Doctors of the Church.

I enjoyed this post on the Doctors of the Church, both for the content and for the creative use of text tools to convey information. It's hard not to mark a "dark age" between John Damascene and Peter Damian. Also interesting:

Some notable and influential theologians who very likely meet all the criteria but haven't yet received the designation: Gregory of Nyssa (whose absence is very noticeable), Epiphanius of Salamis, Jeanne de Chantal, Jean Eudes, Louis de Montfort, Bernardino of Siena, Veronica Giuliani, Birgitta of Sweden, Gertrude of Helfta, John Bosco, Lorenzo Giustiniani, Antonino of Florence, Thomas of Villanova, Ignatius of Loyola, Vincent de Paul.

Eternities.

Some of the recent talk about eternity at the Fear and Loathing in Georgetown blog came to mind when I read this, in an essay by Robert Jenson (who may someday be thought of as "the theologian of Time," given his steady conviction that time is not just stuff our souls happen to be halfway stuck in):

But there are many putative eternities and correspondingly many putative gods. There is, for example, the kind of eternity of which Plato spoke, that is to say, the still point at the center of the wheel of time, a depth of reality in which time simply does not move, a great nunc stans, a standing present tense. At an opposite extreme of sophistication, the point about ancestors in animistic faith is that an ancestor is someone who has gotten so old that nothing surprises him or her any longer, so that in consultation with the ancestor the surprising things that time brings forth are unveiled as not surprising at all.

-Robert Jenson, "Faith and the Integrity of the Polity." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (98)

Prophets and tensions.

I've joined a Bible study for the summer. The first topic was "Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament." Yes, this is already shaping up to be a good Bible study.

We didn't get a chance to finish the planned arc of the evening, so we ended without really finishing our discussion of these passages:

"[The children of Israel] have turned to me their back and not their face. And though I have taught them persistently, they have not listened to receive instruction. They set up their abominations in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin."

-Jeremiah 20:33-35 (English Standard Version)

"Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life, and I defiled them through their very gifts in their offering up all their firstborn, that I might devastate them. I did it that they might know that I am the LORD."

-Ezekiel 20:25-26 (English Standard Version)

So which is it? "I did not command them" or "I gave them statutes that were not good"? The prophets are apparently and perhaps truly at odds here.

The New International Version text, as published in 1984, reads some Pauline theology back into Ezekiel by translating part of verse 25 as "I also gave them over to statutes that were not good." This translation echoes the phrasing in Romans 1:21-25, and thus reverses the direct and indirect objects of the sentence by comparison to the other translations I've looked at.

However, the current NIV text has backed off and merely says "I gave them other statutes that were not good."

I don't have a problem with the solution the 1984 NIV proposes; but I am surprised that I grew up with a translation so brazen in pre-resolving difficult passages in scripture.

Notes on Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church (1)

Chapter 1: Scripture and the Divided Church

The first thing a non-theologian ought to know before getting into Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West is the definition of “pneumatology.” A pneumatology is something like a theory of the action of the Holy Spirit. That being said, I'll do my best to use common language, even though there's no avoiding "pneumatology" when the book under discussion uses that word in its subtitle.

One of the points of agreement for ecumenically inclined mainline Christians on the one hand and the sort of conservative Christians who rally around "mere Christianity" on the other is the notion that division in the church is to be lamented. Yet we often follow that acknowledgment with an affirmation of one of the many doctrines that sets our particular tradition apart from others. What Ephraim Radner is doing in this book is trying to linger on the problem of disunity. What does it mean to lament our division?

Looking back to the Protestant Reformation, we see that Catholics and Protestants rarely hesitated to label each other's churches false. For example, my edition of the Westminster Confession says: “In no sense can the Pope of Rome be the head of [the church]. Rather, he is that Antichrist, the man of sin, and son of damnation, who glorifies himself as opposed to Christ and everything related to God.” But, for all sorts of reasons, we're not so quick to do this anymore. Many theologically serious evangelical Protestants find comfort in the work of unmistakeably Catholic writers. The mainline ecumenical movement was built on the recognition of saving faith among parties to the dialogue.

So many of us are now in conflict with Reformation-era Catholic or Protestant theology. Reformation Protestants argued that the Holy Spirit acts in the hearts and minds of individual believers as they read scripture; Catholics of the time claimed that the Holy Spirit only comes to individuals through their involvement in the true community of the Church. If we hold to either view of the Holy Spirit, one party must be illegitimate. Radner asks, “If the Spirit works preeminently neither to guide our hearing of Scripture nor to forge the common space for that hearing, what are we to say about the Spirit at all in its relation to Scripture and the Church?” (23)

The ecumenical movement, in Radner's telling, saw this difficulty and tried to get around it, but the results were disheartening. “[T]he ecumenical path for resolving the post-Reformation pneumatological contradiction was to redefine the Holy Spirit's office into that of mediating visible disunity into an invisible unity. … Incoherence … becomes itself a pneumatic virtue” (25). It's a harsh verdict, and Radner offers his alternative.

Turning to Scripture, one finds that the New Testament is not helpful in this particular matter: “How one understands the Church as itself a divided entity is not a topic the New Testament openly broaches” (34). And so we look to the Old Testament, and see the “figure” of Israel divided into two kingdoms just after Solomon's death. The key teaching point is that “partitioned Israel is ‘abandoned’ Israel; and this Israel, separated among its members, is separated too from the Holy Spirit” (37). This is the frightening thesis of Radner's book: in our division, we as Christians are in a position of disobedience, and we, like divided Israel, lack the spiritual fullness that marked an earlier time. Is it possible that our disagreements are so persistent precisely because of the condition of our division?

We already have resources for understanding what Radner means by “abandonment.” Both Protestants and Catholics have thought a great deal about how spiritual deadness functions in the individual life; what is needed now is to consider whether this deadness has a communal analogue. Radner considers St. John of the Cross's mystical writing as well as Puritan perspectives on spiritual “aridity.” Radner suggests that to explore how a negative condition can work to our betterment and God's glory, we should recall Pauline accounts of the “negative function” of the law as described in Romans and 2 Corinthians. Though spiritual deadness isn't discussed in this way, he thinks we can draw the analogy.

What's especially interesting is the model Radner ends up recommending as an alternative to division. Without endorsing any of their doctrinal claims, he points to the Jansenists, who would allow themselves only (as Pierre Nicole put it) a “simple and negative separation, which consists in the refusal of certain acts of community, without however involving positive acts of separation against the community from which one separates” (47). This might have been Luther's original intention; what might have happened had he stuck to it?

All of this would be very depressing if Radner hoped for some institutional process to overcome division. But, observing how divided Israel hoped for the coming Messiah, we must put our hope elsewhere. “Bodies,” Radner says, “especially bodies laid out with the pallor of insensibility, bodies of the dead, await not medical specialists, but Creators” (56).

I don't know if I'm able to endorse Radner's argument here, but I'll be reading with interest and posting my notes from future chapters as I get through them.

Jenson on Calvinism.

"...Calvinism (unlike early Lutheranism) maintained the patristic and medieval doctrine of God unchanged. ... On the one hand, there is the metaphysical God, the final explanatory Ground of reality as we find it, who is reached by argumentative and mystical penetration back through reality as we find it. On the other hand, there is the proclaimed God, the Power of the future to differ from reality as we find it, who is known by words about Israel and Christ, addressed to historical and contingent hopes and fears.

[...]

"Thus the traditional doctrine of God shimmered with polarities between the two starting identifications of God, inside each, and crossways. In the system of medieval Christianity all these were reconciled and made religiously fruitful by the existence of the church. The church was a rationalized institution -- of miraculous grace. It was a public and political administration -- that administered inner power. It was a main structure of the standing order -- to make available eschatological transformation. It was the mediator between the distant exterior and public ground and the inner and private experience of Christ's presence. Remove this sort of church, leaving most else as it was, and you have classic Reformed theology.

"In Reformed tradition the two identifications of God, and the two appropriate relations to God, stand unmediated against each other. They are very nearly two different religions, united only by fiat."

-Robert Jenson, "The Kingdom of America's God." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (54-55)

This description of Calvinism as the traditional doctrine of God minus the mediating institution of the hierarchical church is both illuminating and, I think, basically fair. Illuminating because it explains the issue behind predestination and the other Calvinist sticking points. And, in my limited reading, the most interesting work in Reformed theology usually has to do with the attempt to elaborate a principle that overcomes precisely the tension described here. In other words, Reformed theologians seem aware that they need to find a way to escape what Jenson describes here, and Jenson's fair in leaving this as a possibility.

Later in the essay, Jenson asserts that Enlightenment Deism is simply the metaphysical side of Puritanism without the Biblical side. Though I haven't read much Karl Barth, I'm curious about whether it's accurate to say he did the opposite of what the Deists did.

Sheer wonder.

In Christ—-in the historical event of Christ—-so profound a re-orientation of moral and metaphysical perspectives has been introduced into history that all our understandings of nature, of holy law, and of moral obligation have been shaken to their foundations. One must first dwell in the sheer wonder of that event before one then tries to make sense of what it demands of us.

-David Bentley Hart, The Power of the Sword, at First Things

Starting on Jenson.

“The gospel tells about Jesus as the future, and in doing so impresses him on the hearers as a future for which they may live, calls up and evokes the coming Lord as the Lord of their present. Therefore, the gospel can never be only statements about Jesus; the gospel depends on the creative, future-evoking power of language. Of course, our ordinary language — whether of words, gestures, purely didactic pictures, or whatever — is itself more than descriptive, and will, therefore, often suffice for the telling of the gospel. But the church seeks to intensify the future-pointing power of its talk about Jesus; as a result, the church finds itself singing, rhyming, depicting, dancing, and playing his story.”

-Robert Jenson, “Language and Time.” Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (4)

Essays in Theology of Culture is my first attempt to get into Robert Jenson's work. So far I'm finding a lot to like.

Sadness, joy.

I didn't realize how well-composed Kim Fabricius's “theses” posts are until I tried to choose one of his theses on sadness for an excerpt here. I hope Thesis Seven will serve as an enticement:

“I know a little boy whose mother had to go away for a few days. When she came home, he cried and told her he had missed her. Touched by his infant sadness, the mother said, ‘It’s nice to be missed’ – and he replied, ‘It’s not nice to miss.’ It is nice to be missed because we learn what love means in the sadness of another. The face that always smiles is the face of a stranger. Love is written on the face of sadness.”

A few days later, Fabricius posted theses on joy.

An argument and a typology.

(using this blog as an expanded memory)

I. The argument

Alexander Pruss has posted the nine-step "consequence" argument against Calvinism. The consensus in the comments is that the fourth premise (sixth step) is the one to argue about.

II. The typology

From Adam Kotsko at AUFS:

In the center, you have liberalism, for which capitalism is here to stay and must simply be managed (and sometimes that “management” is held to consist in leaving it to its own devices). The attempts to get rid of capitalism can be classified as either trying to replace it with a system of similar universality and universalizability (left-wing) or retreating into a particularity that will shield us from its effects (right-wing). That really is how the situation is laid out: you have socialism (left-wing) or capitalism (liberalism), and the only place for a “third way” to land is on the right wing (whose exemplary form is fascism).

In the comments, where there's a lot of noise but also some helpful clarifications, Kotsko explains a little further.

What I reject is local-ism, which makes the irreducibility of the local a starting place and rejects universalizability in principle — i.e., people who will say “the whole problem with capitalism is that it’s universal; universalism is oppressive in itself; we need local/particular strategies that can never become universal and hence oppressive, etc.” I think we need models that are universalizable, that can be applied (while making adjustments for local circumstances) everywhere, that think through what it would look like for something to be applied universally...

It goes without saying that if you don't think capitalism is the problem, you'll be in the "liberal" category here. Anyways, "universalizability" is a useful concept.

One more thing: I have to admit it was a little bit disturbing when Kotsko broke the fourth wall in the comments and started talking about the disagreement being a performance for the lurkers, of which I am one.

Barth in Korea.

So did you ever wonder how Barthian theology has been received in South Korea? Wonder no more: this post from Faith & Theology will put you on the path to discovery. This in particular is really interesting:

“…even today a huge number of Korean pastors and theologians view Barth’s theology as a dangerous ‘liberal’ deviation from Calvinist orthodoxy. Young-Gwan Kim’s study doesn’t go into much detail about this Calvinist context of Korean theology; but I think it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of Korean Barth-reception. Protestant liberalism has never taken root in Korea, and this fact alone has a decisive influence on the way Barth’s work is read and received. It helps to explain why Barth’s avowedly anti-liberal theology could be condemned as a ‘liberal’ threat by so many Korean theologians and institutions.”

“Can a Scientist Pray?”

If there were any easy way for me to get to New York City on a Thursday evening, I'd go see John Polkinghorne give a lecture called “Can a Scientist Pray?” at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, this Thursday at 6:30 pm. Hopefully the event will be well-attended despite my absence.

Information here.

Milliner on beauty: Barth and Maritain.

I'm more or less recording this for my own reference, since I have absolutely nothing to add, but Matthew Milliner's been on a roll, writing-wise.

He wrote a blog post called “Beauty and the Barthians,” which explains why, for all the good things to be found in Barth's theology, Barth is a dead end as far as theological aesthetics are concerned. I'm just dipping my toes into Barthian waters now, and I'm really glad that Milliner has already mapped out how Barth relates to Hart, whose book The Beauty of the Infinite I read and enjoyed several years ago.

And then, a few days after showing us a dead end, Milliner points to the more promising paths explored by Jacques Maritain in an article for Public Discourse about “The New Maritainians.” Clearly, I'm going to have to chase down some of the books he's mentioning here.

Really, millinerd.com just keeps getting better and better.

Karl Barth / public faith.

"Faith means choosing between faith and unbelief, wrong belief and superstition. Faith is the act in which man relates himself to God as is appropriate to God. For this work takes place in a stepping out of neutrality towards God, out of any disavowal of obligation towards Him in our existence and attitude, out of the private sphere, into resoluteness, responsibility and public life. Faith without this tendency to public life, faith that avoids this difficulty, has become in itself unbelief, wrong belief, superstition. For faith that believes in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit cannot refuse to become public."

-Karl Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline

McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy.

Eugene McCarraher has given a three part interview to the Other Journal. McCarraher’s a Christian socialist who is one of the most visible and ferocious critics of the First Things crowd. I find him to be consistently interesting, even if I have trouble understanding his confidence. Here's what he had to say about the Radical Orthodoxy (RO) movement in the third part of the interview:

“Before I go on further about McCabe, let me offer a critique of RO, because if RO led me to McCabe, McCabe led me away from RO. Like a lot of Christian intellectuals over the last two decades, I quaffed a bit of the Kool-Aid served up by those in the RO constellation. Well, if I can extend the Kool-Aid metaphor a bit, drinking from the cistern of RO was refreshing and stimulating, particularly the idea that theology can be a distinct and compelling form of social and cultural criticism—of all the literature on that score, I think Graham Ward’s Cities of God is a real milestone. But as I’ve watched how some of this has played out or not played out over the last decade, I’ve concluded that the theological renaissance these figures embodied not only has waned, but also has encouraged some very bad mental and political habits. For one thing, I’m tired of hearing ‘modernity’ and ‘liberalism’ treated as though they were the spawn of Satan. Along with the other usual suspects—instrumental reason, science, universal rights, cosmopolitanism, ‘the Enlightenment project’—modernity and liberalism get hauled into the docket and found guilty, usually after a perfunctory trial, of the Judeocide, ecological catastrophe, capitalism, nuclear war, abortion, et cetera, ad nauseam. Give me a frigging break. When modernity and liberalism are this all-encompassing, they’ve become nothing more than verbal ciphers, containers for everything the writer doesn’t like, bestowing license to utter all manner of grandiose and stupid pontifications. With a lot of these people, liberalism equals nihilism, which equals the lowest circle of the inferno. The theological problem with this view is that it tends to completely strip the created world of its goodness. Can’t liberal modernity mediate grace or partake of beatitude in some fashion? Since when did Gothic architecture and the like become the only sanctioned media of Trinitarian love? Since when did Brave New World become the final word on modernity? So if you want to deride instrumental reason and technology, fine, but just remember all that when you have a toothache, or if the specialist discovers a tumor in time, or if your wife needs emergency assistance during childbirth. If you want to curse cosmopolitanism, fine, but just stop jetting across the oceans and using the Internet to do it, all the while lecturing the rest of us about nestling in the homespun joys of localism.”

I am a little curious as to how McCarraher would relate this to MacIntyre, for whom he has kind words in another section of the interview. But more generally, I think this paragraph describes pretty well an excess to which I was especially prone for several years. I don’t think I’ve adopted another point of view on the matter; I’ve just gotten much less confident in my ability to know what the boundaries of “modernity” and “liberalism” really are.

A problem with rejecting natural theology.

Some time ago, I decided that natural theology was a dead end. I take natural theology to be something like the practice of looking at creation to deduce information about God. I'm not sure when I did this consciously, but I think I had two reasons. First, I became interested in theology that suggested to me a God who is way transcendent, except for the Incarnation, when He became way immanent. Second, I learned enough math and science to see that nothing in nature really jumps out as special creation — everything seems to run on laws, and we've described enough of those laws that we've got a general picture of how things work, though I have to acknowledge that picture gets really weird when you look at very big or very small things. (Weird in a good way, I think.)

At first, this made things simpler, as it avoided all the conundrums of creationism or ID theory. No conflict with science!

But recently I've been wondering if I made a mistake somewhere. I wrote a rather mopey post at the League on this theme. As I see it, dropping natural theology entirely leaves you with philosophical arguments, personal experience, and revelation handed down. Philosophical arguments can be nice, but there's also a counterclaim for almost every claim that's been made: I don't take leaning on philosophy to be easy. Personal experience… it's difficult for me to rely on my interpretations of my own interior life. And revelation — ah, revelation. More on that another time?

At any rate, as I think threw my view of nature, I'll take these ideas into consideration. Lee at A Thinking Reed:

“What we can and should do as Christians is offer a way of integrating the findings of the sciences with a richer picture of reality that takes account of all our experience (moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.). Reality is a many-layered thing.

“It also strikes me that Kenneth Miller’s statement that human beings are “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out” is a salutary and properly humbling one. Christian theology has been entirely too anthropocentric, and a more theocentric and creation-centric perspective is urgently needed.”

And Matthew Milliner, a.k.a. Millinerd, quoting Jonathan Edwards:

“There is some impropriety in saying that a disposition in God to communicate himself to the creature, moved him to create the world. For though the diffusive disposition in the nature of God, that moved him to create the world, doubtless inclines him to communicate himself to the creature when the creature exists; yet this can't be all: because an inclination in God to communicate himself to an object, seems to presuppose the existence of the object, at least in idea. But the diffusive disposition that excited God to give creatures existence was rather a communicative disposition in general, or a disposition in the fullness of the divinity to flow out and diffuse itself.”

Final thought: it'd be so much easier to give up on this stuff if it weren't for beauty.

Beauty absorbing sublimity.

Eve Tushnet has an article up at Inside Catholic on beauty and sublimity. It's well worth reading, but her definitions of beauty and sublimity are not quite the same as mine (which I have poached more or less whole from David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite).

Tushnet wants to start with Burke:

“It's just about impossible to talk about the sublime without reference to Edmund Burke's rakish essay, ‘A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,’ although we shouldn't end there . . . Beauty, in this understanding, is found in those objects and people we can cherish; and therefore in those we can master. The sublime, by contrast, inheres in what masters us.”

She rightly goes on to distinguish the Christian sublime from the Burkean sublime. For Tushnet, the most important difference is that, for the Christian with eyes to see, sublimity is to be found in what is humble, even ridiculous. Saintly foolishness is sublime.

But is this really the best way to parse out beauty and sublimity? Well, David Bentley Hart managed to write a whole book about beauty, with a large section on various postmodern sublimities, without mentioning Burke, except perhaps by including him in a broad allusion:

“As it happens, beauty has fallen into considerable disfavor in modern philosophical discourse, having all but disappeared as a term in philosophical aesthetics. In part this is attributable to the eighteenth-century infatuation with Longinus's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one of whose unfortunate effects was to reduce the scope of the beautiful to that of the pretty, the merely decorative, or the inoffensively pleasant; in the climate of postmodern thought, whose humors are congenial to the sublime but generally corrosive of the beautiful, beauty's estate has diminished to one of mere negation, a spasm of illusory calm in the midst of being's sublimity, its ‘infinite speed.’ ” (15)

It could be that that Hart and Tushnet don't have much more than a terminological disagreement; they may be working within roughly the same conceptual scheme. For Hart, “beauty is the true form of distance,” (18) which means that it includes what we master and what masters us as part of the same right order of creation.

I can't help but think of Sam Gamgee and the Elves in Tolkien: the Elves mastered the hobbits and were therefore Burkean-sublime to Sam, whereas the simplicity and courage of the hobbits was Burkean-beautiful to the Elves. Yet Sam's Burkean-beautiful dedication to Frodo becomes nothing if not Christian-sublime by the time they arrive in Mordor. For Hart, this would all be Christian beauty, all covered in this single term.

I have to admit that I have a preference for Hart's definitions. Take the music of Bach (whom Hart terms “the greatest of Christian theologians” (282) ). In the biggest works, there is plenty that is pretty and comforting, but there is also much that is awesome in the old sense. Or in the fugues, where the “beautiful” upper voices are so often set in play with the strong, even fearsome bass counterpoints. These sorts of beauty and sublimity do not seem to me to be ultimately separable.

But not all that is sublime is beautiful in this sense. For Kant, Hart says, sublimity was a rupture in the scheme of beauty, and contains within itself a violence. European philosophers developed this sublimity of violence and rupture in four relevant ways. I'll attempt to sum them up based on my reading of Hart, but I'm far out of my depth here. We have the differential sublime, as described by Derrida, in which difference continually escapes from metaphysics; the cosmological sublime of Deleuze, where a chaotic violence is the order of things and representation is but another manifestation of that violence; a Heideggerian ontological sublime, which I simply don't understand at all; and the ethical sublime of Levinas, in which duty and obligation to the Other take on a staggering, stupefying dimension. These sublimities—they clearly are not beauties—oppose theological beauty.

I wonder where Tushnet and Hart would really disagree. Hart seems to be much more committed to Christian beauty as an expression of the primordial peace of the Christian creation and the inner peace and harmony of the Trinity. And Hart argues for the ancient doctrine of divine apatheia, which holds that God does not suffer in his divine nature because the Trinity is, has always been, always will be, infinitely peaceful and infinitely complete. I wouldn't presume to read a position on apatheia into Tushnet's article. (Lee from A Thinking Reed had an informative post on apatheia last week.)

I suppose my basic point is this: isn't the “Christian sublime” just the sublime that is covered by a robust Christian definition of beauty? Failed beauty—saccharine kitsch, for example—is just not beautiful enough. It would be better if it were more deeply beautiful. But human cruelty can be as fully sublime and incomprehensible as any frozen waterfall: no additional amount of sublimity will fix the problem. Indeed, it seems to me that no true beauty is without a place in Christian thinking, whereas many kinds of sublimes fail to make the cut. Can I go so far as to say “Christian sublimity” is only Christian insofar as it is also beautiful?

UPDATE: Eve asks, “Can there be a peaceful rapture?”

Which is a great question, and I'm going to leave it at that for the time being.

The gadfly.

Some of my buddies up in New York City have started a magazine called “The Gadfly.” They're students at The King's College—where I myself spent two years—so some of the material on the website has to do with the internal politics of a small startup evangelical Christian college in Manhattan, but there should be some good stuff coming for general audiences in the theology, philosophy, politics, and economics categories. I should mention here that I will be contributing from a distance.

Try my friend John's article “Free Market Theology”:

Perfect freedom is not the exercise of choice, but the service of a holy God. For thousands of years such an assertion would be uncontroversial for Christians. Today, however, American evangelicalism has developed a hybrid strand of Christian political thought.

Evangelicals have bred a pseudo-theology revolving around the concept of “culture wars.” They seek to wed God to the state and intertwine the beauty of grace with the bureaucracy of the nation state. Certain political positions become an assumed part of orthodoxy. It seems as if these Christians think that belief in the market was adopted into Nicene dogma. Consequently, the language used to describe the market increasingly is applied to the divine.

[…]

The market is an efficient way of allocating resources, but it is not an ethic. When we act as if morality and the market are interchangeable, we force ourselves into blind, sophistical defenses of pure exploitation. Christians may harness the power of the market to benefit society, but followers of Jesus must not allow the scales we use in the market place to weigh justice.

Also, for some reason, there's an array of fine shirts and sweatshirts. (Not my doing.)

I hope the Archbishop doesn't write his own headlines.

The Spectator has an article up by Rowan Williams with the unfortunately confrontational title of “Face It: Marx Was Partly Right About Capitalism,” which is curious in that Williams doesn't invoke Marx until the last paragraph, and then almost as an aside. If I had to re-title the article, I might call it “Don't be an Idolater.”

I'm not turning to Williams for his suggestions about the way forward, which seem to assume that we should keep the structure we have now but regulate it more intensely. But his theological point is a crucial one.

“We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence, like a physical organism or ecosystem. We appeal to ‘business’ to acquire public responsibility and moral vision. And so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness, that business is a practice carried on by persons who have to make decisions about priorities — not a machine governed by inexorable laws.

“. . . Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.”

“The Market,” like “a right,” is ultimately a useful abstraction. It is an abstraction that arises from many human communities, and I would not take as skeptical a view of it as Williams does. The evidence as I understand it seems to be in that under certain broad conditions, free markets are the most efficient way to match goods to desires. There is nothing wrong with considering efficiency in the satisfaction of desires as a good among others, particularly when the alternative could place great power in the hands of the few, or, perhaps worse, in the hands of many, many bureaucrats.

But the idolatry of the Market would have us believe that things are should be considered good because they are valued, not valued because they are good. For Christians, at least, it would have us put our trust in capitalism rather than in God. It would have us believe that markets produce right results always and necessarily rather than with in general and with high probability, under the right conditions. It would have us reduce our fellow men to mere economic men.

The distinction here is not really about policy. It is about the reasoning that leads us to policy, and the status of human knowledge and behavior. It's a theological point (or philosophical, if that's your style). I may disagree with Archbishop Williams on the prudent way to achieve social goods, but we both derive our conception of those goods from a standard exterior to the market. And to be fair, I don't think I know many people who intend to slip into pure market standards of the good, a few hardcore economists aside. But sometimes, despite our best intentions, it happens, and we need to remind ourselves to be careful.

(“Hat tip”: Faith and Theology)

Rowan Williams on Human Rights

From the comments thread of a post on feminism and human rights at Inhabitatio Dei, I followed a link to an essay by Rowan Williams. (I was sad to see that the comments thread wondered away from Rousseau and Mill into debates over the proper labeling of medieval streams of thought.)

Halden's post was to the effect that Pauline theology, which has such a reputation for misogyny these days, is much more “feminist” than the original versions of rights theory in, for example, Rousseau. He concludes quite strongly:

“What we cannot have and do not need and should not want are ‘human rights’ that cast us all in the role of the autonomous self-determining monad. The Western liberal tradition of human rights cannot eventuate gender equality, let alone reconciliation because encoded into its very fabric is an understanding (and practice!) of personhood that is violent, exploitative, selfish, and nihilistic. Thus, the only way for there to be any genuine liberation, equality, and communion between human beings is for all of us to reject the demonic fabrication that masquerades under the title of ‘human rights.’”

Almost as if nobody had ever tried to fix Rousseau's mistakes. I mean, I'm with him on the original encoding: a purely Lockean world would be a pretty awful place. And I think he does mean to suggest that the problem is not with the mere formulation of human obligations in terms of rights, but rather with the conception of the self hidden within the particular rights that emerge from the liberal tradition. At the same time, I do think the liberal tradition has managed to improve on Rousseau, so to say that it still carries the contagion of his sexism would require a strong case that the later theorists couldn't get rid of it.

Archbishop Williams tries to deploy a brief but meaningful theory of human rights that is consistent with Christian theology. Since it may be that “the language of rights is indeed the only generally intelligible way in modern political ethics of decisively challenging the positive authority of the state to do as it pleases,” we need to be able to speak it well. This may be what Halden is looking for. The first three paragraphs give a masterful review of problems with the language of rights, after which Williams proposes a view of the human person that he thinks can provide a theological foundation for human rights. As usual, it's highly engaging at some points, and highly abstract at others.

Theology against Platonism

Lest it be suspected that my hidden motive for speaking of creation as language is a desire to argue for a metaphysical hierarchy of correspondences, a symbolic economy between the world's “inner” and “outer” texts, I should say that, for biblical reasons, the world can be imagined as a realm of divine semeia only in a principally “rhetorical” sense: the liber naturae is a text of majestic lucidity, whose exquisite and terrible intricacies are stylistic, not hermetic; the world is not a vast system of auguries and “symbols,” merely pointing away from itself to a realm of rational or magical essences. Scripture attests to God speaking his glory in creation, not his arcana; the invisible things of him are clearly seen. It is as a kind of poetry that the discourse of being is revelatory, as endless sequences of beautiful turns of phrase, and the proper response to this language — the reply that properly grasps, interprets, and corresponds to the truth of creation — is doxology. The Word comprehends all words transcendently, not as a great silence destitute of speech, but as the fullness of utterance, a “sounding silence” of utter plenitude, the Father's entire depth expressed in the agile radiance of the Spirit. As all talk of “substance” is most properly deferred to God, and then as the “effect” of the infinite discourse that God is, creation should be seen as a kind of miraculous wordplay, a brilliant persiflage within the “logic” of the Trinity, demonstrating the inexhaustible richness of God's Word in the endless diversity of its combinations.

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 2003. (292)