Here’s a great TED video for intellectual property geeks on the virtues of copying in the fashion industry.
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Month: May 2010
Well, not really, but this Onion News Network video clip satirizes the absurdity of many of the ongoing disputes about “balancing” public school curricula.
Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming
This clip would be very funny if it weren’t so sad. It’s sad because, like all good satire, it’s based in truth. When the Texas School Board rewrites its curriculum to include country music as an important cultural movement, demonize the U.N., emphasize the state’s rights side of the arguments leading up to the Civil War, and so on — primarily at the urging of presumably good-hearted but seriously misguided religious people — humor seems a better response than despair. It’s also sad because it captures the cultural influence of the Left Behind phenomenon. As the Left Behind website asks:
“Are you ready for the moment of truth?
- Political crisis
- Economic crisis
- Worldwide epidemics
- Environmental catastrophe
- Mass disappearances
- Military apocalypse”
And this in turn is sad because it detracts from the authentic teaching in Christianity and other religions that there is a purpose to the ordering of life and society in this world — an ordering that implies final Divine judgment of evil. Many Biblical texts, such as 2 Peter 3, warn that the reality of final judgment is not a trifle. I would argue, in fact, that the reality of justice and final judgment is one of the basic reasons why “law” and “policy” truly matter.
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I, Robot Interview
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Soul Sorting and Election
My third and (I think) final post on the “soul sort” narrative is up on Jesus Creed. This one is about “election.” This topic ultimately is a deep mystery, upon which I offer my reflections as tentative at best. Here’s the conclusion of the post, but I encourage you to hop over to Jesus Creed and read the whole thing:
We, the Church, have been elected for mission. But this emphatically does not mean that those outside the visible Church are forever outside the reach of God’s grace. Barth’s approach is helpful here: God has already said “yes” to all of humanity in Christ. The eschatological victory over sin, evil and death is sealed. In my view — given what I know of God’s character revealed in Christ – at the final judgment, only those who persistently reject God’s grace will remain outside the Kingdom. Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Leslie Newbiggin, Donald Bloesch, Dallas Willard, and the like, were right: it is wrong to suggest that all people who do not (as far as we can see) have access to the Gospel in this life are simply cast off by God. (Whether God’s salvation encompasses an ongoing post-mortem “harrowing of Hell,” as many Eastern Church Fathers and contemporary Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians suggest, I do not know, though I personally suspect something like this is so. ) Yet, as always, it is not for me to pretend to constrain what God can or cannot do, or to pry too deeply into His mysteries. Judgment and salvation belong to God alone.
Meanwhile, we who know Christ go into the world with great hope and anticipation for the wedding feast to come, as people chosen by God for His mission of redeeming all of creation, trusting that nothing God has done or will do is in the slightest way unloving, unjust, unfair, or wrong, working out our own salvation, and content to leave the mystery of final judgment to our good and beautiful God.
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Faithful Presence
In his new book To Change the World, leading faith-and-culture scholar James Davidson Hunter describes the misplaced efforts by both conservative and progressive Christians in recent decades to change culture through law and politics. In my view, Hunter’s deconstruction of the Church’s complicity in fostering unproductive culture wars is nothing short of prophetic. But what does Hunter offer in place of political change? The phrase he wishes to promote is “faithful presence.”
“Faithful presence” does not imply that Christians should withdraw from law and politics. Indeed, Hunter also critiques the “neo-Anabaptist” approach to culture, which is at turns loudly combative and unrealisticly pacifistic. “Faithful presence” does mean, however, that the Church should not seek to “transform culture” by winning in the judicial and legislative arenas.
There are two reasons why this Quixotic quest should be abandoned. First this quest is, in fact, Quixotic; culture simply does not “transform” when laws change, at least not in the way that Christian culture warriors suppose is the case, and certainly not in ways that anyone can confidently predict. Second, this kind of quest is not consistent with the missio Dei.
This latter point, I think, is one that Christian and other religious legal scholars should explore more carefully. How did legal and political change become so central to the mission of the Church? Why does the political discourse in American Chrisitian churches, at least at the popular level, so rarely rises above the bar set by the Fox News Channel? Why do many of the messages we receive in our email inboxes from parachurch organizations read like paranoid radical libertarian hate mail (or, if the organization is “progressive,” like Marxist propaganda)? Is this what we believe life, death and resurrection of the Son of God, and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, are all about? As religious legal scholars, how can we help shape conversations about law and culture in ways that reflect a humble “faithful presence” rather than a drive to “win” at all costs?
Hunter predicted that his proposal would generate significant opposition, in no small part because the warrior mentality is now so engrained in our spiritual DNA. Not surprisingly, for example, in a response to Hunter’s book in Christianity Today, Chuck Colson dismissed the notion of “faithful presence” as “quietism.” This sort of response baffles me. Whatever happened to Romans 12:18: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone“? It seems the Apostle Paul lacked a sufficiently Kuyperian / neo-Calvinist take on culture and politics.
I do, of course, appreciate the push-back that some great moral movements in history were motivated by a form of religious engagement that seemed like more than “faithful presence.” The abolition of African slavery is Exhibit A in this regard.
And yet, upon closer examination, slavery is a curious case because the justification for slavery in the American South became increasingly “Christian” as the country careened towards the Civil War. What if the Southern Presbyterians had exercised “faithful presence” in the antebellum years, rather than insisting that African slavery was part of God’s providential design and branding the abolitionists heretics? The drive to eliminate American slavery was not a case of Christian abolitionists fighting against pagan or atheistic slave owners. It was, tragically, in addition to all its other historical, economic and political dimensions, a contest of competing Christian theologies. It seems to me that this cannot be compared to what the Church’s political presence should look like in response to openly anti-Christian culture. (Anyone who argues for slavery as a case study in Christian cultural engagement should read John Patrick Daly’s book When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War.)
In short, “faithful presence” seems to me exactly what Christian faith requires
This week I’ll be at the Pastoral Science conference at Regent College in Vancouver. I’m incredibly excited about this conference — it’s the sort of thing I’ve been hoping to become involved with for quite a while. Internet access will be limited, but I’ll post when I get back.
A new genetic study confirms that humans and Neanderthals interbred. This is fascinating in its own right, and truly intriguing with respect to the faith-and-science connection.
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Law and Justice at JC
Stop by and join the conversation on Law, Judgment and Justice.
I’m pleased to announce the “Faith, Law and Culture Distinguished Speaker Series” to be held at Seton Hall University Law School during the 2010-11 academic year. The goal of this series is to create dialogue between legal scholars and theologians around the theme of “faith, law and culture.” Lectures are free to the public and will be held at Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey. If you’re a regular reader of Through a Glass Darkly and you can attend one of the lectures, get in touch with me about the after-lecture dinner with the speaker.
September 15, 2010: D. Stephen Long, Marquette University
October 27, 2010: Miroslav Volf, Yale Divinity School
February 3, 2011: David Bentley Hart
March 31, 2011: Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University
James Davidson Hunter is well known to most of us interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture. His new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World is sure to rock some boats. Here’s a snippet from Chapter Two of the book, in which Hunter lays out what he perceives to be the dominant modes of cultural discourse by contemporary Christianity:
the reality is that politics is the tactic of choice for many Christians as they think about changing the world. This has been most conspicuously true for Evangelicals, though it has also been as true for Christians in the Mainline Protestant traditions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of the Christian churches in America since the early 1980s has been a political witness. This remains true today, again, particularly among Evangelicals who, through innumerable parachurch ministries, assert themselves into one political issue after another and into electoral politics as well.
Hunter goes on to discuss the “worldview” approach to cultural engagement, which encourages individual Christians, even if not directly engaged in politics, to transform culture through the power of ideas. He notes:
At the end of the day, the message is clear: even if not in the lofty realms of political life that he was called to, you too can be a Wilberforce. In your own sphere of influence, you too can be an Edwards, a Dwight, a Booth, a Lincoln, a Churchill, a Dorothy Day, a Martin Luther King, a Mandela, a Mother Teresa, a Vaclav Havel, a John Paul II, and so on. If you have the courage and hold to the right values and ifyou think Christianly with an adequate Christian worldview, you too can change the world.
He concludes, however, that “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”
The problem, Hunter suggests, is that “worldview transformation” approaches are rooted in idealism, particularly German idealism — the notion that “culture” is what exists in the “hearts and minds” of ordinary people. He argues that idealism misconstrues the capacity of individuals to change contingent historical circumstances, and ironically reinforces a sort of Cartesian dualism about “culture” “by ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power.”
A great deal of what Hunter says here resonates with me. I think he’s on to something important about how Christian and other religious lawyers and legal scholars should construe their roles as “culture makers.” More on some of Hunter’s specific conclusions in another post.