I may be a little late to weigh in on the recent controversy surrounding Richard Dawkin's recent article on Pat Robertson's controversial remarks about the earthquake in Haiti, but I felt I needed to say something about an issue that is deeply connected with it. Many Christians were quick to criticize Robertson for implying that the earthquake was a sort of divine punishment, but Dawkins insists that Robertson is the real Christian here for affirming a belief in a God who seeks to send disaster and punishment on those who disobey Him, which is the God that the Bible reveals. Dawkins' view has been affirmed by other atheists (over at Debunking Christianity there has been some recent bickering about it), who argue that Christians may very well want to disagree with Robertson, but in doing so they are being unfaithful to the tradition that they claim to represent.
The issue that I find troubling here is the presumption of people like Dawkins to tell Christians how they should interpret the Bible and Christian tradition. This is by no means the first time that people have argued that the Christian Church has misunderstood the Bible, going back to the earliest decades and centuries after the death and resurrection of Christ. As Craig Allert notes in A High View of Scripture? the early Church fathers argued against heresies that sought to appropriate scripture, by claiming that the Bible is the Church's book and it is the Church's privilege and responsibility to interpret it. While I don't think this means that only Christians are allowed to weigh in on issues of Biblical interpretation, I think that this is a very important point. Those outside the Church may have their opinions about the Bible ought to be interpreted, but they should not presume to claim the authority to tell the faith community who possesses these scriptures that they have the proper interpretation and that other Christians have it all wrong.
I realize this raises the issue of the fact that many different Christians have varying views of how to read the Bible and often take issue with the way that other Christians read it. This is true and important, but I do not think decisive over the issue of who can presume to tell another how to interpret a sacred text. I believe there is an important distinction that needs to be made between in-house debates and those with "outsiders." Debates within Christianity are carried out within a larger shared context of faith and belief that makes it distinct from other debates. In the same way, it would be inappropriate for a young earth creationist to tell evolutionary biologists which view of evolution is the proper understanding of it (no doubt with the aim of showing that this view is untenable or unethical). If someone rejects evolution then they probably should not presume to tell those who accept it how best to interpret it. That matter of interpretation is best left in the hands of those in the community that affirm it, which in this example is obviously the community of other evolutionary biologists. They may disagree with one another over how evolution ought to be interpreted, but surely someone who rejects evolution altogether has little standing in such a debate.
This is not a problem unique to only Christian-atheist debates. I have read Christian apologists seeking to convert Muslims who argue that if Muslims take the Koran seriously they must believe such and such (inevitably unsavory) belief. The problem I have with this is that we as Christians have no right to tell Muslims how they must or should interpret their own holy writings. We may disagree with these writings and may not accept them as authentic or complete revelation, but that does not mean that we get to tell them how to interpret them. That privilege lies with the community that affirms it. Obviously a Christian who becomes a scholar of Middle Eastern religion would have a bit more authority to speak to such matters, but she still has no right to tell that faith community that they are wrong in their interpretation of their own work.
I am not trying to say that only Christians can weigh in on Biblical debates and interpretation. There are many competent and excellent scholars in the field who are not Christians who have important perspectives to offer on the Bible, but even they do not really have any say in telling Christians now that they are "wrong" in how they read the Bible now. Clearly many Christians reject Robertson's (and Dawkins') interpretation of parts of the Bible, and do so for reasons that are just as much rooted in the history and tradition of Christianity and the words of the Bible, and it is wrong to say that we are misunderstanding our own tradition when we do so.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
More Thoughts on Morality
Awhile ago, I wrote something on how an argument from morality doesn't give a Christian, or anyone else, a free pass to say that moral principles are ontologically grounded. I want to expand on some of the thoughts I have on the issue of morality, because I think Christianity has an important role to play in it, even if it is a little bit different than what is often put forth by other Christians.
In reflecting on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, I began to think about the moral impact that Christianity has left in its wake. In this work, Nietzshe provides a searing indictment of Christian morality as "slave morality" that sought to enshrine its own powerlessness and impotence through a redefinition of "good" and "bad" to make signs of powerlessness moral goods (like "humility," "forgiveness," "submission,", turning the other cheek, etc.). He criticizes those who seek to locate the source of these values as being simply evolutionarily advantageous, arguing that this view is merely seeking a justification for holding to principles of Christian morality that are now untenable in the wake of the death of God. What struck me during this particular reflection on the Genealogy was the way that Nietzsche asserts that Christianity has pulled off a moral coup, redefining moral concepts along new lines and replacing an older model.
The reason I find this to be so interesting is that so often it is assumed that moral principles that have been enshrined in Western Europe/Anglophone world are somehow moral universals for all humans, when in fact they reflect a particular cultural moral legacy, a cultural moral legacy that has been profoundly influenced by Christianity. Even if these values are no longer necessarily seen as originating in Christianity, it does not change the way in which the Christian Church has dramatically shaped the moral world of the West. To paraphrase Lesslie Newbigin, you cannot live with the Christian God for a thousand years and then simply cut ties. The influence still remains.
This is not to say that terrible things have never been done under the banner of Christianity, or that no other religion has expounded powerful moral principles. This does not "prove" that Christian moral principles are derived from divine authority or that no one other than Christians has any access to these kind of moral thoughts. I'm not making any such claim. What I am saying is that it is interesting how many moral principles that we treat as "obvious" are not at all obvious in the light of history or in the light of the experiences of the vast majority of people throughout the world. To say that moral principles are good because they reflect a basically human feature that makes us beings who want to show compassion and who empathize with the sufferings of others is a nice sentiment (and one that I encountered in one particular book on atheism) , but it does not sit well at all with most of human experience.
While the moral teachings of Christianity have not been employed perfectly and many who claim the name of Jesus still do terrible things in his name (something that I attribute to what Paul Hiebert calls "Christo-paganism"), it is interesting to see how moral principles that are derived in many ways from the Western worlds encounter with the God of Christianity are assumed to be universal and derivable from nature or sociology or history, when it is not at all clear and it appears that very different views of morality are possible and still exist. We're still living in the wake of the moral redefinition that Nietzsche saw, and it raises many interesting things to reflect upon about the nature of morality if we reject the source, not in the sense of not being able to have moral principles at all, but in the intellectual consistency of holding on to moral principles based on a belief that is rejected. Just a little food for thought. We'll see what I think in another couple of months:-)
In reflecting on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, I began to think about the moral impact that Christianity has left in its wake. In this work, Nietzshe provides a searing indictment of Christian morality as "slave morality" that sought to enshrine its own powerlessness and impotence through a redefinition of "good" and "bad" to make signs of powerlessness moral goods (like "humility," "forgiveness," "submission,", turning the other cheek, etc.). He criticizes those who seek to locate the source of these values as being simply evolutionarily advantageous, arguing that this view is merely seeking a justification for holding to principles of Christian morality that are now untenable in the wake of the death of God. What struck me during this particular reflection on the Genealogy was the way that Nietzsche asserts that Christianity has pulled off a moral coup, redefining moral concepts along new lines and replacing an older model.
The reason I find this to be so interesting is that so often it is assumed that moral principles that have been enshrined in Western Europe/Anglophone world are somehow moral universals for all humans, when in fact they reflect a particular cultural moral legacy, a cultural moral legacy that has been profoundly influenced by Christianity. Even if these values are no longer necessarily seen as originating in Christianity, it does not change the way in which the Christian Church has dramatically shaped the moral world of the West. To paraphrase Lesslie Newbigin, you cannot live with the Christian God for a thousand years and then simply cut ties. The influence still remains.
This is not to say that terrible things have never been done under the banner of Christianity, or that no other religion has expounded powerful moral principles. This does not "prove" that Christian moral principles are derived from divine authority or that no one other than Christians has any access to these kind of moral thoughts. I'm not making any such claim. What I am saying is that it is interesting how many moral principles that we treat as "obvious" are not at all obvious in the light of history or in the light of the experiences of the vast majority of people throughout the world. To say that moral principles are good because they reflect a basically human feature that makes us beings who want to show compassion and who empathize with the sufferings of others is a nice sentiment (and one that I encountered in one particular book on atheism) , but it does not sit well at all with most of human experience.
While the moral teachings of Christianity have not been employed perfectly and many who claim the name of Jesus still do terrible things in his name (something that I attribute to what Paul Hiebert calls "Christo-paganism"), it is interesting to see how moral principles that are derived in many ways from the Western worlds encounter with the God of Christianity are assumed to be universal and derivable from nature or sociology or history, when it is not at all clear and it appears that very different views of morality are possible and still exist. We're still living in the wake of the moral redefinition that Nietzsche saw, and it raises many interesting things to reflect upon about the nature of morality if we reject the source, not in the sense of not being able to have moral principles at all, but in the intellectual consistency of holding on to moral principles based on a belief that is rejected. Just a little food for thought. We'll see what I think in another couple of months:-)
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Suffering
In the wake of the terrible devastation that hit Haiti last week, my thoughts have been drawn increasingly to thinking about suffering. It is difficult to comprehend that while I live in such relative wealth and luxury, hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in the world (and certainly the poorest period in the Americas) suffer a terrible blow when their lives are already extremely difficult. I wrestled with these thoughts even more since in the past week I have received several unanticipated and extremely generous gifts. Here I am, already with so many things and blessings receiving even more when people who have nothing to begin with experience utter devastation. It tears my heart in two. On the one hand, I want to praise God for the things that have taken place in my life, while on the other hand I question God and ask why such a thing would happen.
This is a difficult question and one that makes me deeply uncomfortable. While I don’t think the logical problem of evil is a problem for God, the emotional and intuitive problem is deeply troubling. It is obviously possible that God has a reason unknown to us for allowing such things to happen, but in the wake of the suffering that comes from evil such a thought seems hollow and mercilessly ad hoc. It is interesting to me that throughout the Bible, there never is an answer given as to the purpose or why of suffering.
Just looking at the life of Jesus is almost shocking in regard to suffering. We have a man who for probably 30 years lived an invisible life in Nazareth. For 30 years people died, endured sickness and oppression, experienced injustice, and the Son of God remained silent. This isn’t even God in heaven appearing silent, this is God incarnate dwelling as an unknown among us for three decades before beginning his ministry and began healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and raising the dead. If Jesus really can do such things, why didn’t he do them sooner? Even when he did perform these miracles, Jesus acknowledged that there were others who were sick and did not receive healing. This seems shocking and immoral. If this is the great physician and he is aware of the need, then why doesn’t he go and meet it?
Instead of bringing an end to suffering, Jesus’ response is much different. He enters into it. He suffers alongside. He experiences injustice, scorn, pain, abandonment, and ultimately an excruciating death. God’s response to suffering is not to end it but to humbly dwell in it along with us. The response is not to end pain, but to experience it. It is a response of empathy and humility and gives us a different picture of God than what we are used to. Instead, we are confronted with a God who suffers. As seems to be the case so often throughout scripture, our propositional and existential questioning is met only with the person of God. This is so strange and frankly often seems deeply unsatisfying. Still, I must admit I do find comfort in a God who suffers and understands suffering. Perhaps evil may be a metaphysically irreducible feature of existence; I don’t know, and God seems silent on this question. It’s something that I grapple with and find on the one hand incredibly frustrating and on the other incredibly beautiful.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Faith, Atonement, and the Centrality of Jesus
I'm still dialoging with Harlan Quinn over at QuIRP on the idea of the atonement, and it looks like I will be contributing some ideas to a document that he hopes to create mapping out logically the concept of the atonement. The dialog has been stimulating, charitable, and good natured so far and I look forward to continuing it. It is making me think and reflect on ideas of law, justice, and sin as they relate to Christianity and the significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
I have been reading Jan-Olav Henriksen's book The Reconstruction of Religion: Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and some of his thoughts on Kierkegaard have resonated with me as I have been thinking about the idea of atonement. Kierkegaard, though not without his flaws, is one of my favorite thinkers and writers and along with Nietzsche was the main reason I was drawn to this book. Henriksen emphasizes the centrality of subjectivity to Kierkegaard's thoughts on religion. Subjectivity, in the sense that religion is something that involves a person as a subject and focuses on God as another subject, helps point towards the personal nature of God and God's interaction with humans. What this means for Kierkegaard is that we make a mistake when we look to things like doctrine as being the heart of Christianity instead of the person of Jesus Christ and our own encounter with Him.
To quote from Henriksen, "Faith is first and foremost a relation to the communication of the mode of existence provided by the Teacher, a communication that cannot be separated from the Teacher himself . . . The statement that Christianity is not a doctrine but a communication or mediation of a mode of existence should not be taken as a direct negation of the doctrinal content in Christianity. It does have such a content, but this content is mainly related to personal and individual existence, not to what can be spelled out in paragraphs resulting from mere speculative thought" (114).
What we find in the words of the New Testament is a testimony to the person of Jesus and the accounts of the spiritual experiences and reflections of those who were his contemporaries and near contemporaries to the events of his life. However, we are making a mistake if we see these gospels and epistles as being primarily sources of doctrine instead of testimonies to the encounters with Jesus, both physically and spiritually, of the earliest believers. The New Testament as the "word of God" testifies to the pre-incarnate Word. As a Christian, Jesus was and must always be for me the Word of God, and while the words of the Bible are to be treasured and studied diligently, the two should not be confused.
Kierkegaard's work helps point to the need for following Jesus to be a subject-subject relationship, not a subject-object one, which is extremely easy to fall into. I know I frequently lose sight of the stunning picture of reality that we find in John's prologue: the Word, the logos, is personal. This means that Christianity makes a radical claim here, the claim that ultimate reality at its heart is personal. Thinking about God and faith isn't a matter of trying to investigate a set of circumstances or look for empirical data, because if we are dealing with something that is personal than we learn through conversation. We ask and are asked in return, and information can be willingly given or deliberately withheld, but cannot be attained without the consent of the other.
All this may sound somewhat abstract, but the point that I want to make when thinking about the atonement is that from a Christian perspective, if we are looking to apply logical principles and historical investigation to prove or disprove anything about the consequences of the life of Jesus, then we are in danger of missing a great deal of the story if we in fact really are dealing with a personal source of all reality. My intent is not to denigrate reason, philosophy, or history (all of which are passions of mine), but rather to make sure that we are not pushing them beyond their limits. We can know the past only indirectly and there will always be room for doubt and uncertainty, but there is no reason that this needs to leave us in a permanent state of agnosticism about God and Jesus Christ.
These are just some rough reflections that I have had, and I don't claim that this is the final or best word on the subject. I just want to raise the question of how, based on the testimony of Jesus and the scriptures, we might expect to most fruitfully go about reflecting on the idea of the atonement, and what I want to suggest is that it can never be separated from Jesus Christ and simply dealt with as a matter of doctrine. Once we start moving away from Jesus in these reflections, we are entering a realm of theology and philosophy that while certainly religious does not deserve to be called Christian.
Too often we as Christians forget our own namesake and slip into talk about an abstract entity called "God" that is defined anthropomorphically and said to have to meet certain standards of excellence or perfection. The only problem is that this vision of "god" has very little to do with the God we find in the Bible and even less to do with Jesus. If we make the mistake of viewing God as an object instead of a subject then all of our reflections on him and on doctrine will only be directed towards an idol. The atonement, like any other doctrine of Christian faith, only has value as a means of pointing beyond itself to Jesus Christ himself, and if we lose sight of this then I fear that we are merely engaging in one giant exercise in missing the point.
I have been reading Jan-Olav Henriksen's book The Reconstruction of Religion: Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and some of his thoughts on Kierkegaard have resonated with me as I have been thinking about the idea of atonement. Kierkegaard, though not without his flaws, is one of my favorite thinkers and writers and along with Nietzsche was the main reason I was drawn to this book. Henriksen emphasizes the centrality of subjectivity to Kierkegaard's thoughts on religion. Subjectivity, in the sense that religion is something that involves a person as a subject and focuses on God as another subject, helps point towards the personal nature of God and God's interaction with humans. What this means for Kierkegaard is that we make a mistake when we look to things like doctrine as being the heart of Christianity instead of the person of Jesus Christ and our own encounter with Him.
To quote from Henriksen, "Faith is first and foremost a relation to the communication of the mode of existence provided by the Teacher, a communication that cannot be separated from the Teacher himself . . . The statement that Christianity is not a doctrine but a communication or mediation of a mode of existence should not be taken as a direct negation of the doctrinal content in Christianity. It does have such a content, but this content is mainly related to personal and individual existence, not to what can be spelled out in paragraphs resulting from mere speculative thought" (114).
What we find in the words of the New Testament is a testimony to the person of Jesus and the accounts of the spiritual experiences and reflections of those who were his contemporaries and near contemporaries to the events of his life. However, we are making a mistake if we see these gospels and epistles as being primarily sources of doctrine instead of testimonies to the encounters with Jesus, both physically and spiritually, of the earliest believers. The New Testament as the "word of God" testifies to the pre-incarnate Word. As a Christian, Jesus was and must always be for me the Word of God, and while the words of the Bible are to be treasured and studied diligently, the two should not be confused.
Kierkegaard's work helps point to the need for following Jesus to be a subject-subject relationship, not a subject-object one, which is extremely easy to fall into. I know I frequently lose sight of the stunning picture of reality that we find in John's prologue: the Word, the logos, is personal. This means that Christianity makes a radical claim here, the claim that ultimate reality at its heart is personal. Thinking about God and faith isn't a matter of trying to investigate a set of circumstances or look for empirical data, because if we are dealing with something that is personal than we learn through conversation. We ask and are asked in return, and information can be willingly given or deliberately withheld, but cannot be attained without the consent of the other.
All this may sound somewhat abstract, but the point that I want to make when thinking about the atonement is that from a Christian perspective, if we are looking to apply logical principles and historical investigation to prove or disprove anything about the consequences of the life of Jesus, then we are in danger of missing a great deal of the story if we in fact really are dealing with a personal source of all reality. My intent is not to denigrate reason, philosophy, or history (all of which are passions of mine), but rather to make sure that we are not pushing them beyond their limits. We can know the past only indirectly and there will always be room for doubt and uncertainty, but there is no reason that this needs to leave us in a permanent state of agnosticism about God and Jesus Christ.
These are just some rough reflections that I have had, and I don't claim that this is the final or best word on the subject. I just want to raise the question of how, based on the testimony of Jesus and the scriptures, we might expect to most fruitfully go about reflecting on the idea of the atonement, and what I want to suggest is that it can never be separated from Jesus Christ and simply dealt with as a matter of doctrine. Once we start moving away from Jesus in these reflections, we are entering a realm of theology and philosophy that while certainly religious does not deserve to be called Christian.
Too often we as Christians forget our own namesake and slip into talk about an abstract entity called "God" that is defined anthropomorphically and said to have to meet certain standards of excellence or perfection. The only problem is that this vision of "god" has very little to do with the God we find in the Bible and even less to do with Jesus. If we make the mistake of viewing God as an object instead of a subject then all of our reflections on him and on doctrine will only be directed towards an idol. The atonement, like any other doctrine of Christian faith, only has value as a means of pointing beyond itself to Jesus Christ himself, and if we lose sight of this then I fear that we are merely engaging in one giant exercise in missing the point.
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Atonement
I am participating in some interesting dialog about the Atonement over at QuIRP. Rather than trying to retype everything I have said and formulate it into a single post for Reflective Faith, I thought I would just link to the page. My thoughts are as always developing and being refined, and I appreciate the chance to interact with a few others and hear their ideas on the concept of the atonement. The idea that Jesus' death and resurrection has something to do with forgiveness and sins and reconciliation to God is central to Christianity, but is also difficult to articulate and has led to inadequate explanations like the penal-substitution view.
Christian history is in my view a story in many ways of trying to make sense of just what Jesus did through his death and resurrection and who he was. We shouldn't be surprised if our thoughts are refined or if the ideas of earlier Christians are somewhat different. We are all in the process of trying to make sense of this dramatic and utterly transformative event that seems to defy perfect articulation. The power of Jesus' death and resurrection is not able to be limited to just any one view or perspective, though all of the different perspectives provide new and often fruitful ways of teasing more and more of the far-reaching implications and consequences of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. I hope the dialoging continues to be fruitful and I look forward to seeing it unfold.
Christian history is in my view a story in many ways of trying to make sense of just what Jesus did through his death and resurrection and who he was. We shouldn't be surprised if our thoughts are refined or if the ideas of earlier Christians are somewhat different. We are all in the process of trying to make sense of this dramatic and utterly transformative event that seems to defy perfect articulation. The power of Jesus' death and resurrection is not able to be limited to just any one view or perspective, though all of the different perspectives provide new and often fruitful ways of teasing more and more of the far-reaching implications and consequences of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. I hope the dialoging continues to be fruitful and I look forward to seeing it unfold.
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