Yoder a sectarian? Really?

Let’s face it: the “John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas are sectarians” or “They have no public theology” critique is not just tired – it’s wrong. I sincerely wonder if people who most stridently make such accusations have ever read Yoder (especially), and if they have, have read him widely or fairly.

It’s not as if you have to delve into obscure monographs in order to find Yoder explaining precisely what he means by saying that the first task of the church is to “be the church,” precisely what he doesn’t say, and how his view does not preclude him speaking to issues normally labeled “public.” The last two chapters of Priestly Kingdom are all developing something of an “Anabaptist” Public theology (he uses the looser term “Anabaptist” in this book to refer to free churches generally). His last essay in the book, “Civil Religion in America,” is extremely good, and reminds me of work done by William Cavanaugh (or vice versa, I guess), especially in that Yoder works to particularize claims to universality and complexify public space to make room for a more robust form of pluralism than the current political landscape makes room for.

Anyway, here’s a good quote from the man with who wore a devil’s beard, a quote that ends Priestly Kingdom and sums up the irony of American Civil Religion, and by extension the nation-state and Constantinianism in general. (Seriously – go read these last two articles by Yoder – the other is titled “The Christian Case for Democracy.” Show me the sectarian).

We call a nonviolent man “Lord” and in his name rekindle the arms race. We call a poor man “Lord” and with his name on our lips deepen the ditch between rich and poor. We call “Lord” a man who told us to love our enemies and we polarize the globe in the name of Christian values, approving of “moderate repression” as long as it is done by our friends. (195)

It strikes me that this quote doesn’t really demonstrate the point I’m making – but that’s okay. It’s just meant to tempt you to go pick it up for yourselves.

Yoder on Mystery

Continuing the “mystery” theme I’ve been thinking on for the past few days, consider this quote from John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, writing on Ephesians 3. For what it’s worth:

Here the apostle makes claims to a knowledge and to a ministry that is not merely on the level of the other apostles but unique among the apostles. It is a particular grace which was given just to him to steward for the churches (Eph. 3:2), a “mystery” which was made known to him (3:3). “Mystery” is to be understood not as a spooky secret forever hidden from view, but rather as the strategic purpose of God, which was not widely known until the point of its execution. (218)

Mystery or Nonsense?

The other day in the class I’m working with this quarter (“Theological Portraits of Human Nature”), we had a very interesting discussion on the question of what is at stake in dualism/physicalism debates. It was very illuminating and helped along by the excellent book by Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life. At one point, the idea of “mystery” came up in connection with an ontologically separate and separable soul (or mind); the idea intimated was that belief in a soul may seem unnecessary or superfluous given current neuroscience, but its existence should be accepted on faith. The way this all works is a mystery that we should accept.

Now, I’m all for mystery. I think the Christian faith is built on mystery, awe, and wonder – what is more mysterious (especially to a nonreductive physicalist!) than the Incarnation of God in a very human Jewish carpenter; or, more, the Resurrection of a crucified criminal three days after death? But there still must be criteria in place to distinguish between mystery and good old fashioned, incoherent, self-contradictory bullshit (which is, by the way, an important philosophical term). We should affirm mystery and faith (all knowledge, after all, rests on some fiduciary framework; as G.K. Chesterton said, “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”), but eschew nonsense.

From "The Tree of Life"

The trick, of course, is sussing out the difference between the two, which I do not think can be done universally or once-and-for-all and then applied to each particular situation (what Yoder called “methodologism”); rather, on a case by case basis, you must assess the argument and evidence before you, see how it fits within one’s epistemological web, and see which argument makes better sense out of what is “going on.” Of course, one person’s mystery is another person’s bullshit, but this merely illustrates the strength of Nancey Murphy’s holist, “web” epistemological method (following Imre Lakatos) – we all have principles and “hard core hypotheses” guiding our rationality. Within a particular web, the debate between mystery and nonsense can take place; it is an inter-web (or inter-tradtion in the MacIntyrean sense) discussion.

On the problem of good… and the problem of evil

So a lot – a whole lot – of ink has been spilled meant to address the so-called “problem of evil.” I have my own take on this problem myself (is there just one?), as it was perhaps the first and most dear theological conundrum I wrestled with seriously – that, and the issue of individual eschatology (that is, heaven, hell, inclusivism, exclusivism, that’s-none-of-my-damned-business-ism). Perhaps I’ll write about it sometime.

One thing that always struck me about potential “solutions” to “the” problem of evil was their propensity to fix the problem by creating a “problem of good.” What I mean is, the problem of evil would go away in certain theological formulations, but then if something good occurred that one wanted and was tempted to attribute to the action and activity and will of God, one was sort of forestalled from doing so by one’s previously articulated solution to theodicy.

Edvard Munch, "The Scream"

Maybe this betrays my own theological and philosophical leanings, but it seems to me that we should be more content to sit in mystery or tension when it comes to certain questions, and theodicy may be one of them. I’m not saying we should affirm something that is self-contradictory or just doesn’t make coherent sense with a major Christian affirmation (for instance, I cannot affirm anything that suggests God to be the author of evil, on Christian grounds); I’m saying that we should be more willing to live in mystery, and not speak beyond what one really can (“…whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” One must be silent…).

The specific tension “the” problem of evil creates is highlighted wonderfully by this quote by G.K. Chesterton from The Man Who Was Thursday, which I came across this morning in my notes. Even if all of the above is nonsense, the below is worth remembering:

Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil can be explained.

On owning up to one’s disbelief…

A brief story from SCE that’s been floating through my mind the past few weeks. After Stanley Hauerwas’ presidential address, one person in a later session said to the group, “I think I’m a Christian… but I’m never quite sure after I hear Hauerwas speak.” This got a chuckle or two, as Hauerwas is every Protestant Liberal’s favorite punching bag. But what really struck me about the statement was that Hauerwas hadn’t sad anything incredibly controversial vis-à-vis Christian belief. His talk was basically about owning up to the parts of reality we so often seek to ignore or deny in this world, and at one point said something to the effect of, “Christians affirm that a slaughtered animal is actually at the center of the universe.”

What struck me about this person’s statement was that it was clearly meant to cast aspersions on Hauerwas’s talk, but all it made me think was, “If you can’t affirm such a basic Christological statement as that, maybe you’re just not (descriptively) a Christian!” What happens in some Christian circles, I think, is that we become so concerned to make every decent person we run across a Christian that the word begins to lose meaning. We fear that in saying someone is not a Christian, we are also saying they are going to hell, or are outside of God’s grace, or are a persona non grata or not worthy to be listened to or affirmed. One need not mean any of those things in order to think that one of the good things Hauerwas’s work does is help give the term “Christian” meaning. It’s at least possible that Hauerwas rubs some people the wrong way because he reveals the atheism, or paganism, that they try to deny. It reminds me of a quote I heard from the former-atheist Alasdair MacIntyre: speaking of Protestant Liberalism, he quipped “They are giving atheists less and less in which to disbelieve!”

There are times when we need reminding of the parts of ourselves that are still resistant to the God who has redeemed us – a Gospel message I usually find most unwelcome, but Gospel all the same. And it is good news, because such proclamations reveal the extent to which I am still in need of redemption; they help me identify those parts of myself I would rather not see. As Augustine put it in the Confessions, “You, O Lord, turned me back upon myself. You took me from behind my own back, where I had placed myself because I did not wish to look upon myself.” So if you can’t really affirm something like “Jesus is Lord,” don’t redefine what it means to be Christian – own up to your disbelief! It’s better that way. Only then can truly meaningful, potentially paradigm-changing, and (more than anything) interesting conversation take place.

SCE 2012

I just got back from my first trip to the Society of Christian Ethics, and it was wonderful. Many of the sessions I went to were interesting, thought provoking, and/or challenging (with only one real dud). Even more, the conversations that emerged from the various sessions, which themselves provoked me to further thought and reflection, made the whole thing worthwhile. If you get a chance to go in the next few years, drop in! (You have to register, but I was never stopped or checked as I walked around in there with my “official” badge). It’s in Chicago next year, and Seattle the following year.

The sessions that really stuck out to me:

Aristotle Papanikolaou of Fordham University: “The Ascetics of War: The Undoing and Redoing of Virtue.” He talked about how the training for war (both before and during combat) very much forms us in a way that is the antithesis of our ultimate end, according to Orthodox theology, communion with the Divine. His tentative reflections on “redoing” virtue revolved around a particularly embodied conception of theosis, following Maximus the Confessor, that revolved around truth-telling. This interested me not only because it very much paralleled my most recent term paper (exploring a physicalist account of being formed into the imago Christi), but also because it provoked me to wonder if someone could conceive of a “just” war under this articulation (while Papanikolaou sought to bracket out this question, I couldn’t help but ask it in my head). More, his account of the impossibility of “forgetting” such trauma reminded me of Miroslav Volf’s work in The End of Memory – in particular, is Volf’s idea of an eschatological forgetting rendered incoherent by Papanikolaou’s work, which accounts for the profound and irrevocable effect such trauma has on and “in” our bodies?

Allen Verhey, Duke University and Christopher Vogt, St. John’s University, “The Christian Art of Dying Well.” A wonderful session that talked of the virtue necessary to die well, and how such virtue is not acquired on one’s death bed, but comes from a life lived well. Between viewing death as a friend to be welcomed to free us (a result of dualist thinking that Verhey termed “bullshit”) and viewing death as an enemy to be constantly staved off, controlled, and/or conquered via medicine and science (idolatry), the two argued for a view of death as enemy conquered already by the love of God in Jesus (echoing St. Paul). Death is not welcomed as friend, but accepted as a part of our finitude, an enemy that nevertheless does not get the final say in our existence. Verhey counseled Christians to look to Christ as an example at death, which I appreciated, and yet I wondered whether care must be taken in using such a metaphor: after all, Jesus died a particularly political death as a result of a particularly political life of discipleship, and I would not want that political dimension of his death to be abstracted or forgotten in the course of pastoral care. Just as I would resist saying to a heart-attack patient that they should “have their cross to bear” (for similar reasons), so I would be careful in using this language as well. But, Verhey assured that the chapter in his book dealing with Christ as example (which I plan to read immediately) is thoroughly nuanced in this regard. We shall see!

“Alasdair MacIntyre, 30 years after” was a panel discussion of the place MacIntyrean thought is and should head in the next 30 years. The consensus seemed to be that one must conceive of a robust natural law theory (in a sense very different from classic Reformed and Thomist conceptions), and also articulate how an agent occupies multiply overlapping traditions, as well as works with other traditions for a greater conception of the good. This session had Michael Baxter (Hauerwasian ethicist, Catholic worker, and provocateur) getting into a good-natured argument with Romanus Cessario OP. Fun stuff!

Stanley Hauerwas’ Presidential address (“Bearing Reality”) was phenomenal, really. I hope a transcript was made somewhere, by someone. Combining Stanley Cavell and John Howard Yoder makes for a very interesting talk indeed. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T.S. Eliot. In the face of horrendous evils, silence overcomes us to a great extent, and much of our chatter is meant merely to distract us from the horrible nature of that which we do not wish to face, both in ourselves and in our world. We (Christians) confess that at the center of reality is a slaughtered animal, and so silence does not have the last word, even if that last word is not our own.

Overall: good conference, and now I’m ready to get back into the fray!

Theological Implications of Nonreductive Physicalism – Proposals

Happy New Year! After this past quarter, from all the readings for class (especially these two), the discussions had with fellow classmates, and the paper I eventually churned out on the image of God as telos, I’ve become convinced of nonreductive physicalism. Whereas before the this quarter I had no real theological use for the Cartesian mind/soul, this class gave me the linguistic tools to propose an alternative that, in my estimation, is faithful to the Christian tradition. This alternative is “nonreductive physicalism,” and argues that humans are fully created and fully physical beings – there is no ontologically separable soul residing somewhere inside our bodies that is freed upon death. However, the “nonreductive” part is important. We are our bodies, but we are not “just” our bodies or “merely” our bodies. Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown’s Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? is written basically to argue against this philosophical reductionism that we in the modern (or post-modern) age take for granted. The readings from class convinced me that some form of monism (as opposed to dualism) is both biblically faithful and is at the center of a massively progressive research program involving the neurosciences.

Wrong!

The implications this simple Gestalt switch has for Christian faith are many and varied, but as far as I can tell mostly revolve around viewing the life, and especially the Christian life, as inescapably embodied. Implications abound in ethics and social practices (how are we formed into the image of God, which is the image of Christ? This was my paper topic), Christology (how do we affirm the full humanity and divinity of Christ sans-soul?), eschatology (if there’s no soul to go to heaven, our emphasis must change to resurrection… what does this do to our vision of the last things, and how we are to live in the meantime?), worship/spiritual practice, and divine action (how does God interact with human beings?), just to name a few off the top of my head.

So, I’m planning to do a few sketchy posts tentatively exploring different ways nonreductive physicalism positively effects Christian theology and Christian living. My paper was on being formed into the image of Christ via concrete social practice, so that will likely be mixed in throughout the posts. But I think this is a fruitful place to explore other ways this view changes how we view life, not least in our worship. If you think of any implications yourself, suggest them!

Christmas Homily

A guest post from Rebecca Hewitt-Newson

(This is a short sermon I read the other day that I thought was really great, based on Luke 1:39-45. Of course, it was written by my wife, so my liking it was probably a foregone conclusion! She is an ordained baptist minister and serves as a hospital chaplain here in the city; this was delivered during the subacute worship service to mostly nonverbal patients and their staff. Her way with words is always so direct, simple, and beautiful that it gets to me every time. In any case: Merry Christmas! Safe travels!)

I love this story about Mary coming to visit Elizabeth because in some ways it seems so normal. Here we have one cousin going to visit another cousin in another town. They have probably not seen each other in a while and they are excited to reunite. Not only are these women relatives, but they are connected in another way. They are both pregnant – waiting in expectation for the arrival of their first sons. These women would clearly enjoy each other’s company. They might share what they are experiencing of pregnancy and their hopes and dreams for their sons, just like any normal women.

But as you all know there is something particularly special and beautiful about this encounter and these women that is different. And Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, recognizes it. Or more importantly her baby recognizes it. Her baby leaps for joy at Mary’s voice! Because of this Elizabeth recognizes that there is something miraculous happening. She knows that God is at work in Mary. She recognizes that God has chosen her for a special purpose. And she blesses her! And what is the reason she gives for the blessing? Because Mary is a woman who believes. “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” Mary believed that God would fulfill God’s promises to her.

The Christmas season is a time to celebrate belief. It is a time of hope, where we are reminded of God’s promises to us and we look forward to their fulfillment, just as Mary did. Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation. We reach out to grab hold of God’s promises to us. And we celebrate on Christmas morning that God’s greatest promise to us is fulfilled. What is that greatest promise? That God is with us – that God is not far away from us, but right here in our midst. The Zephaniah passage says “Do not be discouraged! The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior.” That is what Christmas means – that God is with us. Emmanuel. God was at work on that first Christmas in Mary’s womb, just as God is at work now in this Christmas season.

My prayer is that we will all be Elizabeths. That we will be ready to see God all around us at work. Elizabeth saw the big picture, the beauty of God’s work, in what seemed like an ordinary day. I pray that we will be Elizabeths – who see God’s hand in those around us, who see that God is in our midst, and who celebrate because God is with us! Amen.

The Things of this World Grow Sharply Into Focus

Here’s a hymn that I haven’t heard sung, ever, in church, but I hear preachers mention from time to time.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

I hate this hymn, or at least this part of it (which is the only part that’s ever quoted), because it’s the exact opposite of what I see as the goal of the life of faith. Christian discipleship doesn’t make this life fade into the background, nor is the work of Christ to create a community of people who follow him that subsequently have a hard time seeing the world around them. Rather, to follow Jesus is to actually see the world, this world, clearly (and indeed, we confess, aright). But this betrays a fundamental disagreement between two different versions of Christianity: one, totally about the next world and heaven and souls and the like; the other, about this world extending into the world to come, bringing heaven to earth, resurrection, and the like. This past quarter my readings in Theological Anthropology confirmed for me that Christianity is not meant to be nonphysical (especially as we are, in my estimation, wholly embodied, nonreductively physical beings); whatever life in the Spirit looks like, it definitely doesn’t look disembodied. But this hymn betrays a strand of Christianity that does seem to presuppose disembodiment, and the result, politico-theo-ethically, is an outlook like this: “the world grows strangely dim.”

In this season of Advent (and very very soon, Incarnation), let us beware of such sentiments. As Rob Bell put it, “The Word became flesh; beware of people who want to turn flesh back into the word.”

Ordinary Language Philosophers Say the Darndest Things

If you’ve read Wittgenstein even casually, one thing that will strike you almost immediately is how easy it is to understand his sentences, grammatically. He goes out of his way to make his thought intelligible – a rarity for philosophers (Milbank is the polar opposite – he seems to go out of his way to make his writing harder to understand). Incidentally, this makes Wittgenstein a welcome tool for learning to read German. Another thing you’ll notice, if you’re lucky, is that this emphasis tends to be accompanied by a good (albeit offbeat) sense of humor. I suppose this is natural: humor, at least humor that “lands,” depends on ordinary language and social context in order to be intelligible, and the best jokes, in my estimation, are ones that are sort of bizarre and ordinary all at once: Jerry Seinfeld does this well. That Wittgenstein’s humor is mostly understated and weird, and that in his lived life was not really known for his chuckles, does not negate his purported statement that a serious philosophical work could consist entirely of jokes. In Wittgenstein’s case, it’s not a normal sense of humor, but a penchant for making ordinary stories sound extraordinary, and end up making you giggle and nod in agreement all at once. Not every thinker does this, and the more obtuse a writer is, the less funny they tend to be. For instance, I love Dostoevsky, but the dude didn’t like punctuation, is a wreck to read, and incidentally, is hard to imagine joking around. It’s still worth reading, of course, but it’s a very different experience from reading Wittgenstein. I guess that’s what a fake execution will do to a person’s sense of humor.

Get it?

In any case, I was reminded of this while reading an article on natural evil by Brad Kallenberg, a wonderful theological ethicist/philosopher at Dayton University who is an expert on Wittgenstein’s thought. At one point, expanding on an image of Wittgenstein employed (moving a sofa to the front lawn), Kallenberg provides this anecdote to make his point. It illustrates what serious, engaging philosophical work looks like that is at once illuminating and funny.

Consider the sentence, “Cadavers are frequently in the prone position.” Devoid of context, this sentence is trivially true. But the very absence of context bewitches us into thinking that what is primarily at stake is the truth or falsity of the sentence. Imagine now a different conversation. At a casual gathering, I begin to brag how nimble I am as a forty-seven-year-old distance runner. I recount how just this afternoon while running through the forest I nimbly leapt over a boulder, a cadaver, and a fallen tree. “Wait just minute! Did you say, ‘Cadaver’?” “What of it?” I reply. “Cadavers are frequently in the prone position.” If I calmly proceed to inform you how far I ran and at what pace, you’d think something was horribly wrong with me. Part and parcel of a proper description (in this case of cadavers) is the inclusion of a broad enough context so that what is really going on is made apparent. To leave out such details is substandard, even demented, by the canons of ordinary conversation. (16)

The story makes his point brilliantly and clearly, and as a bonus, is hilarious. Incidentally, if you get interested on wrestling with “natural evils” in a way that describes the terms and stories behind such terms in robust, “thick” ways, definitely check out Kallenberg’s article, “The Descriptive Problem of Evil,” in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Natural Evil.