningful way – too often theological terms become shibboleths that don’t find purchase in our actual experience. For Wynkoop, “holiness” is fundamentally about the flowering of love in our relationship with God and others. It is never a sub-personal, mechanical, or quasi-magical process; rather, it is an intensely personal relationship with the God of love.

    Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology: This is an ambitious work that tries to reframe Christian theology around a “supra-lapsarian” understanding of the incarnation. Wells, a pastor of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, former Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and author of numerous other works, applies his concept of “being-with” to some of the classic loci in Christian theology. Wells argues that, most fundamentally, God desires to be with God’s creatures and all of creation exists for this purpose. Rather than the incarnation being a “plan B” in response to sin, it is the manifestation of God’s desire to be with God’s creation. This is a provocative and original work, though I’m not 100% sold on Wells’ organizing idea of “being-with” as a kind of master key for scripture.

    Adam Hamilton, Why Did Jesus Have to Die? See my review here!

  • The Cross as God’s Word

    Adam Hamilton, Why Did Jesus Have to Die? The Meaning of the Crucifixion (Abingdon Press, 2025)

    Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS, one of the largest Methodist churches in the country. He’s also the author of numerous books and bible studies where he’s tried to carve out what I would characterize as an irenic Christian orthodoxy for mainline Protestants. He’s “progressive” in the sense of supporting women in ministry and the full equality of LGBTQ+ folks in the church; but his theology is more in the spirit of a Lewisian “mere Christianity.”

    I co-lead a small group at my church, and we’ve used a number of Hamilton’s books over the years. His latest book, Why Did Jesus Have to Die? is one of the more explicitly theological of his works. In it, he wrestles with several of the traditional “theories” of the Atonement – or how Christ’s death and resurrection reconcile us to God. Since this is a topic I’ve long struggled with, I was interested to see how Hamilton would approach it.

    Maybe the most important move Hamilton makes is how he frames the Atonement. It’s a mistake, he argues, to treat theories of Atonement as though they describe the “mechanism” by which God effects our reconciliation. Instead, he says, we should see the cross as “God’s Word to humanity”:

    Jesus incarnates God’s word, revealing God’s heart and character, God’s action on our behalf to reconcile and heal us, God’s word about the human condition, and God’s word concerning God’s will for our lives. Our task is to hear this word, to receive it, and to allow it to have its intended effect on our lives, and through us, on the world. (p. xviii)

    Hamilton acknowledges that some might see this as a merely “subjective” interpretation of the cross. However, he notes “that claim fails to understand the power of God’s Word and how God works in our world”:

    Throughout scripture God acts by speaking. “God said ‘Let there be light.’ And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was” (Gen. 1:3-4). God speaks and a stuttering sheepherd named Moses becomes the great deliverer. God speaks and the childless Abraham and Sarah conceive a child. God speaks through prophets and kingdoms rise and fall. Paul, as well as the writer of Hebrews, describes God’s word as a sword. But most importantly for our purposes, in his epic prologue, John describes Jesus himself as God’s Word. (p. xix)

    In this perspective, the various New Testament motifs or metaphors for the salvation Jesus brings are better viewed as multifaceted images of the word God speaks in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

    In the succeeding chapters, Hamilton provides an overview of various NT metaphors and the theories of the Atonement that have been built upon them. These include:

    Recapitulation – Jesus is the new human archetype

    Penal substitution – Jesus bears the punishment we deserve

    Sacrifice – Jesus offers himself for our forgiveness

    Passover Lamb – Christ delivers us from slavery and death

    New Covenant – Jesus institutes a new covenant in his blood

    Ransom – Christ frees us from the devil/powers of evil

    Redemption – Jesus purchases our freedom

    In all these cases, Hamilton thinks we can recover the power of these metaphors/images interpreted as aspects or facets of the word God speaks to us.

    An instructive case study is that of penal substitution, which is both the most popular theory of atonement in some Christian circles and the most controversial in others. Hamilton offers strong criticisms of this theory as it’s often presented. These will be familiar to those who’ve followed the debate:

    1. The idea that Jesus’ death was to appease God’s anger seems contrary to the gospel message.
    2. It paints an unflattering image of a God who needs an innocent person to be tortured and killed in order to forgive.
    3. It suggests God cannot forgive sin without punishment. But God is portrayed throughout Scripture as forgiving without punishment.

    There are, of course, more sophisticated and nuanced presentations of penal substitution (e.g. John Stott’s The Cross of Christ). But even the most sophisticated interpretations of penal substitution tend to suggest that Christ’s suffering and death was something God needed in order to be gracious to us.

    Hamilton does think, however, that the motif of Christ suffering for us can be helpful:

    I believe it is we who needed Jesus’ death, not God. It was to change our hearts, not to change God’s heart. God can forgive anyone God chooses and does not require God’s Son’s torturous death in order to appease his anger.

    As God’s Word, we can say that we see God demonstrating the pain he himself experiences as a result of human sin but also the lengths to which he is willing to go to save us from it. (p. 28)

    I might put it this way: The cross reveals that God is always bearing the pain of our sin – and yet always offering mercy and forgiveness. The more “transactional” view suggests that there was a time when this wasn’t the case — that God had to be persuaded or paid off in order to be merciful. Attempts to salvage this by appealing to the Trintiy only get you so far, because you still end up having to say that God is paying Godself off or self-propitiating, which is an obscure idea to say the least.

    Interestingly, given the reputation “moral exemplar” theories have had (almost as bad as penal substitution!), Hamilton spends to chapters expounding and defending multiple versions of this motif.

    Essentially, Hamilton boils this down to two elements:

    1. Christ provides an example of sacrificial love that we are to imitate.
    2. Christ’s death reveals God’s loving heart to us.

    It’s the second of these ideas that Hamilton says he finds the most compelling of the traditional atonement motifs. But what, one might ask, distinguishes the death of Jesus from the deaths of other heroic saints and martyrs throughout history?

    What differentiates Jesus’ death … is his identity as God’s Word enfleshed. In John 14:11, Jesus said “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Christians believe that Jesus is the incarnation, the very embodied presence of God the Son. He is God’s anointed King. He is the Word of God enfleshed. He is God, the Son, who willingly dies not just for one person, but for all of humanity. (p. 80)

    As Hamilton puts it:

    [The Cross] reveals the very heart of God for humankind, and the motivation behind Christ’s death. It sees the story of Jesus as a love story portraying God’s steadfast love for humanity climaxing with the highest expression love might take — that of dying for another. When this love is experienced and accepted, it draws us to God, leads us to repentance, transforms our hearts, and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, compels us to live a life of selfless love. (pp. 80-81)

    One could say that the death of Christ reveals God’s love because it was the (inevitable?) outcome of the kind of life he lived — the life of God’s love reaching out to us. God in Christ willed to be with humanity and creation, but human beings, in their sin, rejected God. However, this didn’t (indeed, can’t) deter God’s love, and God “loved his own to the end” (Jn. 13:1). (For a theology that puts God’s desire to be with us at the center, see Samuel Wells’ Constructing an Incarnational Theology.)

    Fittingly, Hamilton concludes the book with an exposition of the “Christ the Victor” motif. All too often, Christian thought has separated the cross from the resurrection. This can suggest that it’s Christ’s death alone which saves us and this was the entire reason for his coming.

    Through his death and resurrection Jesus overcomes the forces of evil. This doesn’t mean these forces have been destroyed — history and current experience give ample evidence that they still plague us. But the cross and resurrection demonstrate that God’s love is sovereign over these powers and they will ultimately be defeated once and for all. Importantly, this means that we can be freed from the fear of death and for works of love for our neighbors.

    Summarizing, Hamilton offers some key takeaways:

    • Jesus didn’t have to die, but he believed God could use his death for a redemptive purpose.
    • Christ’s death is about forgiveness — but also more than forgiveness. It’s about transformation, new life, and victory over death, among other things.
    • Metaphors for atonement shouldn’t be confused with “mechanisms” that explain “how it works.”

    I think some more transactional understandings of the Atonement appeal to our desire for things to be fixed through a quasi-magical act that doesn’t require anything from us. But Hamilton’s insistence that, in the cross, God is reaching out to us emphasizes the personal nature of this relationship. Ultimately, the cross and resurrection are God offering Godself to us through God’s Word, for our reconciliation, forgiveness, liberation and new life.