Category Archives: theology

C.S. Lewis: “For Gods, like other creatures, must die to live”

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Here’s C.S. Lewis echoing some of the same ideas as Wallace (in my previous post):

The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius [Odyssey, vi, 41 & Lucretius De Rerum Nat. iii, 18]. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.

h/t Nathan Schneider at Killing the Buddha. It’s a great blog, by the way.

 

God does not (not) exist

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Paul Wallace’s essay on negative theology and atheism offers much to ponder. He takes apart the immature atheism of Richard Dawkins by making use of negative, or apophatic theology, which begins with the notion that the only true statements one can make about God, are negative, saying what God is not. Negative theology has a long history in the Christian tradition, going back to Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite.

Wallace’s starting point is a statement by Denys Turner: “Atheists reject too little,” Turner writes, “This is why their atheisms lack theological interest. The routine principled atheist has but tinkered with religion.”

His essay put me in mind of a job candidate for a position in a department of religion some years ago, who when asked about his own religious commitments, said boldly, “I’m an atheist.” I thought at the time, and still do, that it seemed strange and immature coming out of a scholar of religion–not that I expect scholars of religion to be believers by any means, but I expect them to have developed an understanding of the complexity of religious ideas and practices which would preclude such simple, black and white statements.

 

The ABC on Anabaptists and Mennonites

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Inhabitatio Dei points to a passage in Rowan Williams’ address to the Lutheran World Federation. The LWF is officially repenting for the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutherans in the sixteenth century. Williams said:

One other crucial focus today is, of course, the act of reconciliation with Christians of the Mennonite/Anabaptist tradition.  It is in relation to this tradition that all the ‘historic’ confessional churches have perhaps most to repent, given the commitment of the Mennonite communities to non-violence.  For these churches to receive the penitence of our communities is a particularly grace-filled acknowledgement that they still believe in the Body of Christ that they have need of us; and we have good reason to see how much need we have of them, as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.  Neither family of believers will be simply capitulating to the other; no-one is saying we should forget our history or abandon our confession.  But in the global Christian community in which we are called to feed one another, to make one another human by the exchange of Christ’s good news, we can still be grateful for each other’s difference and pray to be fed by it.

As a former Mennonite, and as a former scholar of Anabaptism (in particular their treatment by other confessions in the sixteenth century), I have been thankful that it is no longer required of ordinands that we swear our commitment to the 39 Articles, which include in them a strong repudiation of adult baptism and other practices associated with sixteenth-century Anabaptists.

I’m unaware of any similar movement, either within the Episcopal Church or in wider Anglicanism, to address the historical condemnations by our tradition of Anabaptists.

The full text of Williams’ address is here.

Often, the disagreements among Christians that occasionally culminated in violence are now viewed by most contemporary Christians as quaint and misguided. But dismissing them masks the real theological differences that underlay those conflicts, as well as the long-term effects on both sides. As Williams states, the Anabaptist tradition confronts us “as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.”

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

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I finally got around to reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It was published in 2009 and consists of his Terry Lectures on Religion and Science, given at Yale University. In fact, it’s a direct attack on the arguments of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he has renamed “Ditchkins.” Eagleton is quite humorous and uses his wit effectively.

What’s perhaps most effective about the work is that he agrees with many of Ditchkins’ arguments against religion, but nevertheless takes them to task for their “faith” in rationality. Aside from the humor, which occasionally had me bursting out in laughter, there is a serious argument here. Eagleton links Christian theology to Marxism and uses both to level criticism at capitalism, postmodernism, and neoconservatism. He concludes:

The distinction between Ditchkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those like Ditchkins who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. This in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishig of humanity; but it holds that this is possible only by confronting the very worst. (pp. 168-169)

Eagleton, whose own religious convictions remain unclear throughout the work, has some powerful things to say about the New Testament idea of following Jesus:

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it apears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress…  (pp. 27-28)

The chapter on “Faith and Reason” especially deserves close attention. He works with Charles Taylor, Badiou, other philosophers, as well as Thomas Aquinas, to show that rationality itself requires certain prior commitments.


April 21: St. Anselm of Canterbury

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Today is the commemoration of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1109. Anselm was a native of Italy who traveled throughout Europe as a young man in search of learning. He lived before the rise of universities, just when Europeans were beginning to discover logic and the philosophy of Aristotle. In Anselm’s day, most learning took place in cathedral schools or in monasteries, and was very much dependent on the gifts and scholarship of particular teachers. He found his way to Normandy and the monastery of Bec, where Lanfranc was the leading teacher. Lanfranc was called into service by his secular lords who had recently conquered England, and became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm would succeed him both in Bec and Canterbury.

Anselm is primarily remembered for two major works and ideas. The first is what has come to be known as the ontological argument for the existence of God (the phrase God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”) and for the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement, articulated in Cur Deus Homo.

Centuries of theology and philosophy have extracted from Anselm’s writing and spirituality the elements of both of these arguments, and in so doing have robbed it of its spiritual depth and power. What you experience when you actually read the Proslogion is not an argument for the existence of God–that’s dealt with in a few sentences–but rather an extended meditation, prayer really, on Anselm’s relationship with and experience of God. He begins with a famous paragraph:

Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself for a little to God and rest for a little in him. Enter into the inner chamber of your soul, shut out everything save God and what can be of help in your quest for Him and having locked the door seek Him out.”

Anselm moves quickly from logical argument to direct address of God, language that explores his own experience of God, and seeks to deepen that experience.

I’ve been in lengthy conversation with someone about the doctrine of atonement recently, a conversation that has focused on the mechanics of the doctrine. When extracted from Anselm’s spiritual life, the doctrine he expresses is cold and bloodthirsty. Yet it’s important to remember that he articulated that idea as an attempt to make sense of his experience, a religious life that was expressed in deep prayer and devotion. Anselm’s prayers are especially beautiful, and he marks an important change in his devotion to the Virgin Mary.

I’m also struck as I read him by his dependence on Augustine. There are times in the Proslogion, for example where it seems he is doing nothing more than paraphrasing Augustine.

Lourdes

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I saw the 2009 film Lourdes this evening as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival.  Written and directed by the Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner, it takes the viewer inside the pilgrimage to Lourdes, where more than a million people seek healing each year. The film is shot with empathy toward the pilgrims and sensitivity to the theological questions that arise for people seeking healing. Hausner is interested in these questions, and has a variety of characters asking them overtly, and with her camera asks them implicitly. Surprisingly, the church and the clergy come off fairly well. The priest who has to answer everyone’s questions, seems uncomfortable with facile answers, yet tries to find ways of helping the pilgrims understand their plight.

The lead character is Christine, played by Sylvie Testud. She suffers from multiple sclerosis and has come to Lourdes because such pilgrimages are the only way for her to get out of her house. She admits to preferring the cultural offerings of Rome to what Lourdes can provide. Testud is marvelous as the suffering woman who wants to have a “normal” life as she confesses to the priest.

One rarely sees in film images of people taking care of others in such intimate ways. Christine is tended by a volunteer, a young woman who says she’s doing this because she wants to find meaning. She dresses Christine, spoon feeds her, and pushes her wheelchair, but she also goes off and has fun with the young male attendants.One of the lingering, unspoken questions concerns the motives of all of those who take care of the pilgrims.

As I watched, I was reminded of Robert Orsi’s discussion of the Catholic cult of suffering that emerged in the mid-twentieth century (in Between Heaven and Earth) and indeed one of the characters mouths platitudes to the invalids about their role as model sufferers. There are also almost continuous shots of religious gift shops, but they serve as a backdrop to the action; there’s no attempt, explicit or implicit, to comment on the commercialism.

Suffering and the quest for miracles can bring out the worst in religion, and in movies. It’s easy either to give an easy answer to the difficult questions of why suffering happens, and why one person receives a “miracle” while others don’t. The quest for healing also attracts all matter of charlatans.

The movie asks great questions and ends in ambiguity. If you’re in Madison, there’s another showing tomorrow night; otherwise, add it to your Netflix queue.

Pastors who doubt

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There’s a discussion in the Washington Post about doubt among the clergy. Some of the entries are interesting. I would especially recommend Martin Marty’s. On the surface, of course, it all seems obvious. How can you continue to do your job, if you no longer have faith?

And put that way, the answer does seem simple. But faith and doubt are not opposites; they can exist simultaneously, the classic prayer of Augustine, “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief,” being a profound example.

Marty talks about obvious examples where pastors and religious leaders of Lutheran denominations no longer accept elements of the sixteenth-century confessions, that the pope is the Anti-christ, to take one case. The same is true in Anglicanism. It is still the case that clergy in the Church of England have to subscribe to the 39 Articles, but there are very few of them who could accept all thirty-nine.

Part of the issue is that the authors of the study in question understand “faith” in propositional terms; that is to say, they seem to think that to be a Christian pastor, one must accept literal scripture or literally accept the creeds. But neither scripture nor the creeds are propositional; indeed, faith itself is not propositional. It does not operate in the same way that empirical evidence does. We believe the world is round, because it can be proven to be round, in a number of ways.

Religious faith is rather different. The best way I have of understanding it is to see faith as the early church fathers did, as involving not simply assent and certainly not intellectual assent to a proposition. Rather, it involves all of one’s being, and a crucial part of faith, perhaps the crucial part, is will, or to use patristic synonyms, desire, or love.

Radical Orthodoxy; or the search for a theological voice

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There’s a recent interview with John Milbank, the founder of the theological school known as Radical Orthodoxy. The interview, and much of the theology associated with the movement, is obscure to the point of incomprehensible. Still, I found the work of Milbank’s students helpful in rethinking the relationship between the pre-modern Christian theological tradition and contemporary philosophy. It’s a bridge I found difficult to construct for myself, in part because of my own theological training.

I read a great deal of German neo-orthodoxy in college (Barth, et al). Then I went to Harvard where I encountered constructivist theologians like Gordon Kaufman, critical theologies like Feminism and Liberation, and the writings of Derrida and Foucault. Putting it all together was impossible. That may be why I retreated into historical study. But I studied history because I thought it continued to have relevance to the life of faith today, and making it relevant was in some sense my ultimate goal.

There are aspects of the project of Radical Orthodoxy I find helpful–especially the attempt to rethink traditional categories, rituals, and the like with an eye to contemporary questions, and to offer a critique of the Enlightenment project from the perspective of earlier thinkers. Thus, Augustine provides an interesting foil to Descartes (see Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity).

The interview with Milbank made clear that there is not only a philosophical project, there is also a political one. That I find somewhat alienating, if only for odd statements like “Marriage and the family, for all their corruption and misuse, are at base democratic institutions,” which is so patently false from an even cursory reading of history.

In addition, there seems to be something of a nostalgia for another time, when Christianity was in some sense “given;” when children were raised in the faith. Such times are long past, and it is silly for theologians or pastors to try to recapture them.

In many ways, we are living in a post-Christian age, when the churches have retreated from the central role they played in culture and society. Whatever the loss, Christianity’s new role holds out exciting possibilities for creating new ways of being faithful, and reaching with new language to embrace people into our communities.

Trinity Institute: Building an Ethical Economy

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This year’s Trinity Institute is taking place today and tomorrow. The topic is Building an Ethical Economy. I was invited by Luther Memorial Church to participate as one of the theological reflection group leaders. To be honest, I was somewhat hesitant, because my background and interest in economics is quite limited. I only took one class in college, and I must of spent much of it sleeping (it met at 2:00 in the afternoon, nap time). I certainly haven’t thought much or read much about the topic in the intervening years, either.

Besides that, Rowan Williams was on the agenda. He’s a brilliant thinker, but a turgid writer. I’d heard him speak more than ten years ago and was very impressed, but I’ve always had trouble understanding his prose, and my perception of him is shaped in part by his work as Archbishop of Canterbury. So I wasn’t expecting a great deal.

Today was great. Williams was brilliant and comprehensible. He pointed out that economics was only one way in which human beings relate to one another and that to reduce everything to economics or the marketplace is false. Money is only a symbol, as language is a symbol. Most importantly, he stressed that the questions we should be asking are about are ultimate end and purpose: human well-being, and that our focus should not be only on the individual but on our shared life, as communities, and as a world community.

He ended by saying that “what makes humanity human is sheer gift, sheer love;” that is to say, God created us in and from love. Love requires relationship and community; that we are “helpless alone, gifted in relationship.”

In the panel discussion that followed his talk and Kathryn Tanner’s, tomorrow’s speaker, Partha Dasgupta said some very insightful and provocative things. I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say tomorrow.

It was fun to sit around in a room and talk about these questions with others. We had an intelligent and provocative conversation.

There’s much more info about the Trinity Institute at its website. Transcripts and webcasts should be available soon.

More on God and Haiti

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It’s inevitable that questions of theodicy arise when natural disasters occur. The problem of suffering may be one of the oldest and most intractable problems in all of human thought. It certainly is a concern in Christian theology (and all monotheistic religions; polytheism tends to come up with better answers to the problem). The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes both struggle with suffering, although in different ways.

Theological pronouncements on why this or that happened are inevitable. Seldom are they as crass as that of Pat Robertson’s, but to be satisfied with “It’s God’s will” is no better. Philosophers distinguish between natural evil, such as earthquakes, and moral evil, that brought on by human activity or human will. We can explain an earthquake scientifically; what we can’t explain is why now, and why such devastation. Yet the human spirit wants to make sense of such events, to claim that life and natural events have meaning, especially in the face of what seems like meaninglessness.

I’m intrigued by the way people use such tragedies, to reinforce their own religious or political ideas, their own world views. It’s as if the desire to make meaning becomes even stronger at times like this.

But I’m also beginning to become rather annoyed with the inevitable “Where’s God in all this?” that comes from more progressive religious voices. They too want such events to have meaning, or at least, to be teachable moments. I’m just not sure such answers are more satisfactory in the end than the simple, “It’s God’s will.” Sometimes I think the least productive thing we can do is try to make sense of natural disasters like Haiti. Sometimes, the answer might be, like Candide’s was “let’s cultivate our own garden;” or in this case, let’s raise some money for Haiti relief.