tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050Cole J. BanningA Faith without Foundations; A Messiah without MetaphysicsCole J. Banning2016-04-30T19:51:06Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:32414Divine Freedom2016-04-30T18:29:58Z2016-04-30T19:51:06Zpublic0Let me take a break, for a moment, from talking about human free will to touch upon the freedom of God. It is probably natural that my views on the former--my rejection of libertarian free will, in particular--influences my understanding of the latter. This does not mean, of course, that I think any of God's actions are caused by anything outside of Godself. If that were the case, God would not be God. But the fact that I don't understand human freedom as consisting of the ability to have done other than what one has done in some sort of absolute sense (i.e., a sense that is incompatible with the causally deterministic nature of the universe as we understand it) almost certainly does influence the way I talk and write about God's freedom, which must in some sense be analagous to human freedom for the phrase to have any meaning.<br /><br />One of the classic questions about God's freedom is whether God could have chosen not to create a world dependent upon Godself, yet outside Godself such that God is not dependent upon it. Many Christians would claim that the only possible orthodox answer to that question is "Yes." Insofar as that is the case, however, I can only accept it as a paradox, a divine mystery. Certainly God cannot act against God's own nature, and so I cannot imagine God, in "the free, overflowing rapture" (Moltmann) of perichoretic love which is the Trinity, doing other than creating a world separate from Godself. Perhaps that is due to the finite nature of my own human mind. Perhaps.<br /><br />A human analogy might be my "ability" to rob a bank. Clearly I am physically capable of attempting to rob a bank in the sense we usually use that term. Yet my unique blend of moral courage (I know robbing banks is wrong) and moral cowardice (I'm afraid of getting caught) is such that it is inconceivable I could ever rob a bank because it is contrary to my nature. We could say perhaps that I have a "hypothetical" ability to rob a bank, and God has a hypothetical ability to not create the world. But there is no possible world in which those hypotheses could take place without first rendering either God or I unrecognizable. (And while my nature is mutable across possible worlds, God's is not.)<br /><br />The above is something of a preamble to another question I encountered in Roger Olson's <i>Questions to All Your Answers: The Journey from Folk Religion to Examined Faith</i>, which I am currently listening to on audiobook. The question was, "Can God change the past?" and Olson seems to imply he thinks the question ought to be, "No."<br /><br />But why? Unless we are to become open theists, then God is eternal, and the difference between future and past is as meaningful to God as the difference between left and right is to us. We might as well ask if we are able to make changes to our left as well as to our right. Unless one is a character in a side-scrolling video game from the 1980's, such a question is either absurd or meaningless. <br /><br />Of course, one might well question the use of "change" at all. From God's perspective, viewing all of time and space as a unity, any intervention God might make would not be a "change" at all but a seamless element of God's creation as executed according to God's divine plan. After all, every element of the world is a consequence of either God's deliberation action or else our own human free will, which is itself a gift from God, being the exceptional sign of the image of God within us. So the very idea of God desiring to "change" anything which exists is revealed to be contradictory, and certainly God cannot act against God's own desires.<br /><br />Some will argue that this understanding of divine freedom renders prayer meaningless, but such an argument misunderstands the place and purpose of prayer. As I preached to the congregation of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in <a href="https://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/2012/11/18/sermon-proper-28-year-b.html">my 2012 sermon on the prayers of Hannah and Penninah</a>, the revealed purpose of petitionary prayer is not "to flatter a capricious deity into giving us what we want" but to enter into relationship with the Triune God, to put our hopes and fears before the Lord that God's will may be done.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=32414" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:30262Quick Theological Comments2013-06-29T01:28:42Z2013-06-29T01:28:42Zpublic0Yes, I'm still working on my Wittgenstein and metatheics series. (And my atonement theology series, too, for that matter, although at present the metaethics one has the precedence.) I promise.<br /><br /><hr><br /><br /><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/06/23/the-doctrine-of-the-trinity-its-a-trap/">Fred Clark wrote about patripassianism recently</a>, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/06/26/does-god-the-father-suffer/">and got an "Amen!" from Tony Jones</a>. I share their instinct that God the Parent can known, and more importantly has known, suffering, but am uncomfortable with Clark's description of Trinitarian theological reasoning:<blockquote>one is “allowed” to recite the lawyerly formulations of the Athanasian Creed, but if you stray at all from that narrow path or attempt to say anything more — any positive statements, clarifications, analogies, applications — you’re screwed. [. . . T]his doctrine creates so many different ways in which you can be screwed that it’s hard not to suspect this was the intention — a doctrine more useful for generating and then condemning heresies than for avoiding error.</blockquote>A lot of this comes down to Clark being much more Protestant than I am, so traditional notions of heresy and orthodoxy don't hold the same authority for him as for me. But I do think the best articulation of the pure theology of the Trinity is found in the Athanasian articulation (although admittedly it's light on the practical implications), and that it's important to be mindful of the ancient heresies precisely because God defies the categories we are liable to try to place God in if we're not eternally vigilant.<br /><br />Insofar as patripassianism is by definition a form of modalism, confusing or conflating in some sense the distinction in persons between God the Parent and God the Begotten, then it represents a damaging heresy and should be denounced. That strikes me as pretty straight forward. But does it? <br /><br />I think it's possible to meaningfully still speak about God the Parent being present with and sharing the suffering of God the Begotten upon the Cross (or, if our theology requires God the Parent to forsake God the Begotten in order for God to experience the absence of God, then surely the Parent suffers in the act of forsaking the beloved Child!) without falling into modalism, without confusing the distinction in persons between the Parent and the Begotten. The question then becomes a defitional one, whether a suffering Parent still constitutes heretical patripassianism even when it isn't modalist. I suspect the answer should be no, but the trail goes pretty much cold at the Wikipedia article, and without reading the primary texts in which member (or better yet, ecumenical councils) of the early Church denounce the heresy it's impossible to say. <br /><br /><hr><br /><br /><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/06/a-talk-on-god-and-suffering-given-at-theology-live-event-in-beeville-texas/">In a talk on theodicy</a>, Roger Olson says, "Well, theology has four criteria: revelation, including Jesus Christ and Scripture, tradition, reason and experience." Now, Jesus Christ is <i>the</i> revelation of God to the world. That's central to my faith. But I don't know how much sense it makes to talk about Jesus Christ as a subcategory of revelation <i>when we are talking about criteria of theology</i>. The revelation which was the historical Jesus is mediated to us <i>through</i> scripture and tradition. And the revelation of the Risen Christ is mediated to us through scripture, tradition, reason, and experience--the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, a variation of the Anglican three-legged stool. So I'm not sure what sense it makes to talk of Jesus as a separate revelation <i>when we're talking about our work as a theologians</i>. In a sense, what Christian theology does is precisely try to arrive at the revelation of Jesus Christ <i>through</i> the tools of scripture, tradition, reason, experience, etc. <br /><br />Furthermore, the way Olson formulates the Quadrilateral implies that tradition, reason, and experience are not also forms of revelation. I suppose I can understood why a non-liberal ("post-conservative") evangelical Protestant wouldn't classify them as such, but as a post-liberal Anglo-Catholic I absolutely would. Again, scripture, tradition, reason, and experience are the means we have by which we come to terms with <i>the</i> revelation of God to the world: the person of Jesus Christ. <br /><br /><hr><br /><br />My twitter feed seemed to be, well, a-twitter with comments about Christological and/or Messianic themes in <i>Man of Steel</i>, the Superman mythos in general, and the superhero genre even more in general. I'll put forth <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/poptheology/2013/06/five-reasons-why-superman-isnt-jesus/">Five Reasons Why Superman Isn't Jesus</a> and <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/poptheology/2013/06/five-reasons-why-jesus-isnt-superman/">Five Reasons Why Jesus Isn't Superman</a>, both from Pop Theology at Patheos, as semi-representative. I tend to think the question is mostly silly (although the theology is usually right-on). No, Jesus isn't a superhero. He certainly isn't the "first superhero"; Gilgamesh and Herakles not only fit the "superhero" mold much better than Jesus, but they pre-date the birth of Jesus by several centuries. <br /><br />At the same time, it's silly to think that how we tell superhero stories isn't influenced by the story of Jesus. I haven't seen <i>Man of Steel</i> yet, but the fact that there will be parallels, both in terms of imagery and of plot, between Superman and Christ, is pretty much inevitable. That doesn't make Jesus a superhero. It doesn't mean Snyder was somehow blaspheming in creating the movie, or that we are in seeing such parallels. It does mean that the great secular myths of the postmodern era do--as arguably all myths do--have a complicated, messy relationship with what Lewis famously called the "true myth": the Christian narrative.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=30262" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:28461Theology and Metaethics2013-04-20T16:03:27Z2013-06-12T15:42:05Zpublic1As part of his "Questions That Haunt" series, Tony Jones has taken on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy">the question of theodicy</a> and <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/04/19/god-is-implicated-in-evil-questions-that-haunt">come to a startling conclusion</a> (emphasis his):<blockquote>I know this: <b>No one — not the Jews, not the Romans — was responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. God was was ultimately responsible. That blood is ultimately on God’s hands.</b> God could have stopped it; God didn’t. And so we’re all left to wonder about God’s responsibility for that act of evil, and for all acts of evil.</blockquote>First off, I find Tony's disavowal of human responsibility for the crucifixion perplexing. It doesn't follow obviously from anything else he says (as far as I can tell) and, at least for me, seems to me to undermine the power of the Incarnation, the entire point of which was for God's Begotten One to enter into our human suffering and become vulnerable to human evil. Even if we were to agree that God were ultimately responsible, it's not at all clear to me how that absolves Judas of <a href="http://youtu.be/SBs-vzOsjAw">Jesus' betrayal</a> or Pilate of <a href="http://youtu.be/WEzEROSj11Q">Jesus' condemnation</a>. <br /><br />The question of God's responsibility, however, is much more interesting and challenging. Here's some more of Tony's logic:<blockquote>God is ultimately liable for the evil in the world. On my theory, God could reclaim omnipotence at any moment, step in, and stop evils and horrors. The fact that God doesn’t, implicates God.<br /><br />Does this make God less than perfectly benevolent? Maybe. Maybe God also abdicated “benevolence” at creation, or at least perfect benevolence. Or maybe God’s all-in-allness means that our conception of “goodness” and “benevolence” is swallowed up in God’s fullness.</blockquote>I think much of this is at least partly right. Certainly it is probably a mistake to think of God's omnibenevolence as just like human benevolence, only better. But I think a lot is also caught up in the word "could." <i>Could</i> God step in and stop evils and horrors? At first glance, it seems like to deny this is to deny God's omnipotence; of course, God could, because God can do anything and, being the highest authority, answers to no authority higher than Godself. <br /><br />But God <i>is</i> answerable to Godself, to the perfect goodness of God's own nature which requires God to respect the dignity and free will of God's creatures created in God's own image. This is no more to speak of a limitation on the part of God than it would be to say that God "cannot" <a href="http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1668">create a stone so heavy</a> that God "cannot" lift it. In both cases, the true limitation resides in the ability of our language to describe that which lies past its limits. Instead, to speak of God's "inability" to act contrary to God's nature is actually to speak of the very perfection of divine freedom; there is no division in God's will and thus no force which could possibly coerce God into acting against Godself.<br /><br />Of course, without getting needlessly metaphysical, the above does assume there is some sort of enduring character to God's goodness, that God cannot and would not simply decide today that respecting human dignity and free will is a good thing and decide tomorrow that it is bad. This, then, is against what Roger Olson calls "nominalistic voluntarism," the claim that "“Whatever God does is automatically good and right just because God does it":<blockquote>[The nominalistic voluntarist believes that] God does not have an eternal nature of character; he [<i>sic</i>] is pure power and will. God is whatever God decides to be. The result is that the “good” is whatever God commands and God does not command anything because it is good. It is good only because God commands it. <br /><br />[. . .]<br /><br />This makes God truly monstrous because God, then, has no virtuous character. “Good” becomes whatever God decides and does and, ultimately, becomes meaningless because it has no essential connection with anything we know as “the good.”</blockquote>Drawing then on the scriptural truth that "Ever since the creation of the world, the eternal power and divine nature of God, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made" (Romans 1:20), I affirm that the enduring nature of moral goodness is discernible, if imperfectly, by human beings through the dialectic of human reason and history, as I note in my blog post on <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/23503.html">Liberalism and Moral Absolutes</a> and perhaps most fully in my essay <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/6235.html">History and Christ</a>. While our understanding of what is good and evil is always evolving and improving through history as it is led by the Spirit, good and evil themselves do not change, and certainly not at the whims of a capricious deity. So when the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia <a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11181c.htm">asserts</a><blockquote>As to whom we are to obey, there can be no doubt that first we are bound to offer an unreserved service to Almighty God in all His [<i>sic</i>] commands. No real difficulty against this truth can be gathered from putting in juxtaposition the unchangeableness of the natural law and an order, such as that given to Abraham to slay his son Isaac. The conclusive answer is that the absolute sovereignty of God over life and death made it right in that particular instance to undertake the killing of an innocent human being at His [<i>sic</i>] direction.</blockquote>I simply cannot go there with it. If God had allowed Abraham to kill Isaac at God's direction, God would have revealed Godself to be a moral monster unworthy both of worship and of obdeience. Following a line of throught I encountered (if I remember correctly) in Elie Wiesel's <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Messengers_of_God.html?id=Xcgn-d2TkpAC">Messengers of God</a>, I tend to assume that Abraham knew this too. By going ahead and carrying out God's outrageous command, Abraham was calling God's bluff, so to speak--putting the Lord God Almighty to the test.<br /><br />Does this understanding of the relationship between God and goodness require us to posit some independent existence for goodness in some Platonic heaven in order for God to perfectly embody it? Of course not, and I plan soon to write <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/28921.html">a post on Wittgenstein's metaethical mysticism</a> to gesture towards how we can talk practically about enduring good and evil without getting needlessly caught up in metaphysics.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=28461" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:27742What Is Theology, Anyway?2012-12-07T21:50:38Z2013-06-12T15:44:59Zpublic0Last week, Roger Olson posted yet another intriguing--if perhaps, I might argue, misguided--reflection, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/11/when-did-we-open-the-pandoras-box-of-theologicaldoctrinal-pluralism/">When Did We Open The Pandora’s Box of Theological/Doctrinal Pluralism?</a>:<blockquote>[T]he academy, the guild, of Christian theologians has given up on the search for truth about God. That is, we have given up on even the ideal of discovering truth that is consensual. The result is that theology has laid down its claim to being a discipline, a science (in the German sense of <i>Wissenshaft</i>), and has become by-and-large a collection of disparate voices speaking out of incommensurate experiences treated as authoritative sources and norms.<br /><br />[. . .] Who, outside of the theological academy, guild (such as it is), takes theology seriously anymore? Even within it, much of what goes under the label “theology” isn’t recognizable as theology in any traditional sense, as the search for truth about God, but is really politics (in the broadest sense of the word) disguised as theology.</blockquote>This interested me because it reminded me of one of my favorite essays by the American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopragmatism">neo-pragmatist</a> philosopher Richard Rorty. It's called <a href="http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/rorty-philosophy-as-a-kind-of-writing-1978.pdf">"Philosophy as a Kind of Writing"</a> and is collected in his book <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>. In the essay, Rorty considers two different ways of understanding what philosophy is and might be:<blockquote>Here is a way of looking at philosophy: from the beginnning, philosophy has worried about the relation between thought and its object, representation and represented. The old problem reference to the inexistent, for example, has been handled in various unsatisfactory ways because of a failure to distinguish properly philosophical questions about meaning and reference from extraneous questions motivated by scientific, ethical, and religious concerns. Once these questions <i>are</i> properly isolated, however, we can see philosophy as a field which has its center in a series of questions about the relations between words and the world. The recent purifying move from talk of ideas to talk of meanings has dissipated the epistemological skepticism which motivated much of past philosophy. This has left philosophy a more limited, but more self-conscious, rigorous, and coherent area of inquiry.<br /><br />Here is another way of looking at philosophy: philosophy started off as a confused combination of the love of wisdom and the love of argument. It began with Plato's notion that the rigor of mathematical argumentation exposed, and could be used to correct, the pretensions of the politicians and the poets. [. . .] The philosophers' own scholastic little definitions of "philosophy" are merely polemical devices--intended to exclude from the field of honor those whose pedigrees are unfamiliar. We can pick out "the philosophers" in the contemporary intellectual world only by noting who is commenting on a certain sequence of historical figures. All that "philosophy" as a name for a sector of culture means is "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell . . . and that lot." Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition--a family romance involving. e.g. Father Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida.</blockquote>You've probably by this point already anticipated my thesis: just as there are two different ways of thinking about philosophy, so too are there two different ways of thinking about theology. The first is the science, the <i>Wissenshaft</i> which Olson seemingly prefers, "the vision of a universal theology that makes truth claims that are intended to be true for everyone" whose loss he bemoans. This approach is a "vertical" one in which revelation is understood as something outside ourselves and essentially static. "Our task as theologians," Olson writes, "should not be to allow our social locations to determine our theological conclusions; it should be to set aside our social locations, as much as possible, in order to adhere to objective, given, divine revelation and interpret it objectively (as much as possible)."<br /><br />The second way of thinking about theology, the way I understand theology, is as a kind of writing, a genre like poetry or journalism, as a conversation--which is of course appropriate for the Trinitarian because, <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/tag/trinitarianism">as I've stressed over and over again on this blog</a>, our Triune God exists in and as perichoretic conversation. This approach is a "horizontal" one in which revelation is dynamic and happens through our experience of being the Body of Christ, of which scripture and tradition are integral parts (but not the whole). When I talk about "A Faith without Foundations" or a "Messiah without Metaphysics," this is what I'm envisioning: a postfoundationalist, postliberal theology which, yes, is always-already going to be political, in the broadest sense of the word. <br /><br />Olson complains that "in the interest of being sensitive to the oppressed, the academy, the guild, of Christian theologians has given up on the search for truth about God." I think this is a bit parochial in its misdiagnosis. Christian theologians have not given up on "the search for truth about God"--but some (not enough!) have given up on intellectually indefensible notions of what it means to be "true." And they have done this not just to be "sensitive to the oppressed," but because their conversation includes Hume and Kant and Hegel and Wittgenstein and Rorty (and, yes, Schleiermacher, but with nowhere near the importance Olson ascribes to him) and has evolved to incorporate their insights. <br /><br />And obviously, the "family romance" of theology includes quite a bit of intermarriage with that of philosophy. My formal training, such as it is, is in philosophy, not theology, so when I approach theological questions on this blog it is always from the perspective of both conversations, insofar as we can refer to them as discrete and separate conversations at all (which I question). <br /><br />May the conversation be fruitful and ongoing!<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=27742" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:27596God as Relationship and Absolute: A Holy Mystery2012-11-24T13:35:31Z2013-06-12T15:45:58Zpublic0<a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/27298.html">Speaking from the pulpit last Sunday at the Church of the Ascension</a>, I said that "[prayer] is a chance to enter into relationship with the Triune God who, as Parent, Child, and Spirit, always exists in and as relationship. True relationship works both ways, which means that in some mysterious way I do not pretend to understand, our prayers have the ability to transform God."<br /><br />Looking over <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/11/a-christian-humanist-manifesto-part-3-final/">a recent post</a> from Roger E. Olson, one of my favorite theo-bloggers among those with whom I typically expect to disagree, I see him developing this point by describing his youthful encounter with an essay by Reformed theologian James Daane called “Can a Man Bless God?”:<blockquote> Like many seminary students, I was taught in my theology classes that God is immutable; nothing any creature can do can add anything to God. God is in every way always complete and unconditioned—incapable of being given anything he does not already possess in himself eternally. Traditional theologians like to pay God metaphysical compliments like that.<br /><br />Against the stream of traditional Christian theism, and against the grain of his own Reformed tradition, Daane wrote that “[The] God of the Bible is not unresponsive to finite human condition. His freedom does not consist in being free from the touch of what is not God, nor is his immutability a change of relationship to the world that involves no change in God….” (p. 171) Daane asked why theologians came up with the idea of God as the “Unconditioned Absolute” and answered that they “lingered too long at the waterholes of Western rationalism.” (p. 172) He concluded that “In the biblical view God hears and responds to the cries of the needy, and is indeed so involved in conditional, contingent reality that he can be both sinned against and, no less, blessed by man in such a way that it makes a difference to God himself. But a God who is unconditional because he himself accounts for all conditions by virtue of his essence or decree is a God who cannot hear, let alone answer prayer.” (p. 173)<br /><br />Daane was one of several Christian thinkers who together liberated me from thinking of God as absolute, unconditioned, incapable of being changed or affected by what creatures, by what I, do. </blockquote>While I am as I said sympathetic with their premise to a point, I find myself only able to go so far with Daane and Olson. [And, for that matter, with <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2012/11/23/god-is-not-perfect-questions-that-haunt/">Tony Jones</a>.] I entered into my theism--such as it is--through <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/tag/ludwig+wittgenstein">Wittgenstein</a> and <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/tag/paul+tillich">Tillich</a>. It was, in some important sense, at the very "waterholes of Western rationalism" that I learned to make sense of my belief in the Ground of Being. If we too divorce the God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar too much from the God of philosophy, then the "Biblical" God we are left with may seem more like a superpowered alien than anything else, an empirical being which can be said to either exist or not exist and demands evidence, <i>empirical</i> evidence, for the claim that it exists. And that evidence is, to say the least, sorely lacking. Worse yet, it would always make God and our belief in God contingent upon that evidence--the God Who Might Be, and <a href="http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=263423">Who Might Not Have Been</a> in some other <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world">possible world</a>--instead of allowing God to exist in Godself as the One Who Is, the most-real reality which is primal and ultimate. If God exists, then God exists necessarily, for any being who exists other than necessarily cannot in truth, by my reckoning, be called God.<br /><br />More importantly, even if we were to conclude such evidence did exist, little would flow from it. I do not worship a being simply because it is more powerful than I am. I do not consent to obey its edicts simply because it has the power to torture or annihilate me--or if I do, then I do so out of cowardice rather than virtue. Such a view of God degrades God in a way which makes theism unpalatable down to its core. Instead of the source of all goodness in which we live and move and have our being, we are left with a jealous tyrant in the sky.<br /><br />Admittedly, I have subtitled this blog "A Messiah without Metaphysics." But I write that as a Wittgensteinian, so what I am trying to describe is not so much a God without metaphysics as it is a God which is past metaphysics. Both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche--two of the philosophers who have influenced me most profoundly--were not afraid to use "metaphysics" as a pejorative. But I think both of them also understood the subtle truth that the movement beyond metaphysics is itself in some sense always-already a deeply metaphysical move. We cannot escape the limits of our language even as we do our best to gesture at what lies beyond them.<br /><br />But to believe in a truly unmetaphysical God in the sense I've laid out above--a God who is simply a contingent being who can be said to exist or not on the basis of contingent evidence--represents turning our back on millennia of theological tradition and Church teaching, as Olson plainly admits:<blockquote>I came to believe that paying too many metaphysical compliments to God can de-personalize God. That trend was, I believe, unwittingly set in motion by some of the church fathers as they adopted Greek philosophical modes of thinking about God, carried forward by Augustine under the spell of neo-Platonism, deepened by Thomas Aquinas who borrowed from Aristotle to describe God as <i>actus purus</i>—pure actuality without potentiality, and brought into evangelical thought by Reformed theologians like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Hodge.</blockquote>Now of course I do not assume that everything the Church fathers and mothers, or Augustine or Aquinas, wrote is inspired and authorative truth. Far from it! If anything, I am the first to critique what I see as an untenable neo-Aristotelianism in Roman Catholic theology since Aquinas. <br /><br />But as an Anglo-Catholic, I am also far more wary than a Protestant like Olson might be to conclude that such constant and uniform Church teaching represents some sort of poisoned well. The solution is to put Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas in dialogue with Hume and Kant and Wittgenstein, not to retreat to some illusion of <i>sola scriptura</i>. This is especially important because I cannot see the Greek-influenced understandings of God's nature as being something separable from other key conclusions made by the early Councils, e.g. about the Trinity. I don't see how we can throw out the influence of Greek philosophy and still keep our understanding of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as described in the creeds and confessions of the ecumenical councils.<br /><br />At the same time, I agree--as I said plainly in my sermon--that God's being in true relationship with humanity requires God to be able to be transformed by us and by our prayers. And Scripture does indeed seem to agree with this point and confirm it: even if we don't understand the repeated references to God changing God's mind in the Hebrew scriptures completely literally, neither do I think we can write them off entirely. Instead, I see them gesturing towards the higher reality of a mysterious God who is at once immutable and always changing, who is at once relational and absolute. And as I said in my sermon, I don't really pretend to understand this paradox, but I do think that either of our choices in trying to defuse it is going to end up falling short in one way or another.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=27596" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:26570What I Want from an Atonement Theology: Incarnational Emphasis2012-08-18T00:15:03Z2012-08-18T00:20:39Zpublic0It's been a while since I've posted an entry in my <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/24265.html">"What I Want From an Atonement Theology" series</a>, but I have not forgotten it! I'm still very interested in articulating just what I'd like to see in a theology of atonement, and then perhaps thinking about just how a theology might manage to fill those requirements.<br /><br />And one of the important--I was tempted to say "most important," but really all of the criteria I specified at the beginning of this project are pretty critically important--requirements which I have for an atonement theology is that it treat the Incarnation not merely as a necessary prerequisite for the Cross, but recognize that "Incarnation <i>is</i> redemption."<br /><br />You might remember that I actually preached on this in <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/23155.html">my sermon for the Feast of the Holy Name</a>:<blockquote>[There is] a tendency we sometime see in some parts of Christianity to view the Incarnation as a mere prerequisite to the Cross, something God had to do in order to accomplish the plan of salvation just as it might be necessary for a high school student to take Algebra I before she can take Algebra II. <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/12/for-god-so-loved-the-world-that-he-couldnt-stay-away-a-christmas-meditation/">Roger Olson speaks of it</a> as a “rescue mission”: “its only purpose being to get God the Son onto the cross to change God’s attitude toward us from wrath to love. This,” Olson says, “does not take the truth of the incarnation seriously enough.”</blockquote>I contrasted this with a Franciscan understanding of the Incarnation as articulated by Fr. Richard Rohr:<blockquote>For Francis and the early Franciscans, "incarnation was already redemption," and the feast of Christmas said that God was saying yes to humanity in the enfleshment of his Son in our midst. If that were true, then all questions of inherent dignity, worthiness, and belovedness were resolved once and forever—and for everything that was human, material, physical, and in the whole of creation. That's why Francis liked animals and nature, praising the sun, moon, and stars, like some New Ager from California. It was all good and chosen and beautiful if God came among us "as Emmanuel" (Isaiah 7:14).</blockquote>What are the implications of this understanding of the Incarnation as "already redemption" on how we view the Atonement? What happens when we view the Cross through the lens of the Incarnation instead of <i>vice versa</i>?<br /><br />Jesus' death was an inevitable consequence of the Christ becoming human, of sharing our mortal nature. Whether it was at 33 years old on the Cross, or as an elderly person on a deathbed, <i>Jesus was always going to die</i>. That's part and parcel of being human, an inescapable result of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis">the kenotic process</a> described in the <a href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=6543367">early Christian hymn quoted by St. Paul in his letter to the Phillipians</a>:<blockquote>Christ, though in the image of God,<br />didn't deem equality with God<br />something to be clung to--<br />but instead became completely empty<br />and took on the image of oppressed humankind:<br />born into the human condition,<br />found in the likeness of a human being.<br />Jesus was thus humbled--<br />obediently accepting death, even death on a cross! (2:6-8, <i>The Inclusive Bible</i>)</blockquote> By emptying Christself and becoming human, Christ doomed Christself to death. So it seems to me that the question of the Cross is: in what ways, if any, does Jesus' violent death on a cross accomplish something that a death in bed from natural causes at age 90 would not have? I think the hymn above implies an answer in its phrase "death, even death on a cross!" Crucifixion is, in a sense, the <i>sine qua non</i> of deaths, dramatically underscoring what it means to be mortal, to be subject to suffering and ultimately to death. Jesus' experience on the Cross was what every human being faces in death, only more so. "Jesus' cry from the cross—'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'—shows that in the crucifixion, God experienced the most human of all feelings: the absence of God. In so doing, God bridged the gap that sin had caused between us," <a href="http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Jesus-Crucifixion-Is-the-Solution-Whats-the-Problem-Tony-Jones-03-39-2012.html">writes Tony Jones</a>, explicating the view of the atonement held by theologian Jürgen Moltman.<br /><br />In <i>The Crucified God</i>, Moltman writes--quoted by Tony Jones <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2012/03/28/a-better-atonement-jesus-dies-with-trayvon/">here</a>--that it is on the Cross that Christ takes upon Christself "the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and godforsaken can experience communion" with the Christ. That's the sort of insight that I think a theology of the atonement has to take into account if it is to properly understand the Cross in light of the Incarnation, rather than simply understanding the Incarnation in light of the Cross, as has been lamentably more common within Western Christianity.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=26570" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:23155[sermon] Feast of the Holy Name2012-01-01T18:06:14Z2013-02-03T02:23:27Zpublic0<i>As preached to the Church of the Ascension in Gloucester City during the Celebration of Christmas Lessons and Carols on Jan. 1, 2012 C.E.</i><br /><br /><a href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=192440721">Genesis 3:1-15</a><br /><a href="http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=192440803">Isaiah 40:1-11</a><br /><a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/HolyName_RCL.html#OLDTEST">Numbers 6:22-27</a><br /><a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/HolyName_RCL.html#EPISTLE">Galatians 4:4-7</a><br /><a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/HolyName_RCL.html#EPISTLE2">Philippians 2:5-11</a><br /><a href="http://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/HolyName_RCL.html#GOSPEL">Luke 2:15-21</a><br /><br />So here we are, the Eight Day of our voyage through the (relatively short) season of Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Name. “When the eight day arrived for the child’s circumcision, [the child] was named Jesus.” This, the first shedding of Jesus’ blood, stands of course as a prefiguring of the Cross. It also stands as a powerful testimony to the truth of the Incarnation, that God became fully human, suffering out of love all the pains and frailties that we suffer out of sin. <br /><br />We know that we are subject to injury, to pain, to illness, to temptation, and ultimately to death because of sin, because of our own turning away from God’s Love. The account of the Fall found in the Book of Genesis expresses this important truth in figurative terms. Yet Jesus was without the stain of that sin, and still Jesus’ blood was able to be shed, first at the circumcision and ultimately at the crucifixion.<br /><br /> Just as “in the free, overflowing rapture of [God’s] love, God makes a creation that is other than [God]self” (<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonestony/statuses/138293420765618176">Jürgen Moltmann</a>) in the Genesis accounts, in the Incarnation our loving God empties Godself, taking the form of a slave. <br /><br /> Think of the sacrifice! The omnipresent Christ becoming limited to a single human body in a single place; the omniscient Christ needing to learn and grow as human children do; the omnipotent Christ made weak and helpless. And then, on the eighth day, well, you know.<br /><br />Fiction writers from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rice">Anne Rice</a> in <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/8333"><i>Out of Egypt</i></a> to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis">Nikos Kazantzakis</a> in <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/8493"><i>The Last Temptation of Christ</i></a> have written novels trying to imagine what that sort of experience for the young Christ would have been like as Christ “grew in size and strength” (<i>Invlusive Bible</i>) and “increased in wisdom and in years” (NRSV), as two different translations of Luke 2:40 put it. There is no definitive answer to that question, of course, but we should not be surprised that so many authors’ pens have been inspired by the powerfulness of Christ’s sacrifice, confronting and conquering the worst of our human natures-- fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, and perhaps, as in <i>The Last Temptation</i>, even lust--out of love rather than out of sin.<br /><br />It’s true that here in the western Church we are more likely to talk about Jesus having two natures, one human and one divine, united in one person--what’s called the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_Chalcedon">Definition of Chalcedon</a>--while our siblings-in-Christ in Eastern Orthodoxy are more likely to speak of the humanity and divinity united in a single nature. But the underlying core doctrine--that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine--represents a central orthodoxy for the entire Church catholic in all her branches: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant alike.<br /><br />But . . . so what? Hopefully I am my own harshest critic, but I can just imagine a hypothetical parishioner sitting in their pew, going, “Well, it was fun, reading lessons and and singing Christmas carols, but then we had to let the theology geek get up and talk.” Well, that hopefully fictional parishioner would be in good company: no less a personage than the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther himself once wrote: “What is it to me that Christ had two natures?” He did not, of course, mean that the doctrine was altogether unimportant, but his comments represent a tendency we sometime see in some parts of Christianity to view the Incarnation as a mere prerequisite to the Cross, something God had to do in order to accomplish the plan of salvation just as it might be necessary for a high school student to take Algebra I before she can take Algebra II. <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/12/for-god-so-loved-the-world-that-he-couldnt-stay-away-a-christmas-meditation/">Roger Olson speaks of it</a> as a “rescue mission”: “its only purpose being to get God the Son onto the cross to change God’s attitude toward us from wrath to love. This,” Olson says, “does not take the truth of the incarnation seriously enough.”<br /><br /><a href="http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/Rohr-is-christmas-christian">Richard Rohr writes of the Incarnation</a> as “God [. . .] saying yes to humanity in the enfleshment of [God’s] Son in our midst. [. . . A]ll questions of inherent dignity, worthiness, and belovedness were resolved once and forever—and for everything that was human, material, physical, and in the whole of creation.” Rohr reminds us that for St. Francis, St. Clare, and the community they led at Asissi, “incarnation was already redemption.”<br /><br />Earlier I mentioned the Definition of Chalcedon, the formula we in the western Church use to grasp as best as we are able the holy mystery which is Jesus’ full humanity and full divinity. The full text of the definition as composed at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451 of the Common Era can be found on page 864 of your Prayer Book, albeit in incredibly small type, but part of that definition--and I’m tweaking the translation a bit here--states that Jesus is “truly God and truly human, of a rational soul and body, of one being with the One whom Jesus called 'Abba' according to the divinity of Christ, and of one being with us according to Christ’s humanity.”<br /><br />Let’s say that again: by virtue of Jesus’ humanity, we are one in being with Christ. We share Christ’s essence, Christ’s substance, Christ’s being. Talk about a weighty message!<br /><br />So when Mary and Joseph bring their infant child to be presented at the temple, in a sense it is all of humanity which is being presented before God. When that infant’s blood is shed according to the covenant made with Sarah and Abraham, all of humanity is bound in a New Covenant. And when that child is given the name Jesus--meaning “the L<small>ORD</small> brings salvation”--that becomes <i>our</i> name, our promise, our truth.<br /><br />Amen.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=23155" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:22446Liberal Theology and a Wrathful God2011-09-05T12:50:38Z2011-09-05T12:53:04Zpublic0Okay, returning to the train of thought inspired by Roger Olson's <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/07/how-serious-a-heresy-is-universalism/">thoughts on universalism</a> (if you haven't <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/21179.html">been</a> <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/21252.html">following</a> <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/21839.html">along</a>, he's not sympathetic), I'm particular interested, for the moment, in these passages: <blockquote>I also evaluate the seriousness of universalism by its context–viz., why does the person affirm it? If universalism is evidence of a denial of God’s wrath and/or human sinfulness, then it is much more serious. Barth’s universalism (yes, I believe Karl Barth was a universalist and I’ll post a message here about why later) did not arise out of those denials which is why he didn’t like the appellation “universalist.” The term is usually associated with liberal theology. In that case, as part of an overall liberal/modernist theology, I consider it very serious indeed. <br /><br />[. . .] <br /><br />When universalism is believed on biblical grounds (as in The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory McDonald–a pseudonym), it is much less serious than when it is believed as part of a liberal theology that denies the wrath of God and the sinfulness of all human beings (except Jesus Christ, of course). <br /><br />[. . .] <br /><br />There is egregious error and there is simple error. One kind of universalism (based on denial of God’s wrath and human sinfulness) is egregious error. Another kind (based on confusion about God’s love requiring his overriding free will) is simple error. </blockquote>I'm not a universalist, of course, but I am a modernist or a liberal theologian? I certainly don't think I'm a modernist, at least not by the definition given by D.A. Carson in <a rel="nofollow" target="_top" href="http://www.librarything.com/work/38053">Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church</a>: <blockquote>Modernism is often pictured as pursuing truth, absolutism, linear thinking, rationalism, certainty, the cerebral as opposed to the affective which in turn breeds arrogance, inflexibility, a lust to be right, the desire to control. Postmodernism, by contrast, recognizes how much of what we know is shaped by the culture in which we live, is controlled by emotions and aesthetics and heritage, and in fact can only be intelligently held as part of a common tradition, without overbearing claims to be true or right. Modernism tries to find unquestioned foundations on which to build the edifice of knowledge and then proceeds with methodological rigor; postmodernism denies that such foundations exist (it is antifoundational) and insists that we come to know things in many ways, not a few of them lacking in rigor. Modernism is hard-edged and, in the domain of religion, focuses on truth versus error, right belief, confessionalism; postmodernism is gentle and, in the domain of religion, focuses on relationships, love, shared tradition, integrity in discussion.</blockquote>Am I liberal? Well, I'm certainly not <i>illiberal</i>. I've recently stopped identifying as a liberal theologian, deciding to instead to identify as a "post/liberal" theologian (even as I don't yet claim even a simplistic mastery of what that means). From <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliberal_theology">the Wikipedia article on post-liberal theology</a>: <blockquote>In contrast to liberal individualism in theology, postliberal theology roots rationality not in the certainty of the individual thinking subject (cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am") but in the language and culture of a living tradition of communal life. The postliberals argue that the Christian faith be equated with neither the religious feelings of Romanticism nor the propositions of a Rationalist or fundamentalist approach to religion. Rather, the Christian faith is understood as a culture and a language, in which doctrines are likened to a "depth grammar" for the first-order language and culture (practices, skills, habits) of the church that is historically shaped by the continuous, regulated reading of the scriptural narrative over time. Thus, in addition to a critique of theological liberalism, and an emphasis upon the Bible, there is also a stress upon tradition, and upon the language, culture and intelligibility intrinsic to the Christian community. As a result, postliberal theologies are often oriented around the scriptural narrative as a script to be performed, understand orthodox dogmas (esp. the creeds) as depth-grammars for Christian life, and see such scriptural and traditional grammars as a resource for both Christian self-critique and culture critique.</blockquote>At the same time, I use the virgule instead of the hyphen (i.e., post/liberal rather than post-liberal) out of an understanding that our post-liberalism needs to be firmly grounded in those aspects which liberal theology gets right. While Olson and I clearly agree that both overly modernistic theology (what I tend to call "liberal historicism" or--worse--"ethical Jesusism") and fundamentalism both rest on the same set of problematic assumptions which need to be removed beyong, reading over past posts by Olsen on liberal theology, modernism, and the Emergent Church movement, however, I get the sense that neither my postmodernism nor my post/liberalism are sufficiently different for his tastes than that which he considers central and problematic to modernism/liberalism (which is probably not the same as I what I see as central and problematic).<br /><br />That's fair enough; it's silly to get too involved in a debate over labels, and I didn't enter into this expecting to <em>agree </em>with a conservative evangelical Baptist theologian, after all. But I think it's important to locate the exact nature of Olson's critique--which is to say, is there a critique here of the way that liberal theologians might come to universalism which is independent of the overall methodology of (post/)liberal theology as a whole? Is the problem simply that liberals have allowed outside sources of authority (reason and experience) to color the way they interpret the Bible and come to a conclusion different to the one that some might claim one to in a purely exegetical reading (as if such a thing were possible)? Or is there a <em>particular </em>theological error ("denial of God’s wrath and human sinfulness)") that liberals might be especially prone to, but which perhaps could be articulated without relying on any specific theological methodology?<br /><br />If it is the former, then Olson and I are clearly on different side of the issue (no matter how much our final conclusions might seem in agreement) without any meaningful persuasion really possible; our starting premises are simply too incommensurate. I look to reason and authority, in dialectical conversation with scripture and tradition, as legitimate sources of Christian authority, and I don't think an interpretation-free reading of the Bible is possible even in theory (so that the attempt to perform such a reading isn't merely subject to human fallibility, but is profoundly mistaken at its heart). <br /><br />If the latter however, then it seems there might be some starting-point for dialogue. What does it mean for a liberal theology to deny "God's wrath and human sinfulness"--and is it possible for a liberal theologian, using a liberal theological method, to come to universalist or quasi-universalist conclusions without so denying? Yes, there are liberal theologians who have clearly denied, in a non-controversial way (that is, it's not controversial whether they did the denying), that "sin" is a useful category for 20th and 21st century. I think they're wrong, and if that's all who Olson is critiquing, then I'll join him in his critique without reservations. But they, if anything, seem to be in the majority and, in particular. feminist, queer, and anti-racist theologies are very much aware of the fallen nature of humanity. A Christian theology lacking the concepts of sin and wrath seems to be lacking, in a very profound sense, just on purely practical grounds.<br /><br />Yet it's not clear to me that Olson intends his critique to be that narrow; indeed, he seems to see the denial of sin and/or wrath as endemic to liberal Christianity. Is there, then, a way that a liberal theologian can acknowledge that human beings are suceptible to moral evil and that God hates evil and wants to erase it from the world, and still count for Graff as denying the wrathfulness of God? One way would be to view the use of any knowledge of God's nature not derived directly from Scripture using an evangelical hermeneutic in order to come to conclusions about universalism as a <em>de facto</em> denial of God's wrathfulness. Under this understanding, then it'd be a tautology that any liberal theologian who was also a universalist would be, necessarily, denying God's wrath. Again, this doesn't really leave open any avenues for dialogue between the liberal theologian and the evangelical.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=22446" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:21839Salvation and Universalism2011-08-28T00:19:05Z2011-08-28T00:19:05Zpublic0After spending <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/21179.html">two</a> <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/21252.html">posts</a> in a discussion on orthodoxy and heresy inspired by an exchange between Roger Olson and Eric Reitan on the orthodoxy of universalism, it seems that it makes sense to say a little bit, however briefly, about that particular test case. <br /><br />First off, no, universalism is <em>not</em> a heresy--at least not by any meaningful standard. (Which is to say, "doctrine that Roger Olson thinks is wrong" is excluded as a workable definition of heresy, for the reasons given in my post <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/21179.html">Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Truth</a> and in Reitan's <a href="http://thepietythatliesbetween.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-heresy-and-universalism.html">On Heresy and Universalism</a>. Although Olson does gives a more comprehensive and coherent, if still not totally persuasive--is there really a consensus, even just among evangelicals, that universalism is heresy?--account of his position from which universalism counts as heresy in a more recent post, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/08/some-random-thoughts-about-that-awful-but-necessary-word-heresy/">Some random thoughts about that awful but necessary word "heresy"</a>) Robin Parry does a good job of working through the question of whether universalism is heretical in a series of posts (<a href="http://theologicalscribbles.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-universalism-heretical-part-1.html">1</a> <a href="http://theologicalscribbles.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-universalism-heretical-part-2.html">2</a> <a href="http://theologicalscribbles.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-universalism-heretical-part-3.html">3</a> <a href="http://theologicalscribbles.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-universalism-heretical-part-4.html">4</a> <a href="http://theologicalscribbles.blogspot.com/2010/06/postscript-universalism-as-theologumena.html">5</a>), and persuasively comes to what seems to be the unescapable conclusion that the Church Catholic has never denounced universalism as such, although it <em>has </em>denounced the teaching of some particular universalists, such as Origen, while praising others, such as St. Gregory of Nyssa. <br /><br />For reasons about which I've posted before, I am not a universalist, or at least don't identify as such. Indeed, my reasons are more or less the same as Olson's (rooted in an account of human freedom), so it could be said that we share the same position: that universalism can be put forth as a "pious hope" but not a "confident belief." But Olson comes off as almost stridently anti-universalist, while I am deeply sympathetic to universalism. <br /><br />Why the difference? It seems to be a disagreement over what, exactly, a "pious hope" looks like. For Olson, it almost seems to be little more than wishful thinking:<blockquote>Of course, someone might argue that, in the end, every creature will freely offer love to God and be saved (e.g., Moltmann). I would just call that optimism. There’s no way to believe that true other than a leap of optimistic hope. <br /><br /></blockquote>Whereas I would find that claim quite likely, given what we know about God's nature from scripture, reason, tradition, and experience, while at the same time agreeing with Olson that asserting as fact that everyone will be saved goes beyond our possible knowledge. But I'm a skeptic in general: asserting as fact that the sun will rise tomorrow goes beyond our possible knowledge. (For one thing, we might blow up the world in the meantime.) As the great author Robert Anton Wilson said, "I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions." <br /><br />So the question becomes: how confident is overconfident? <br /><br />Do I believe that, if there is a an afterlife, then everyone will experience salvation within it? At the end of the day, the answer to that question depends upon an epistemological dilemma: what separates a belief from a mere suspicion on the one hand and an overconfident assertion of knowledge on the other?<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=21839" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:21179Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Truth2011-08-24T18:23:33Z2011-08-27T21:00:44Zpublic0Over at <a href="http://thepietythatliesbetween.blogspot.com/">The Piety That Lies Between</a>, Eric Reitan responds in two posts (<a href="http://thepietythatliesbetween.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-heresy-and-universalism.html">On Heresy and Universalism </a>and <a href="http://thepietythatliesbetween.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-heresy-and-universalism-part-2.html">On Heresy and Universalism, Part 2</a>) to Roger Olson's question <a href="http://www.patheos.com/community/rogereolson/2011/07/30/how-serious-a-heresy-is-universalism/">How serious a heresy is universalism?</a> by deconstructing the question through examining Olson's understandingh of heresy and orthodoxy. In the first post, Reitan writes: <blockquote>Olson does offer a brief definition of heresy in a parenthetical remark, saying that heresies are "theologically incorrect beliefs," but he doesn't consider the adequacy of this definition in the face of alternatives. A "theologically incorrect belief" is presumably a belief about God that doesn't correspond with the way God really is.</blockquote>Now, it's not actually obvious that this is right. It might seem like an unnecessarily pedantic quibble about grammar, but a "theologically incorrect belief" does not mean the same thing as an "incorrect theological belief." The latter noun phrase simply calls out a belief which is both incorrect (under some epistemological understanding of "incorrect") and theological. As Reitan points out, if this is what heresy consists of, there are some rather strange conclusions to be drawn: <blockquote>But the reason why this definition of heresy (and the contrary notion of orthodoxy) has these implications is because it makes the objective nature of reality the standard by which beliefs are judged heretical (or orthodox)--and it seems inevitable that each of us will, in our beliefs about ultimate reality, get some things wrong. But I think this way of understanding heresy has deeper implications that Olson (and other evangelical Christians) would be unhappy to accept. Consider: on this definition, if atheists are right about the nature of reality then all Christians of every stripe are heretical in all their theological beliefs, since all their theological beliefs would then be wrong.</blockquote>But in the actual phrase Olson uses, "theologically incorrect belief," <i>theologically</i> isn't an adjective modifying <i>belief</i>, but rather an adverb modifying <i>incorrect</i>. Which is to say, there could be a special of type of (in)correctness distinct from "objective (in)correctness," called "theological (in)correctness," and it would be by this standard (<i>not</i> our regular epistemological criteria, whatever they may be) which theological claims would (and/or should) be judged. I think this is actually the much more intuitive reading for many of us, precisely for the reason that, as Reitan shows, the alternate reading leads to an absurdity. <br /><br />However, there is actually some support for Reitan's reading, because Olson goes on to say: <blockquote>Strictly historically speaking, any universalism is heresy--according to all major branches of Christianity. The Catholic church allows hope for universal salvation but not confident affirmation of it. But, of course, as Luther demonstrated, all branches of Christianity can be wrong. That is why I reject paleo-orthodoxy and any appeal to absolute authority of tradition. Tradition gets a vote but never a veto. The Bible trumps tradition.</blockquote>By allowing (through an overconfidence in Luther) that "all branches of Christianity can be wrong," Reitan seems to be assuming a standard by which the theological correctness of a belief can be judged which is extrinsic to the discipline of theology itself. He's even quite clear what that standard should be: the Bible--and of course, if the Bible is perfectly perspicuous and inerrant in all things, or at least all things pertaining to faith and/or morals (and I don't know if Olson thinks it is these things or not, but obviously many Christians do), then the distinction between "biblically correct" and "objectively correct" actually collapses in upon itself. <br /><br />Yet as Reitan notes in his second post: <blockquote>Scripture, by virtue of its tensions and complexities and ambiguities, is a much more slippery standard that may require an interpretive hermeneutic in order to be applied effectively (which may mean that what is really operating as the standard isn't Scripture as such, but Scripture as read through a particular interpretive lens).</blockquote>"A similar problem arises," Reitan notes, "when attempting to test a belief against a theological tradition." <br /><br />Now, for the theologicall liberal, be they Emergent ex-Evangelical or Mainline Protestant, this apparent problem really isn't. Whether using the Anglican formulation of scripture/tradition/reason (the "three-legged stool") or the Wesleyan quadrilateral of scripture/tradition/reason/experience (and I think the distinction between the two is ultimately one without a difference), we understand scripture, tradition, and reason (and experience) to be in dialectical conversation with each other (as modeled by the perichoretic dialectic of conversation which is the the Triune God) and the fact that this cannot provide us with any hard and fast, final and ultimate answers to our questions is seen as a feature rather than a bug. There is always room for the Spirit to move us further in our understanding. Or as Reitan says using even bigger words (impressive, isn't it?): <blockquote>this serves as part of a broader Hegelian project of preserving the internal integrity of a system of beliefs so as to make it possible for it to evolve in the face of the lived encounter with ultimate reality.</blockquote>But that's dealing in abstraction. What does it mean in <em>practice </em>to evaluate the orthodoxy or hereticalness of some <em>particular </em>claim, such as universalism? <br /><br /><a name="cutid1"></a>I do think there <em>are </em>certain claims we, working within the theological tradition which can broadly be called "Western Trinitarianism" (and which includes Roman Catholicism and most of Protestantism), can call out as heretical, such as all of the following: <br /><ol><li>The Heavenly Parent, Resurrected Child, and Holy Spirit are different <i>modes</i> or <i>aspects</i> of one God, as perceived by <i>the believer</i>, rather than three distinct persons in <i>God Godself</i>. (Modalism)</li><li>Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was the crucifixion; that is, Jesus only <i>seemed</i> to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality Jesus was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die. (Docetism)</li><li>Jesus was fully human without being divine, simply a highly revered prophet of God who was not equal to God. (Ebionitism/Unitarianism)</li><li>The Heavenly Parent and the Begotten One of God did not exist together eternally; the pre-incarnate Jesus was a divine being created by (and therefore inferior to) the Heavenly Parent at some point, before which the Begotten One did not exist. (Arianism)</li><li>Christ was <i>of</i> two natures but not <i>in</i> two natures: separate divine and human natures had united and blended in such a manner that although Jesus was of one being with the Parent, Jesus was not of one being with humanity. Either the human nature of Christ was overcome by the divine, or Christ had a human nature but it was unlike the rest of humanity. (Eutychianism)</li></ol>(All of the above heretical claims are taken from the Wikipedia articles for the respective heresies, and modfifed as I saw fit.) We know--I would argue--that these claims are heretical because the Early Church explicitly said so, through the earliest Ecumenical Councils. In so doing, they articulated an orthodoxy, a space of limited intellectual elbow-room in which one could operate and still be identifiably within the tradition of Western Trinitarianism. <br /><br />I believe, as of this moment, that I am not a heretic--while at the same time not being sure it would be all that horrible if I were. This means I necessarily have a much narrower understanding of what heresy is than Olsen: <blockquote>I have never met a Christian who was one hundred percent theologically correct. Scratch hard enough and you’ll always find some heresy beneath the surface (if not on the surface). That’s true for me as much as for anyone else. If I thought I held no heresies, I’d think I had already arrived at the fullness of truth–something even the apostle Paul did not claim.</blockquote>I do not believe that I have arrived at the fullness of truth, only that I have managed to avoid those positions which the weight of the tradition of Western Trinitarianism has understood as anathema. In addition to heresies and orthodoxies, I think it is clear there are many claims which are neither orthodox nor heretical. For some of these, this is because they have nothing to do with theology: the number of miles between Paris and Tokyo is not a theological claim. Yet what constitutes a theological claim is itself a disputed matter of theology; what looked liked a theological matter at the trial of Galileo might not seem so to many Christians, including Roman Catholics, today. And it seems clear to me there are a large number of theological issues upon which one might take either side and still remain orthodox, at least in regards to the fullness of Western Trinitarianism. (Someone who claims that grace is irresistable is not an orthodox Roman Catholic; someone who claims that it is resistable is not an orthodox Calvinist; they are both perfectly orthodox Christians.)<br /><br /><a name="cutid2"></a>Now in addition to the earliest Ecumenical Councils, there are many other traditions within the Church which I look to as authoritative, from the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral to many of the canons of the Council of Trent. Now I admit freely that there is a very real sense in which I can be said to "pick and choose" these sources of authority, but the fact remains that I do look to them as authoritative, and together they constitute my particular orthodoxy, one I tried to articulate in <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/12401.html">Twenty Features of My Orthodoxy</a>. In <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/12401.html?nc=1#comments">a comment to that post</a>, I tried to draw out the way each of those twenty "features" drew upon certain strands of (Western Trinitarian) Christian tradition and were in accord with them. Some of these represent clear "orthodoxies" in themselves, beliefs which are central to Western Trinitarianism as a whole. Others are merely "orthodox beliefs" (that is, are not heretical) without themselves being orthodoxies, taking sides with some strand of the tradition against another side within the same tradition, e.g. Catholic versus Protestant.<br /><br /><a name="cutid3"></a>Which leaves the question: why bother being orthodox? Is there any intrinsic value in orthodoxy as such? This is a question which has been more and more on my mind as I find myself, to my great surprise, becoming more and more orthodox as I define it, and is further complicated by my aspirancy to the Epicopal priesthood; I would (of course?) not seek ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church if I did not feel I could in honesty affirm an orthodoxy representative of that church, e.g. that the Bible contains all things necessary to salvation. Reitan concedes there can be "value in the project of subjecting beliefs to such a standard of orthodoxy" in service of the "Hegelian project" mentioned above--but what do I think? <br /><br />If we look at past blog posts or forum comments of mine, I almost always invoke notions of orthodoxy or heresy almost apologetically, with a "<a href="http://youtu.be/2GMZjkNW5b8">not that there's anything wrong with that</a>." <br /><p> </p><iframe height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Oj3VphK9AMk" frameborder="0" width="420" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><p><br />For example, in <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/6235.html">History and Christ</a>, I write, "No articulation of ideology, be it social or theological (however one might understand the distinction) should be exempt from the dialectical processes of which truth is a function. All ideological processes should hold truth, <i>not</i> orthodoxy for the sake of orthodoxy, as their ultimate objective." In <a href="http://cjbanning.dreamwidth.org/9625.html">Why the Quest for the Historical Jesus Is a Spiritual Dead End</a>: "I'd argue that the fact that 'made flesh' is in the title automatically negates any possibility of a fall into the docetist heresy (not that I'm any advocate for orthodoxy for orthodoxy's sake, exactly) [. . .]." <br /><br />I would affirm this understanding; orthodoxy <em>cannot </em>be a lodestone. While I believe that we as Christians are required to be in dialectical conversation with our tradition and our Scriptures, the option of principled dissent must always be an option (although as an ordained minister, it might become incumbent upon myself to resign my position if I could not in good conscience teach orthodox teaching). And yet neither should be surprised when we find--as I have found--that that tradition and those Scriptures speak a wisdom which is enduring through the ages. <br /><br />I reserve the right to be a heretic, but I am glad that I am not.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=21179" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-14:339050:56584th Easter2010-04-26T19:48:29Z2012-08-20T19:46:09Zpublic0<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/toiM1B6E2ww?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="sameDomain"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/toiM1B6E2ww?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><a href="http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster4_RCL.html#EPISTLE#FIRST">Acts 9:36-43<br /></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><a href="http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster4_RCL.html#EPISTLE#PSALM">Psalm 23<br /></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><a href="http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster4_RCL.html#EPISTLE#EPISTLE">Revelation 7:9-17<br /></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><a href="http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster4_RCL.html#EPISTLE#GOSPEL">John 10:22-30</a></span><br /><br />"The Lord is my Shepherd," the psalmist writes, "I shall not want." These words may not seem to describe our lives today: we are constantly wanting. The new video game console which is faster, better, with better graphics and cooler games. The pair of shoes on half price at the mall. The fast food cheeseburger which all by itself constitutes half your recommended calories for the day. We are a culture which is constantly wanting, but--as the immortal Rolling Stones song tells us--we "can't always get what [we] want, / But if [we] try sometimes well [we] just might find / [we] get what [we] need."<br /><br />So unless the psalmist lived a much luckier life than any of us here--where "luck" is measured by a standard of egoistic hedonism--we have to assume the psalmist meant the statement "I shall not want" not as a description of an operative state of affairs but as a moral imperative, the "shall" in "I shall not want" being the same "shall" as in "Thou shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." The psalmist, like the Rolling Stones, is reminding us that we get what we need.<br /><br />God provides for our needs. To explain <i>how</i> God provides for our needs, though, the psalmist turns to the metaphor of a shepherd. Jesus expands on this metaphor in the Gospel of St. John the Evangelist (as well as in the synoptic gospels), and St. John the Divine references back to it in his account of the apocalyptic Revelation provided to him. When we consider the metaphor further, we might gleam some further understanding of why and how we live in such a crazy world where our desires so often run counter to the reality which we find.<br /><br /><img align="right" alt="" src="http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/2155/williamadolphebouguerea.jpg" />Think of the life of an ordinary shepherd. She wakes up early, takes the sheep from wherever it is the sheep might spend the night, in stables perhaps, and she leads them to the "green pastures" where they are set loose to graze. And that, my sisters and brothers and siblings in Christ, is where all the trouble begins. <br /><br />Because grazing sheep get into trouble. They need to be protected from predators, but also they need to be kept from wandering off and getting lost. Think of the sheep in Jesus' parables; they're <i>constantly</i> getting lost or otherwise in trouble, so that the shepherd must leave the flock behind and search for them. It's enough to drive our poor shepherd insane. But sheep need to be free to graze.<br /><br />And as it is for sheep, it is even more so for people. God is raising a flock of free-range souls; the freedom of our wills is a gift from God, but so too is it a consequence of our being a reflection of God, the <i>imago dei</i>, created in the divine image.<br /><br />God could, in God's divine omnipotence, order the universe such that our desires and our daily bread were always in harmony; God could run God's Creation like a well-oiled train station. But God chooses instead to allow us to exercise our freedom, recognizing in God's omnibenevolence that as the greater good. As Baptist theologian Roger Olson notes, "God is in charge of everything without controlling everything." Such are the actions of a good shepherd, or for that matter a good parent--or a good God.<br /><br />The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church affirmed the importance of the doctrine of free will thusly:<blockquote>Only in freedom can [a person] direct [themself] toward goodness. Our contemporaries make much of this freedom and pursue it eagerly; and rightly to be sure. Often however they foster it perversely as a license for doing whatever pleases them, even if it is evil. For its part, authentic freedom is an exceptional sign of the divine image within [a human being]. For God has willed that [humans] remain "under the control of [their] own decisions," so that [they] can seek [their] Creator spontaneously, and come freely to utter and blissful perfection through loyalty to [God]. <br /><br />Hence [a person's] dignity demands that [they] act according to a knowing and free choice that is personally motivated and prompted from within, not under blind internal impulse nor by mere external pressure. [A person] achieves such dignity when, emancipating [themself] from all captivity to passion, [they] pursue [their] goal in a spontaneous choice of what is good, and procures for themself through effective and skilful action, apt helps to that end. Since [humans'] freedom has been damaged by sin, only by the aid of God's grace can [one] bring such a relationship with God into full flower. Before the judgement seat of God each [person] must render an account of [their] own life, whether [they have] done good or evil.</blockquote>This is simply a reaffirmation, in somewhat--ahem--nicer terms, of the doctrine as articulated at the Council of Trent:<blockquote>If any one shall affirm, that [the] freewill [of human beings], moved and excited by God, does not, by consenting, cooperate with God, the mover and exciter, so as to prepare and dispose itself for the attainment of justification; if moreover, anyone shall say, that the human will cannot refuse complying, if it pleases, but that it is inactive, and merely passive; let such a one be accursed.<br /><br />If anyone shall affirm, that since the fall of Adam [and of Eve], [the] freewill [of human beings] is lost and extinguished; or, that it is a thing titular, yea a name, without a thing, and a fiction introduced by Satan into the Church; let such an one be accursed. <br /><br />If any one saith, that it is not in [the] power [of a human being] to make [their] ways evil, but that the works that are evil God worketh as well as those that are good, not permissively only, but properly, and of [Godself], in such wise that the treason of Judas is no less [God's] own proper work than the vocation of Paul; let [them] be anathema.</blockquote>If a person's dignity demands on their part a free choice not forced by external forces, however, then any attack against their freedom--whether by church, government, or culture--is an offense against that dignity, a sacrilege against the <i>imago dei</i> itself.<br /><br />Our duty, then, is to oppose those structures in the world which would act to undermine the agency of our sister and brother and sibling human beings: sexism and racism, transphobia and homophobia; poverty and hunger; totalitarianism and fascism. We must stand in solidarity against that which would diminish the autonomy of the oppressed and downtrodden, against ideologies of fear, of hatred, and of control. We must not allow the voices of any people to be silenced. For the most fundamental freedom of all is the freedom to simply be who we are, who we are called to be by Christ: female and/or male and/or intersexed and/or genderqueer; gay and/or straight; white and/or of color; Jew and/or gentile. "I am woman, hear me roar"--the first line of the 1972 Helen Reddy song "I Am Woman" which became an iconic catchphrase for liberation and empowerment-- is a phrase we make fun of nowadays, but it bespeaks the truth that this freedom is not always easily won, and its exercise often transgressive. Sometimes merely demanding the right to be ourselves, and to speak with our own voices, can be radical in itself.<br /><br />I am reminded of the radical freedom commended to us in the homilectic exhortation of Saint Augustine: "Love, and do what you like." The truth is, it is not possible to do one of these things without the other. Authentic freedom is always necessarily rooted in love, and authentic love is that which fosters freedom. And that being the case, it should be no surprise that it is within the love, which is boundless and abundant, of Christ the Good Shepherd for the flock which is humanity, that we find our most perfect freedom. Freedom from sin, freedom from fear, even freedom from death itself, but most fundamentally the freedom to be ourselves--all of these are the consequences of God's grace, of we and our robes being washed in the blood of the Lamb and made stainless.<br /><br />Alleluia.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=cjbanning&ditemid=5658" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments