In listening to Niall Ferguson’s Empire (on audiobook) lately, I’ve encountered some rather depressing anecdotes about evangelicalism, which show that its recent complicity with injustice is nothing new.
Consider this: We all know about John Newton, right? Author of “Amazing Grace” and other hymns, great evangelical preacher, former slave trader who converted and became a leader of the anti-slavery movement. Great story, right? Well, except for one little detail. Newton’s evangelical conversion took place before he became the captain of a slave ship. It was only after several years as a slave trader that it occurred to him that his Christian duties might conflict with his occupation. Modern evangelical blindness on the Third World Debt problem seems to have plenty of historical precedent.
In another depressing episode, Ferguson tells the story of the great Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857, which was largely a response to the missionary movement; the Indians felt that their religion was threatened, and so they rose in rebellion against the British. Now, I have no problem with the missionaries making the Indians feel threatened about their religion, but it is the response to the rebellion that is deeply troubling. The missionary societies and the evangelicals were the loudest voices calling for vengeance without mercy against the rebels. “In churches all over the country, the theme of the Sunday sermon shifted from redemption to revenge,” Ferguson says. He offers an extended quote from a sermon at the time by none other than Charles Spurgon, which he characterizes as a “call to holy war: “The Hindus’ worship necessitates all that is evil, and morality must put it down. The sword must be taken out of its sheath, to cut off our fellow subjects by their thousands.”
It was all chillingly reminiscent of the evangelical response to 9/11, in which the part of the US population that most fervently claimed to be washed by the blood of Jesus became the most bloodthirsty part.
Read more!
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Property Paradox
It has become fashionable recently in Christian capitalist circles to define capitalism along the lines of “an economic system based on respect for private property.” If this is what capitalism is, then of course we should defend it, right?
The chief objection to this is that it’s completely arbitrary and unhistorical. To define capitalism this way is to define it strictly in opposition to socialism and communism. But the problem is that socialism and communism arose as reactions to capitalism, not vice versa. Capitalism pre-dated the major challenges to the notion of private property, so how could capitalism’s essence be “a respect for private property” given that it arose in a setting where private property was taken for granted? Obviously the essence of capitalism is not a respect for private property, even if that may be a part of it.
But it turns out, that’s not even a part of it. Capitalism is the rejection, the destruction, of private property, at least for most of the population. So Hannah Arendt fascinatingly points out in The Human Condition. See, Arendt points out that property and wealth are simply not the same thing, as we tend to take for granted that we are. We’re obsessed with private wealth in the modern world, but private property is increasingly non-existent. “It is easy to forget,” she says, “that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any signle individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two thigns are connected.”
Property, you see, is not simply any worldly good of value, but is one’s personal share of the productive capacity of the world, it is, in its most basic for, land, and historically speaking, was fairly fixed and inalienable. One was born into and died on one’s property; one did not constantly exchange it for other pieces of property. Wealth is something quite different; wealth is transient, consumable, and in itself unproductive. To have property was the basis for freedom, to lack it was to be a slave, even if one had a fair bit of wealth, as many slaves did.
Capitalism, as a simple historical fact, Arendt observes, has never been particularly interested in the value of private property, but in fact originated in the widespread expropriation of it, and is much more interested in the amassing of private wealth: “The enormous and still proceeding accumulation of wealth in modern society, which was started by expropriation--the expropriation of the peasant classes which in turn was the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation--has never shown much consideration for private property but has sacrificed it whenever it came into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.” Moreover, the central value of private property--its permanence--which made it the basis of freedom and security, is undermined within modern capitalism, which has seen “the progressing transformation of immobile into mobile property until eventually the distinction between property and wealth, between the fungibiles and the consumptibiles of Roman law, loses all significance because every tangible, “fungible” thing has become an object of “consumption”; it lost its private use value which was determined by its location and acquired an exclusively social value determined through its ever-changing exchangeability whose fluctuation could itself be fixed only temporarily by relating it to the common denominator of money.”
This account resonates with Hilaire Belloc’s thesis in The Servile State, which is that capitalism arose via the expropriation of the widely-distributed private property from small landholders into the hands of large landowners. By the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was already a small minority property-owning class and a large majority property-less class. Naturally, then, the course that industrial capitalism took was one in which industry was not cooperative, but was owned by a small capitalist class, which oversaw and increasingly exploited a large working class. (Arendt points out that the whole existence of the “working class” is a modern invention, and was unknown in antiquity and the Middle Ages, where the free man was not a mere laborer, but a property-owner who lived off the produce of his own capital.)
All this of course sheds tremendous light on the meaning of the Old Testament economic laws, which are usually thoroughly misunderstood when we try to read into them modern capitalist/socialist dichotomies of property ownership. On the one hand, capitalist Christians, convinced that what capitalism stands for is “private property,” look at the Torah and assume that the whole point of the laws is to insist upon private ownership of property, but then they don’t know what to do with all the redistribution, which seems kinda socialist. Liberals see all the redistribution, and assume that there’s a more communal understanding of property, but then they don’t know what to do with the emphasis that each family receives and holds his patrimony.
In light of Arendt and Belloc’s analysis, though, it becomes crystal clear. The Torah t is deeply concerned with protecting private property, but not private wealth per se. It understands that private property is necessary for freedom, but precisely for that reason, it resists the private right to the continual acquisition of property (which is what capitalism means by private property rights). Private property is so important that it must be safeguarded by redistribution; if a family is deprived of their property, their fixed piece of land, given by God for them to use for their own and the community’s benefit, then that property must be restored to them via the regular resetting processes of the sabbath year and Jubilee. This puts a tight lid on the process of wealth accumulation that tends to devour the stability of property, and the process of expropriation of property by the strong from the weak. In other words, private property is a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of economic freedom and justice; careful regulation of the use and acquisition of that property is also necessary, lest one person’s property become a means of destroying another’s. Read more!
The chief objection to this is that it’s completely arbitrary and unhistorical. To define capitalism this way is to define it strictly in opposition to socialism and communism. But the problem is that socialism and communism arose as reactions to capitalism, not vice versa. Capitalism pre-dated the major challenges to the notion of private property, so how could capitalism’s essence be “a respect for private property” given that it arose in a setting where private property was taken for granted? Obviously the essence of capitalism is not a respect for private property, even if that may be a part of it.
But it turns out, that’s not even a part of it. Capitalism is the rejection, the destruction, of private property, at least for most of the population. So Hannah Arendt fascinatingly points out in The Human Condition. See, Arendt points out that property and wealth are simply not the same thing, as we tend to take for granted that we are. We’re obsessed with private wealth in the modern world, but private property is increasingly non-existent. “It is easy to forget,” she says, “that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any signle individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two thigns are connected.”
Property, you see, is not simply any worldly good of value, but is one’s personal share of the productive capacity of the world, it is, in its most basic for, land, and historically speaking, was fairly fixed and inalienable. One was born into and died on one’s property; one did not constantly exchange it for other pieces of property. Wealth is something quite different; wealth is transient, consumable, and in itself unproductive. To have property was the basis for freedom, to lack it was to be a slave, even if one had a fair bit of wealth, as many slaves did.
Capitalism, as a simple historical fact, Arendt observes, has never been particularly interested in the value of private property, but in fact originated in the widespread expropriation of it, and is much more interested in the amassing of private wealth: “The enormous and still proceeding accumulation of wealth in modern society, which was started by expropriation--the expropriation of the peasant classes which in turn was the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation--has never shown much consideration for private property but has sacrificed it whenever it came into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.” Moreover, the central value of private property--its permanence--which made it the basis of freedom and security, is undermined within modern capitalism, which has seen “the progressing transformation of immobile into mobile property until eventually the distinction between property and wealth, between the fungibiles and the consumptibiles of Roman law, loses all significance because every tangible, “fungible” thing has become an object of “consumption”; it lost its private use value which was determined by its location and acquired an exclusively social value determined through its ever-changing exchangeability whose fluctuation could itself be fixed only temporarily by relating it to the common denominator of money.”
This account resonates with Hilaire Belloc’s thesis in The Servile State, which is that capitalism arose via the expropriation of the widely-distributed private property from small landholders into the hands of large landowners. By the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was already a small minority property-owning class and a large majority property-less class. Naturally, then, the course that industrial capitalism took was one in which industry was not cooperative, but was owned by a small capitalist class, which oversaw and increasingly exploited a large working class. (Arendt points out that the whole existence of the “working class” is a modern invention, and was unknown in antiquity and the Middle Ages, where the free man was not a mere laborer, but a property-owner who lived off the produce of his own capital.)
All this of course sheds tremendous light on the meaning of the Old Testament economic laws, which are usually thoroughly misunderstood when we try to read into them modern capitalist/socialist dichotomies of property ownership. On the one hand, capitalist Christians, convinced that what capitalism stands for is “private property,” look at the Torah and assume that the whole point of the laws is to insist upon private ownership of property, but then they don’t know what to do with all the redistribution, which seems kinda socialist. Liberals see all the redistribution, and assume that there’s a more communal understanding of property, but then they don’t know what to do with the emphasis that each family receives and holds his patrimony.
In light of Arendt and Belloc’s analysis, though, it becomes crystal clear. The Torah t is deeply concerned with protecting private property, but not private wealth per se. It understands that private property is necessary for freedom, but precisely for that reason, it resists the private right to the continual acquisition of property (which is what capitalism means by private property rights). Private property is so important that it must be safeguarded by redistribution; if a family is deprived of their property, their fixed piece of land, given by God for them to use for their own and the community’s benefit, then that property must be restored to them via the regular resetting processes of the sabbath year and Jubilee. This puts a tight lid on the process of wealth accumulation that tends to devour the stability of property, and the process of expropriation of property by the strong from the weak. In other words, private property is a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of economic freedom and justice; careful regulation of the use and acquisition of that property is also necessary, lest one person’s property become a means of destroying another’s. Read more!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
But Thanks Be to God
Today I passed David Hume's grave in the old Edinburgh Graveyard. It was adorned with a dramatic memorial, which had, prominently inscribed upon it, the words "But thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." This was initially puzzling, as Hume didn't really believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or in any such victory.
But then it occurred to me that Hume himself had not inscribed this, but the townspeople, after his death. Perhaps this exclamation was their way of expressing their sentiments at the termination of Professor Hume's life. Read more!
But then it occurred to me that Hume himself had not inscribed this, but the townspeople, after his death. Perhaps this exclamation was their way of expressing their sentiments at the termination of Professor Hume's life. Read more!
A Couple Thoughts on Yoder
Here's some informal thoughts on Yoder's The Christian Witness to the State that I typed up for our class discussion.
I’ve always been a fan of Yoder, but I was particularly impressed and surprised by this book, which defied the typical portrayal of Yoder, Hauerwas, et. al. as being sectarian, isolated, disengaged, unable to engage the state constructively at all, etc. In this book, Yoder argues that, while the consistent Christian will not be able to participate in many of the state’s activities, and must always protest against the state’s violence as wrong, this does not mean that the Christian cannot offer constructive advice to the state about how to be, if not more virtuous, at least less vicious.
At first glance, Yoder seems to be inappropriately compromising the unalterable principles of Christian ethics. If Christian ethics really says, “Do not kill” then shouldn’t we maintain that staunchly and absolutely, and never dilute it to “Ok, well, don’t kill in certain particularly egregious ways and circumstances”? And yet, upon further consideration, we have to do this sort of thing all the time, unless we give up entirely the idea of giving ethical counsel to unbelievers. Indeed, some Christians tend to go to this extreme: true virtue is possible only in Christ, therefore all we should do is convert unbelievers; no point in trying to get them to do anything good otherwise. Perhaps if the only concern were their own souls, this would be a valid point--if it is true that good ethics apart from Christ will not save them, then let’s not waste time on works-salvation. But it’s not. Their actions affect others, and thus it is important that we exhort them to do actions that are less evil, less harmful--if not for their own justification before God, then at least for the aid of those who might otherwise suffer from their actions.
So, I think Yoder is absolutely justified in saying, “Even if we believe that all war is wrong; we can nevertheless appeal to the State to engage in just war, war that may well do more good than harm.”
But I have a couple questions about Yoder’s approach. Is it coherent to claim that a certain kind of action is necessary and yet sinful? I have serious trouble getting my head around this idea. Yoder claims at several points that the function of the civil magistrate, although it is ultimately wrong for a Christian, is nonetheless necessary in our fallen world to restrain evil. I don’t see how we can maintain that certain actions need to be done by someone in society and yet still condemn those actions as unethical...this kind of approach can lead to a dangerous kind of relativism of the sort that justifies torture, etc., the justificaiton that says that even if it’s evil, it’s necessary and so it must be done-- “well, someone’s gotta get their hands dirty.” Or is Yoder saying it’s not unethical, so long as it’s done by unbelievers? It would be wrong for Christians to do, but is right for unbelievers? If so, this kind of claim creates even more problems.
Second, I have some concerns about how Yoder intends the idea of “middle axioms.” On the one hand, Christians are supposed to appeal to non-Christians in terms of ideas and principles that will make sense to the latter, yet on the other hand, they are not supposed to relinquish their core Christian commitments and pretend to a secular neutrality. Yoder seems to try to emphasize both of these. But I’m a little unsure about where he comes down. Are Christians supposed to check their Christian beliefs in at the door in order to appeal to politicians in terms of general ethical principles, or do we appeal to them always as Christians, reminding them that our concern over the particular ethical issue under debate is just the tip of the iceberg?
Finally, is the state, the civil authority, always and unchangeably characterized as bearer of the sword. The striking thing about the Old Testament prophets’s vision of the redeemed world is that, while they insist that there will be no more war, and swords will be beaten into ploughshares, yet the imagery that characterizes this New Creation is thoroughly political. Must all political rule pass away, or can we imagine a transfiguration of politics so that we still have princes and magistrates, but ones who order society without violence? Maybe not, but it’s at least worth a thought experiment. Read more!
I’ve always been a fan of Yoder, but I was particularly impressed and surprised by this book, which defied the typical portrayal of Yoder, Hauerwas, et. al. as being sectarian, isolated, disengaged, unable to engage the state constructively at all, etc. In this book, Yoder argues that, while the consistent Christian will not be able to participate in many of the state’s activities, and must always protest against the state’s violence as wrong, this does not mean that the Christian cannot offer constructive advice to the state about how to be, if not more virtuous, at least less vicious.
At first glance, Yoder seems to be inappropriately compromising the unalterable principles of Christian ethics. If Christian ethics really says, “Do not kill” then shouldn’t we maintain that staunchly and absolutely, and never dilute it to “Ok, well, don’t kill in certain particularly egregious ways and circumstances”? And yet, upon further consideration, we have to do this sort of thing all the time, unless we give up entirely the idea of giving ethical counsel to unbelievers. Indeed, some Christians tend to go to this extreme: true virtue is possible only in Christ, therefore all we should do is convert unbelievers; no point in trying to get them to do anything good otherwise. Perhaps if the only concern were their own souls, this would be a valid point--if it is true that good ethics apart from Christ will not save them, then let’s not waste time on works-salvation. But it’s not. Their actions affect others, and thus it is important that we exhort them to do actions that are less evil, less harmful--if not for their own justification before God, then at least for the aid of those who might otherwise suffer from their actions.
So, I think Yoder is absolutely justified in saying, “Even if we believe that all war is wrong; we can nevertheless appeal to the State to engage in just war, war that may well do more good than harm.”
But I have a couple questions about Yoder’s approach. Is it coherent to claim that a certain kind of action is necessary and yet sinful? I have serious trouble getting my head around this idea. Yoder claims at several points that the function of the civil magistrate, although it is ultimately wrong for a Christian, is nonetheless necessary in our fallen world to restrain evil. I don’t see how we can maintain that certain actions need to be done by someone in society and yet still condemn those actions as unethical...this kind of approach can lead to a dangerous kind of relativism of the sort that justifies torture, etc., the justificaiton that says that even if it’s evil, it’s necessary and so it must be done-- “well, someone’s gotta get their hands dirty.” Or is Yoder saying it’s not unethical, so long as it’s done by unbelievers? It would be wrong for Christians to do, but is right for unbelievers? If so, this kind of claim creates even more problems.
Second, I have some concerns about how Yoder intends the idea of “middle axioms.” On the one hand, Christians are supposed to appeal to non-Christians in terms of ideas and principles that will make sense to the latter, yet on the other hand, they are not supposed to relinquish their core Christian commitments and pretend to a secular neutrality. Yoder seems to try to emphasize both of these. But I’m a little unsure about where he comes down. Are Christians supposed to check their Christian beliefs in at the door in order to appeal to politicians in terms of general ethical principles, or do we appeal to them always as Christians, reminding them that our concern over the particular ethical issue under debate is just the tip of the iceberg?
Finally, is the state, the civil authority, always and unchangeably characterized as bearer of the sword. The striking thing about the Old Testament prophets’s vision of the redeemed world is that, while they insist that there will be no more war, and swords will be beaten into ploughshares, yet the imagery that characterizes this New Creation is thoroughly political. Must all political rule pass away, or can we imagine a transfiguration of politics so that we still have princes and magistrates, but ones who order society without violence? Maybe not, but it’s at least worth a thought experiment. Read more!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Health Care Brain Death
When I read Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed, I didn't think much of his mantra, that all societal reform is based upon unavoidable tragic trade-offs, rather than fix-all solutions. It was clearly the product of a Stoic, not Christian, worldview, and I was appalled that Christian leaders that I knew readily espoused it.
While my concern about the larger worldview issue remains, I am forced to admit that perhaps Sowell was right about the need to remind the American people of the simple principle of logic that there's, in the ordinary course of political events, no free lunch. Indeed, I was reminded in such a forceful way that I almost concluded that the time has surely come for America to drop the silly charade of government by the people, when the people in question are clearly mentally unqualified to exercise such government. At the same time, I found myself actually taken aback at the extent of American selfishness, which is a pretty remarkable occurrence, given that I'm scarcely one to harbor rosy illusions about the American social conscience.
All these reactions were prompted by a delightful little article I stumbled across: "Americans fret over health overhaul costs." The article begins unexcitingly by stating "Americans are worried about hidden costs in the fine print of health care overhaul legislation, an Associated Press poll says." Oh really? Well, that's hardly surprising given that the legislation's about 2,000 pages long. No doubt there's lots of fine print and hidden costs. Well...turns out, that's not what the article's about...indeed, the matters for concern never even get down to the level of the large print of the legislation, but stay in the realm of elemental logic, which apparently is now a bit too much for the inebriated consumerist American mind to grasp. The poll found that "When poll questions were framed broadly, the answers seemed to indicate ample support for Obama's goals. When required trade-offs were brought into the equation, opinions shifted — sometimes dramatically." Sowell's right to an extent...in political policies, there will generally be tradeoffs, at least when viewed from the perspective of individual goods. Apparently, many Americans had not paused to consider this fact. Here's a couple of the "hidden costs" that the poll found turned people off.
Turns out that most Americans do not support a ban on denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions. Seriously? I thought everyone thought that such a practice was wicked! Well, yeah, 82% of people want to get rid of it. But....
"In the AP poll, when told that such a ban would probably cause most people to pay more for health insurance, 43 percent said they would still support doing away with pre-existing condition denials, but 31 percent said they would oppose it."
No! Seriously? Wait, let me see if I've got this right...requiring insurance companies to insure people with pre-existing conditions would mean higher premiums? I can't believe it! Well, apparently half of the American populace had trouble grasping this concept.
But this next one was my personal favourite:
"Asked if everyone should be required to have at least some health insurance, 67 percent agreed and 27 percent said no.
The responses flipped when people were asked about requiring everybody to carry insurance or face a federal penalty: 64 percent said they would be opposed, while 28 percent favored that." Now, hang on a moment....You're telling me that 67% of Americans want everyone to be required to have health insurance, but only 28% want them to be penalized for not having it? Now, just exactly what did the other 39% have in mind by "require"? Perhaps a moral exhortation: "Congress strongly encourages the American people to buy health insurance. We would be greatly displeased if they did not." Or more like guidelines, really: "Everyone is required to have health insurance. But, who's to say exactly what this means...as long as you sorta have it...or intend to have it...I guess that's alright." I suppose this same 39% thinks that speed limits ought to be enforced exclusively by admonitions, without the traffic tickets that might infringe our liberty.
Of course, the problem is that this is not "just a poll." Our government is a government by the poll, for the poll, and of the poll. Before any conceivable political decision is made, the American people are first asked their opinion, and then asked over and over and over again to see if they might have changed their minds (or acquired minds, perhaps). Every politician keeps one ear pressed firmly to the keyhole of public opinion, not daring to do any independent thinking or leading. Unfortunately, public opinion hasn't done much in the way of thinking either, which means that, if politicians are relying on the American people to think for them, we are approaching a critical condition of brain death in American public life.
Perhaps more frightening than the loss of the powers of rationality--of theoretical reason--among our populace is the loss of our powers of practical reason, our moral sensibilities. A young woman named Kate Kuhn (no relation, I trust, to the famed philosopher of science) is quoted as representative of the American mentality on the health care issue: "Well, for one, I know nobody wants to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor — I don't....I don't want to pay for somebody to use my money that I could be using for myself." Aside from the logical problem (isn't that kinda what all health insurance is all about? Me paying for other people to get medical care, so that, when I too need medical care, their money will help pay for my care?) such a sentiment is morally reprehensible. Note that she did not say "I don't want to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor; I think taxes to the government are an inefficient way of making sure people get the health care they need." Nor did she say, "I don't want to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor; I'd rather support smaller organizations like churches to provide for that." No, it's "I don't want to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor, because I don't want somebody to use money that I could be using for myself." Consider actually sacrificing some of my own considerable resources to provide for the urgent needs of another human being? Come on, man! What ever happened to American self-reliance? Let them pay for their own darn medical bills.
I could say again, "How the glory hath departed" but I tend to be a skeptic that there ever was such glory in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Read more!
While my concern about the larger worldview issue remains, I am forced to admit that perhaps Sowell was right about the need to remind the American people of the simple principle of logic that there's, in the ordinary course of political events, no free lunch. Indeed, I was reminded in such a forceful way that I almost concluded that the time has surely come for America to drop the silly charade of government by the people, when the people in question are clearly mentally unqualified to exercise such government. At the same time, I found myself actually taken aback at the extent of American selfishness, which is a pretty remarkable occurrence, given that I'm scarcely one to harbor rosy illusions about the American social conscience.
All these reactions were prompted by a delightful little article I stumbled across: "Americans fret over health overhaul costs." The article begins unexcitingly by stating "Americans are worried about hidden costs in the fine print of health care overhaul legislation, an Associated Press poll says." Oh really? Well, that's hardly surprising given that the legislation's about 2,000 pages long. No doubt there's lots of fine print and hidden costs. Well...turns out, that's not what the article's about...indeed, the matters for concern never even get down to the level of the large print of the legislation, but stay in the realm of elemental logic, which apparently is now a bit too much for the inebriated consumerist American mind to grasp. The poll found that "When poll questions were framed broadly, the answers seemed to indicate ample support for Obama's goals. When required trade-offs were brought into the equation, opinions shifted — sometimes dramatically." Sowell's right to an extent...in political policies, there will generally be tradeoffs, at least when viewed from the perspective of individual goods. Apparently, many Americans had not paused to consider this fact. Here's a couple of the "hidden costs" that the poll found turned people off.
Turns out that most Americans do not support a ban on denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions. Seriously? I thought everyone thought that such a practice was wicked! Well, yeah, 82% of people want to get rid of it. But....
"In the AP poll, when told that such a ban would probably cause most people to pay more for health insurance, 43 percent said they would still support doing away with pre-existing condition denials, but 31 percent said they would oppose it."
No! Seriously? Wait, let me see if I've got this right...requiring insurance companies to insure people with pre-existing conditions would mean higher premiums? I can't believe it! Well, apparently half of the American populace had trouble grasping this concept.
But this next one was my personal favourite:
"Asked if everyone should be required to have at least some health insurance, 67 percent agreed and 27 percent said no.
The responses flipped when people were asked about requiring everybody to carry insurance or face a federal penalty: 64 percent said they would be opposed, while 28 percent favored that." Now, hang on a moment....You're telling me that 67% of Americans want everyone to be required to have health insurance, but only 28% want them to be penalized for not having it? Now, just exactly what did the other 39% have in mind by "require"? Perhaps a moral exhortation: "Congress strongly encourages the American people to buy health insurance. We would be greatly displeased if they did not." Or more like guidelines, really: "Everyone is required to have health insurance. But, who's to say exactly what this means...as long as you sorta have it...or intend to have it...I guess that's alright." I suppose this same 39% thinks that speed limits ought to be enforced exclusively by admonitions, without the traffic tickets that might infringe our liberty.
Of course, the problem is that this is not "just a poll." Our government is a government by the poll, for the poll, and of the poll. Before any conceivable political decision is made, the American people are first asked their opinion, and then asked over and over and over again to see if they might have changed their minds (or acquired minds, perhaps). Every politician keeps one ear pressed firmly to the keyhole of public opinion, not daring to do any independent thinking or leading. Unfortunately, public opinion hasn't done much in the way of thinking either, which means that, if politicians are relying on the American people to think for them, we are approaching a critical condition of brain death in American public life.
Perhaps more frightening than the loss of the powers of rationality--of theoretical reason--among our populace is the loss of our powers of practical reason, our moral sensibilities. A young woman named Kate Kuhn (no relation, I trust, to the famed philosopher of science) is quoted as representative of the American mentality on the health care issue: "Well, for one, I know nobody wants to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor — I don't....I don't want to pay for somebody to use my money that I could be using for myself." Aside from the logical problem (isn't that kinda what all health insurance is all about? Me paying for other people to get medical care, so that, when I too need medical care, their money will help pay for my care?) such a sentiment is morally reprehensible. Note that she did not say "I don't want to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor; I think taxes to the government are an inefficient way of making sure people get the health care they need." Nor did she say, "I don't want to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor; I'd rather support smaller organizations like churches to provide for that." No, it's "I don't want to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor, because I don't want somebody to use money that I could be using for myself." Consider actually sacrificing some of my own considerable resources to provide for the urgent needs of another human being? Come on, man! What ever happened to American self-reliance? Let them pay for their own darn medical bills.
I could say again, "How the glory hath departed" but I tend to be a skeptic that there ever was such glory in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Read more!
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Buying Indulgences
On the lighter side of things, check out this article. Looks like the public school system, facing deficient mental performance, has taken a cue from the medieval church's solution to deficient spiritual performance.
Read more!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Works of Love
I've been studying Kierkegaard's Works of Love thoroughly of late, in preparation for a presentation in Ethics class tomorrow, and I've decided to use the opportunity to get back into Kierkegaard in a serious way, and to get a real handle on what is a profound treasure-trove of Christian ethical insight. For now, I'm posting here the summary of the first six sections (the assigned reading) that I typed up for my classmates.
Soren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, written in 1847 as part of the second phase of his authorship, under his own name, is one of his most pastoral writings, and one of the most powerful meditations on the meaning of the command “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
In Luke 10, Christ tells his most famous parable in answer to a question about the meaning of just this command, a question from someone “desiring to justify himself.” Christ cuts through all our self-justifying attempts to limit neighbor-love only to people whom we know and already love, to people who are lovable, and to cases where doing so is feasible and convenient. No, loving the neighbor means loving the stranger, loving the enemy, loving the one whom no one else will love, loving when it is out of the way and inconvenient. Christ also cuts off the self-justification that, while it may be happy to universalize love of neighbor, does so by an abstract or sentimental love, which fails to manifest itself in concrete action. No, the Good Samaritan loves his neighbor precisely in taking diligent action to aid that neighbor.
These crucial features of neighbor love that Christ’s parable shows us, as well as many more, appear throughout Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. Kierkegaard, like Jesus, had a razor-sharp eye for the sinner’s effort to justify himself, even in the midst of doing good. In this text, he repeatedly calls attention to the ways in which, by loving some people more than others, or by loving others instead of God, or by loving God instead of loving others, or by loving others with externals only, or with internals only, we in fact merely indulge in various perverted forms of self-love, and justify it to ourselves as true love. However, this is not to say that Kierkegaard falls into the trap of Edwards and makes self-love as such the antithesis of true love; rather, he takes very seriously the “as yourself” part of the commandment, and repeatedly insists that Christian love of God contains in itself the proper form of love of self. While maintaining the Augustinian emphasis that love of God is the source and centre of all true Christian love, without which any love will go astray, he constantly resists the temptation to make this a basis for marginalizing or instrumentalizing the neighbor; it is not that we love the other merely as a tool for loving God (as Augustine occasionally seems to say), but more that loving God is the only way that we can rightly love the other.
Kierkegaard’s summary statement of all this, in “Love is the Fulfilling of the Law,” is “Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person--God--a person, that is, that God is the middle term....if God and the relationship with God have been omitted, then this, in the Christian sense, has not been love but a mutually enchanting defraudation of love. To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved.”
I could say much more by way of introduction, but I will save that for class, and use the remainder of this post to summarize as briefly as possible (though it will still take a while) each of the sections we read, and raise a question for discussion after each one.
Love’s Hidden Life and Its Recognizability By Its Fruits
In this first section, Kierkegaard explores the paradox of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of love. On the one hand, love cannot be reduced to any external set of actions, because no merely external action is sufficient to prove that love is present; we could be deceived by hypocrisy. Moreover, love must be hidden, in that its true source lies in God, who is invisible. On the other hand, love is surely not merely a disposition; to be love, it must manifest itself in works of love, it must be recognizable by its fruits. But Kierkegaard resists a consequentialist ethic by insisting, not that the fruits actually be recognized, but that they must be able to be recognized. The tension between the hiddenness and visibility of love cannot be cleanly resolved; instead, Kierkegaard says that we must “believe in love,” and that only one who has love will be able to do so and recognize love in another.
Discussion question: How do you like the way that Kierkegaard deals with this tension? Is there a better way? Is it true that no set of actions, taken alone, necessarily manifests love?
You Shall Love
Here Kierkegaard introduces the command “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and explores the significance of the “as yourself,” which teaches a proper self-love, and not a perverse form that hides itself in a slavish devotion to the other, a devotion which secretly fulfills selfish desires. This command, Kierkegaard thinks, is striking and is original with Christianity, which is the first to dare to command love. Such a command seems repugnant to our sensibilities which glorify spontaneous, unforced love. But Kierkegaard maintains that “only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.” (29)
Discussion question: Is Kierkegaard right in saying that this notion of a command to love is original to Christianity?
You Shall Love the Neighbor
Here Kierkegaard expounds upon the notion of neighbor, which means, without exception, everyone. But the command to love the neighbor, Kierkegaard provocatively continues, is not merely something that we can add on top of the other kinds of love we are already engaged in, as if to say, “Oh right. I’ve been loving my wife and my friends, but I shouldn’t forget to love the neighbor too.” No, neighbor-love becomes the ruling category, to which all other loves must be subordinate. I must love my wife because she is a neighbor; no doubt there will still be unique duties here, but they will be specifications of the law of neighbor-love, not manifestations of a different duty of love altogether. Kierkegaard is as merciless in Edwards of purging Christian love of preferentiality; however, as we shall see, he does not thereby purge the neighbor of a face, as Edwards does.
You Shall Love the Neighbor
Here, Kierkegaard cuts off any attempt to make the neighbor-love command a kind of general basis for social reform. The command is not directed to society at large, but to each one of us. This is important because otherwise, if we attempt to show love to the neighbor by directly tackling the inequalities of earthly life, we may fail to attack the source of the inequality at the root, may fail to learn to see in the neighbor what in God’s eye he is. He illustrates this powerfully with Christ’s parable about the man inviting all the poor beggars to a banquet--the revolutionary thing here is not that he feeds the poor, but that he calls it a banquet, a celebration among friends and equals. “The one who feeds the poor--but still has not been victorious over his mind in such a way that he calls this meal a banquet--sees the poor and the lowly only as the poor and the lowly. The one who gives the banquet sees the neighbor in the poor and the lowly--however ludicrous this may seem in the eyes of the world.” (83)
Discussion Question: This section is perhaps the most problematic, because, however much we may value the point Kierkegaard is trying to make, it seems that he goes too far in this section by saying at times that Christianity is not concerned with resolving the external, temporal inequality; it simply sets it in proper perspective by focusing on the eternal equality. What do you think of this?
Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
Kierkegaard resists here the Law-Gospel distinction to which Lutheranism has oft fallen prey, and argues that the command of love is not an overturning of any of the Law’s provisions, but is in fact the proper specification of them; where, with all their multiplicity, they remained somewhat indefinite and unclear, the love command makes all clear. Then Kierkegaard brings the verse “Love is the fulfilling of the Law” into dialogue with the idea that “Christ is the end of the law.” Here, then, he develops his argument about how all other loves, when pursued as ends in themselves, collide with the Christian duty to love, since for the Christian, they must all be oriented around love of God. Christian love is true love of the other, because it is only possible to love the other truly by loving him through God, according to God’s requirements; but the other will often not see this love as love, but as hate, because it subordinates the desires of the other to God’s will, rather than making them paramount.
Discussion Question: In this view, is the other instrumentalized, made simply a means, an object of limited value that must always be sacrificed in order to properly love God? I think clearly not, but Kierkegaard is often read this way--what do you think?
Love is a Matter of Conscience
Here Kierkegaard’s point is again, from a somewhat different angle, to emphasize that the change which Christian love aims for is not a reconfiguration of external social relations. Rather, it is the change of relations at their very heart, at the internal level of conscience, before God, not before man. Christianity “does not wish to bring about any external change at all in the external sphere; it wants to seize it, purify it, sanctify it, and in this way make everything new while everything is still old. The Christian may very well marry, may very well love his wife, especially in the way he ought to love her, may ery well have a friend and love his native land; but yet in all this there must be a basic understanding between himself and God in the essentially Christian, and this is Christianity.” (145)
Discussion Question: Similar concerns as those of IIC arise here. It may be fine to say that Christianity aims not at externals, but at internals, knowing that this is the only true way to make a change in externals. But Kierkegaard seems to go to far in saying that Christianity doesn’t even care about externals. What do you think? Read more!
Soren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, written in 1847 as part of the second phase of his authorship, under his own name, is one of his most pastoral writings, and one of the most powerful meditations on the meaning of the command “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
In Luke 10, Christ tells his most famous parable in answer to a question about the meaning of just this command, a question from someone “desiring to justify himself.” Christ cuts through all our self-justifying attempts to limit neighbor-love only to people whom we know and already love, to people who are lovable, and to cases where doing so is feasible and convenient. No, loving the neighbor means loving the stranger, loving the enemy, loving the one whom no one else will love, loving when it is out of the way and inconvenient. Christ also cuts off the self-justification that, while it may be happy to universalize love of neighbor, does so by an abstract or sentimental love, which fails to manifest itself in concrete action. No, the Good Samaritan loves his neighbor precisely in taking diligent action to aid that neighbor.
These crucial features of neighbor love that Christ’s parable shows us, as well as many more, appear throughout Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. Kierkegaard, like Jesus, had a razor-sharp eye for the sinner’s effort to justify himself, even in the midst of doing good. In this text, he repeatedly calls attention to the ways in which, by loving some people more than others, or by loving others instead of God, or by loving God instead of loving others, or by loving others with externals only, or with internals only, we in fact merely indulge in various perverted forms of self-love, and justify it to ourselves as true love. However, this is not to say that Kierkegaard falls into the trap of Edwards and makes self-love as such the antithesis of true love; rather, he takes very seriously the “as yourself” part of the commandment, and repeatedly insists that Christian love of God contains in itself the proper form of love of self. While maintaining the Augustinian emphasis that love of God is the source and centre of all true Christian love, without which any love will go astray, he constantly resists the temptation to make this a basis for marginalizing or instrumentalizing the neighbor; it is not that we love the other merely as a tool for loving God (as Augustine occasionally seems to say), but more that loving God is the only way that we can rightly love the other.
Kierkegaard’s summary statement of all this, in “Love is the Fulfilling of the Law,” is “Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person--God--a person, that is, that God is the middle term....if God and the relationship with God have been omitted, then this, in the Christian sense, has not been love but a mutually enchanting defraudation of love. To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved.”
I could say much more by way of introduction, but I will save that for class, and use the remainder of this post to summarize as briefly as possible (though it will still take a while) each of the sections we read, and raise a question for discussion after each one.
Love’s Hidden Life and Its Recognizability By Its Fruits
In this first section, Kierkegaard explores the paradox of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of love. On the one hand, love cannot be reduced to any external set of actions, because no merely external action is sufficient to prove that love is present; we could be deceived by hypocrisy. Moreover, love must be hidden, in that its true source lies in God, who is invisible. On the other hand, love is surely not merely a disposition; to be love, it must manifest itself in works of love, it must be recognizable by its fruits. But Kierkegaard resists a consequentialist ethic by insisting, not that the fruits actually be recognized, but that they must be able to be recognized. The tension between the hiddenness and visibility of love cannot be cleanly resolved; instead, Kierkegaard says that we must “believe in love,” and that only one who has love will be able to do so and recognize love in another.
Discussion question: How do you like the way that Kierkegaard deals with this tension? Is there a better way? Is it true that no set of actions, taken alone, necessarily manifests love?
You Shall Love
Here Kierkegaard introduces the command “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and explores the significance of the “as yourself,” which teaches a proper self-love, and not a perverse form that hides itself in a slavish devotion to the other, a devotion which secretly fulfills selfish desires. This command, Kierkegaard thinks, is striking and is original with Christianity, which is the first to dare to command love. Such a command seems repugnant to our sensibilities which glorify spontaneous, unforced love. But Kierkegaard maintains that “only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.” (29)
Discussion question: Is Kierkegaard right in saying that this notion of a command to love is original to Christianity?
You Shall Love the Neighbor
Here Kierkegaard expounds upon the notion of neighbor, which means, without exception, everyone. But the command to love the neighbor, Kierkegaard provocatively continues, is not merely something that we can add on top of the other kinds of love we are already engaged in, as if to say, “Oh right. I’ve been loving my wife and my friends, but I shouldn’t forget to love the neighbor too.” No, neighbor-love becomes the ruling category, to which all other loves must be subordinate. I must love my wife because she is a neighbor; no doubt there will still be unique duties here, but they will be specifications of the law of neighbor-love, not manifestations of a different duty of love altogether. Kierkegaard is as merciless in Edwards of purging Christian love of preferentiality; however, as we shall see, he does not thereby purge the neighbor of a face, as Edwards does.
You Shall Love the Neighbor
Here, Kierkegaard cuts off any attempt to make the neighbor-love command a kind of general basis for social reform. The command is not directed to society at large, but to each one of us. This is important because otherwise, if we attempt to show love to the neighbor by directly tackling the inequalities of earthly life, we may fail to attack the source of the inequality at the root, may fail to learn to see in the neighbor what in God’s eye he is. He illustrates this powerfully with Christ’s parable about the man inviting all the poor beggars to a banquet--the revolutionary thing here is not that he feeds the poor, but that he calls it a banquet, a celebration among friends and equals. “The one who feeds the poor--but still has not been victorious over his mind in such a way that he calls this meal a banquet--sees the poor and the lowly only as the poor and the lowly. The one who gives the banquet sees the neighbor in the poor and the lowly--however ludicrous this may seem in the eyes of the world.” (83)
Discussion Question: This section is perhaps the most problematic, because, however much we may value the point Kierkegaard is trying to make, it seems that he goes too far in this section by saying at times that Christianity is not concerned with resolving the external, temporal inequality; it simply sets it in proper perspective by focusing on the eternal equality. What do you think of this?
Love is the Fulfilling of the Law
Kierkegaard resists here the Law-Gospel distinction to which Lutheranism has oft fallen prey, and argues that the command of love is not an overturning of any of the Law’s provisions, but is in fact the proper specification of them; where, with all their multiplicity, they remained somewhat indefinite and unclear, the love command makes all clear. Then Kierkegaard brings the verse “Love is the fulfilling of the Law” into dialogue with the idea that “Christ is the end of the law.” Here, then, he develops his argument about how all other loves, when pursued as ends in themselves, collide with the Christian duty to love, since for the Christian, they must all be oriented around love of God. Christian love is true love of the other, because it is only possible to love the other truly by loving him through God, according to God’s requirements; but the other will often not see this love as love, but as hate, because it subordinates the desires of the other to God’s will, rather than making them paramount.
Discussion Question: In this view, is the other instrumentalized, made simply a means, an object of limited value that must always be sacrificed in order to properly love God? I think clearly not, but Kierkegaard is often read this way--what do you think?
Love is a Matter of Conscience
Here Kierkegaard’s point is again, from a somewhat different angle, to emphasize that the change which Christian love aims for is not a reconfiguration of external social relations. Rather, it is the change of relations at their very heart, at the internal level of conscience, before God, not before man. Christianity “does not wish to bring about any external change at all in the external sphere; it wants to seize it, purify it, sanctify it, and in this way make everything new while everything is still old. The Christian may very well marry, may very well love his wife, especially in the way he ought to love her, may ery well have a friend and love his native land; but yet in all this there must be a basic understanding between himself and God in the essentially Christian, and this is Christianity.” (145)
Discussion Question: Similar concerns as those of IIC arise here. It may be fine to say that Christianity aims not at externals, but at internals, knowing that this is the only true way to make a change in externals. But Kierkegaard seems to go to far in saying that Christianity doesn’t even care about externals. What do you think? Read more!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Banquet of the Beggars
Very powerful passage from Works of Love, describing Christ’s parable about the man inviting all the lame, crippled, and beggars to a banquet--the revolutionary thing here, says Kierkegaard, is not that he feeds the poor (any charity can do that!), but that he calls it a banquet, a celebration among friends and equals.
“O my listener, does it seem to you that what has been set forth here is merely quibbling about the use of the word 'banquet'? Or do you not perceive that the dispute is about loving the neighbor? The one who feeds the poor--but still has not been victorious over his mind in such a way that he calls this meal a banquet--sees the poor and the lowly only as the poor and the lowly. The one who gives the banquet sees the neighbor in the poor and the lowly--however ludicrous this may seem in the eyes of the world.”Read more!
Sunday, November 8, 2009
And Then God Said, "Let Man Have My So-called Image"
The other day I went to a book-release lecture for Theology After Darwin, open-minded (as I always am these days, you know) and interested in hearing how orthodox Christians have been able to reconcile Christianity with an acceptance of Darwinian evolution, and to learn whether my six-day creationist background hasn't been a bit too dogmatic about things. The Christian Darwinist tent looked roomier and more spacious than the creationist, so I stuck my nose in to check it out, and boy did it smell rotten. At the end of the hour and a half, I had been firmly kicked back into good 'ol Biblical absolutism.
The two presentations, by two contributors to the book, were not so much appalling (though there were certainly appalling moments), as just flat-out boring. At the end, the question I really wanted to raise my hand and ask was "So why'd you write the book again? Did you actually have something interesting to say?" Their main point seemed to be "Theologians figured out how to accommodate Christianity to Darwinism way back in the late 1800s, so we should just listen to what they said." Ok...so how is this an important contribution to the contemporary debate? I hardly heard a new interesting piece of information the whole time (except for a few historical details about the evolution of evolution theory), which is pretty remarkable given that I have barely studied this issue. And the couple times I did hear something new, it was indeed quite appalling.
See, these two fellows did not merely buy into a very old earth, or a very old origin of animal life, but a very old origin of human life as well. They accepted the standard Darwinian account of human evolution (as in the whole ape thing), which raises much more enormous theological problems than merely asserting that God brought plant and animal life into being through the long process of evolution. What becomes of the image of God, the uniqueness of man, Adam, the Fall, if humans gradually came into being, at several places in the world, from apes? Ah, well these two fellows had some very interesting answers to that question.
As far as the image of God, easy, right? Once men had developed sufficiently (Neanderthal, perhaps?), then God decided they were ready to receive "the image of God"; so God entered into a special relationship with man, and superimposed the image of God on man by divine fiat. But what about Adam, what about the Fall? What about "Through one man sin entered into the world"? Well, one of our speakers (the widely renowned Professor of Systematic Theology at New College!!) just waved his hand at the problem and said, "I don't see any reason why a historical Atonement requires a historical Fall; the Fall simply describes an ongoing human condition." The other fellow (who was a scientist, not a theologian) put a little more effort into addressing the problem. His solution was to say that, although when "Adam" was alive, many thousands of men would already be living in various places in the world, so that Adam was in no sense the natural head of humanity, nevertheless, God could constitute him as a federal head and impute his sin to everybody else alive at that time and afterward. Oh, OK, that makes sense. I suppose God could do that after all--I mean, God is God. Thus hath nineteenth-century federal theology gone to seed.
All this got me to thinking just how scary are the potential consequences when theology flings itself headlong into the arms of nominalism, as it had to do in order to consummate its elopement with Darwin. If Creation in itself, even that greatest and most important of all God's works, Man, bears no imprint of God's purpose for it from the outset, has no true nature that properly belongs to it, and God can simply declare for it an arbitrary nature and purpose whenever he wants, then the potential forms of man, the potential uses for nature, can be as varied as the scientist or theologian's imagination. Could we not suggest that, since God saw fit to declare a new nature and moral sensibility for man in the time of Adam, so God has seen fit to declare for man a new nature, a new kind of image, a Nietzschean Superman, for us in the present day? As O'Donovan says "Once we separate God’s purposes in creation from the inherent goods of creaturely existence, there is little reason to hold on to the view that God meant anything at all by making the world."
Another reason why I am not only clinging anew to Biblical absolutism, but to philosophical realism; my youthful love affair with nominalism is fast becoming a distant memory.
Read more!
The two presentations, by two contributors to the book, were not so much appalling (though there were certainly appalling moments), as just flat-out boring. At the end, the question I really wanted to raise my hand and ask was "So why'd you write the book again? Did you actually have something interesting to say?" Their main point seemed to be "Theologians figured out how to accommodate Christianity to Darwinism way back in the late 1800s, so we should just listen to what they said." Ok...so how is this an important contribution to the contemporary debate? I hardly heard a new interesting piece of information the whole time (except for a few historical details about the evolution of evolution theory), which is pretty remarkable given that I have barely studied this issue. And the couple times I did hear something new, it was indeed quite appalling.
See, these two fellows did not merely buy into a very old earth, or a very old origin of animal life, but a very old origin of human life as well. They accepted the standard Darwinian account of human evolution (as in the whole ape thing), which raises much more enormous theological problems than merely asserting that God brought plant and animal life into being through the long process of evolution. What becomes of the image of God, the uniqueness of man, Adam, the Fall, if humans gradually came into being, at several places in the world, from apes? Ah, well these two fellows had some very interesting answers to that question.
As far as the image of God, easy, right? Once men had developed sufficiently (Neanderthal, perhaps?), then God decided they were ready to receive "the image of God"; so God entered into a special relationship with man, and superimposed the image of God on man by divine fiat. But what about Adam, what about the Fall? What about "Through one man sin entered into the world"? Well, one of our speakers (the widely renowned Professor of Systematic Theology at New College!!) just waved his hand at the problem and said, "I don't see any reason why a historical Atonement requires a historical Fall; the Fall simply describes an ongoing human condition." The other fellow (who was a scientist, not a theologian) put a little more effort into addressing the problem. His solution was to say that, although when "Adam" was alive, many thousands of men would already be living in various places in the world, so that Adam was in no sense the natural head of humanity, nevertheless, God could constitute him as a federal head and impute his sin to everybody else alive at that time and afterward. Oh, OK, that makes sense. I suppose God could do that after all--I mean, God is God. Thus hath nineteenth-century federal theology gone to seed.
All this got me to thinking just how scary are the potential consequences when theology flings itself headlong into the arms of nominalism, as it had to do in order to consummate its elopement with Darwin. If Creation in itself, even that greatest and most important of all God's works, Man, bears no imprint of God's purpose for it from the outset, has no true nature that properly belongs to it, and God can simply declare for it an arbitrary nature and purpose whenever he wants, then the potential forms of man, the potential uses for nature, can be as varied as the scientist or theologian's imagination. Could we not suggest that, since God saw fit to declare a new nature and moral sensibility for man in the time of Adam, so God has seen fit to declare for man a new nature, a new kind of image, a Nietzschean Superman, for us in the present day? As O'Donovan says "Once we separate God’s purposes in creation from the inherent goods of creaturely existence, there is little reason to hold on to the view that God meant anything at all by making the world."
Another reason why I am not only clinging anew to Biblical absolutism, but to philosophical realism; my youthful love affair with nominalism is fast becoming a distant memory.
Read more!
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Revenge of the Idols
In the sixteenth-century, the Reformers (and especially the Puritans), determined to purge the churches of idolatry and Popish superstition, lashed out against the abominable screens that confined the laity in the back half of the Church, away from the altar, against the use of images in the church, and against the "vain repetition" of set prayers, among other things. Ironically, it seems that their hyper-Protestant successors are merely reintroducing the same things, in bastardized form. We attended an "Anglican" church recently that meets in a gorgeous neo-Gothic church building, one of the finest such structures in Edinburgh. But they had done their best to obliterate its beauty on the inside, going so far as to build new modern loft seating halfway up the walls, blocking out most of the beautiful stained glass that the builders had put there.
Worst of all, they had re-introduced a permanent screen, halfway up the nave, blocking from view most of the chancel and altar with its stunning architecture, carving, and windows. This screen, though, was no magnificently carved medieval rood-screen, but a massive projection screen for video and imagery. God's people are being kept from the altar, not for the sake of maintaining graded holiness, but for the sake of degraded ugliness, for the idol of the moving picture.
Which leads to my second point. The beautiful and holy images of the stained glass windows in the chancel are barely visible behind this screen, and what takes their place is the odd, meaningless, and artless imagery that was the constant backdrop projected onto the screen throughout the whole service. This imagery consisted of about a dozen green silhouettes of people in various random postures of everyday life--pushing a stroller, listening to music, etc. Instead of staring at the saints and the story of the Bible throughout the service, we stared up at vague shadows of ourselves in our ordinary, worldly pursuits. The most determined apologist might here find some good message about the breakdown of secular and sacred, but I'm skeptical.
Finally, projected onto this screen for nearly half the service were the words of various worship songs, all sung to basically the same vague and watery tune. And in these songs, we would quite often repeat the same vague and watery words over and over and over, sometimes singing the same line well over a dozen times in the course of a song. Though I tried my best to engage with my heart in the singing, I found myself constantly just repeating the words vainly, meaninglessly, an experience I have very rarely had in the most liturgical services. How ironic that we revolted against liturgy to avoid vain repetition, worship with the mouth but not the heart, and then reintroduced vain repetition in an infinitely less artful and much vainer and much more repetitive form.
How the glory hath departed! Read more!
Worst of all, they had re-introduced a permanent screen, halfway up the nave, blocking from view most of the chancel and altar with its stunning architecture, carving, and windows. This screen, though, was no magnificently carved medieval rood-screen, but a massive projection screen for video and imagery. God's people are being kept from the altar, not for the sake of maintaining graded holiness, but for the sake of degraded ugliness, for the idol of the moving picture.
Which leads to my second point. The beautiful and holy images of the stained glass windows in the chancel are barely visible behind this screen, and what takes their place is the odd, meaningless, and artless imagery that was the constant backdrop projected onto the screen throughout the whole service. This imagery consisted of about a dozen green silhouettes of people in various random postures of everyday life--pushing a stroller, listening to music, etc. Instead of staring at the saints and the story of the Bible throughout the service, we stared up at vague shadows of ourselves in our ordinary, worldly pursuits. The most determined apologist might here find some good message about the breakdown of secular and sacred, but I'm skeptical.
Finally, projected onto this screen for nearly half the service were the words of various worship songs, all sung to basically the same vague and watery tune. And in these songs, we would quite often repeat the same vague and watery words over and over and over, sometimes singing the same line well over a dozen times in the course of a song. Though I tried my best to engage with my heart in the singing, I found myself constantly just repeating the words vainly, meaninglessly, an experience I have very rarely had in the most liturgical services. How ironic that we revolted against liturgy to avoid vain repetition, worship with the mouth but not the heart, and then reintroduced vain repetition in an infinitely less artful and much vainer and much more repetitive form.
How the glory hath departed! Read more!
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