For a class I’m teaching at church. And here is the class website.
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Month: December 2010
Video for Conor Cunningham’s BBC series “Did Darwin Kill God” is up on Youtube. Here is Part 1.
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The Test
The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is; “Not really,” then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a loveable God — a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being — before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road.
— Dallas Willard
An excellent essay on BioLogos by Pete Enns. This sort of scholarship helps us understand why various Biblical texts were produced, which in turn helps us understand what they were really designed to communicate. Naivetee about the historical circumstances under which the texts were produced leads to naive exegesis, which in turn leads to bad theology.
Pete’s main point is important: “The Pentateuch as we know it was not authored out of whole cloth by a second millennium Moses, but is the end product of a complex literary process — written, oral, or both — that did not come to a close until sometime after the return from exile.” More specifically, quoting Walter Brueggemann, “the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile.” The redactors of the Pentatuech, after the Babylonian exile, were “bringing the glorious past into their miserable present by means of an official collection of writings.” This suggests that “[t]he Old Testament is not a treatise on Israel’s history for the sake of history, and certainly not a book of scientific interest, but a document of self-definition and persuasion: ‘Do not forget where we’ve been. Do not forget who we are — the people of God.”
Conor Cunningham — my doctoral advisor at Nottingham if I end up pursuing that degree — offers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong, on Christian Century. I love his discussion of the early Fathers and his approach to Christ as the hinge of all theology of creation:
Adam, the idea of a Fall and so on can be revealed only in Christ if we are to remain faithful to the church fathers. It is folly to interpret the Fall or the existence of Adam in either positivistic or strictly historical terms, since there is no Fall before Christ. That is to say, there was but a glimmer of its occurrence, and this glimmer was only about Christ and not about some historical event of the same genus as the Battle of Trafalgar. Moreover, before Christ there was neither death nor life nor even sin. For all such concepts find their truth only in the passion of the Christ, and for one very simple reason: creation is about Christ and nothing else. Jesus, as the Word of God, is the metaphysical or ontological beginning and end (telos) of all that exists. This is not some wishy-washy religious nonsense but is, on the contrary, perfectly logical.
We should therefore bear in mind that, for theology, protology leads to eschatology. So, for example, according to the church fathers, Adam was Christ and Eve was Mary, while paradise is the church, and the Fall signals humankind’s redemption in Christ. Indeed, without Christ there would be no need of redemption—so the Fall would not make any sense. Thus the Fall is never a stand-alone item and makes no sense on its own.
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D'Costa on the Unevangelized
The third post in my series on Gavin D’Costa’s book “Christianity and World Religions” is up on Jesus Creed. I reproduce it below:
This is the third post in my series on Gavin D’Costa’s book Christianity and World Religions: Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions. The first two posts are here and here.
At the conclusion of my last post, I mentioned D’Costa’s emphasis on “participatory ontology” in his construction of a theology of the unevangelized. This notion is an important part of D’Costa’s approach to how a person without explicit faith in Christ during this life might be saved. I believe it is significant not only for the problem of the unevangelized, but also for soteriology in general – indeed, it may be the most significant aspect of the meaning of human nature and salvation routinely omitted from popular Christian teaching.
Questions for the day: What do you think of the notion of “participatory ontology?” Can a person who does not know of Christ or who has not yet confessed Christ “participate” in Christ? Do works of virtue in the lives of non-Christians suggest that God is already at work saving them? Are these concepts Protestant Christians can adopt, particularly those of us who self-describe as “evangelical?”
“Participatory ontology,” in connection with the doctrine of salvation, is the idea that being “saved” involves participation in the life of the triune God. The very being (the “ontology”) of people who are saved is joined in a real way to the being of God. There are many scriptural warrants for this idea, including Romans 6:1-12, 1 Cor. 6:12-17 and 1 John 2:24-25 (which is but one instance of the theme of “abiding” or “remaining” in Christ throughout 1 John). It is an important theme in the Christian Tradition, particularly in the Eastern concept of theosis, but also in the West, notably among the mystics.
This does not mean, of course, that human beings become co-equal members of the Godhead along with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But it does mean that humans were designed to partake in the perichoretic life of the Trinity, in way suited to our creatureliness, yet without the alienation caused by sin. Indeed, all of creation was designed to participate in God’s life. The eschatological conclusion of God’s entire plan of salvation is nothing less than the accomplishment of this goal: upon the consummation of Christ’s Kingdom, “the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
How do we participate in God’s life? The basic answer is that “by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). But “faith,” in Biblical terms, is inseparable from the way we live: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph. 2:10) And without grace and faith, it is impossible for anyone to live well. “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6). Because of the alienation caused by sin, we are unable to participate in God’s life, which means we are unable in ourselves to do anything good: “There is no one righteous, not even one . . . . There is no one who does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10-18).
All good and all truth come from God. Therefore, whenever a person experiences and practices true love, joy, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control – whenever real virtue is present – this is the result of the grace and faith that enable participation in God’s life. (For the moment, I am glossing over some important distinctions between Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and other theologies concerning the effects of sin on the will and natural human reason, and the extent to which human beings “cooperate” in their own salvation. All agree, however, that grace and faith are required for true virtue).
For D’Costa, the link between grace, faith, and virtue suggests that virtuous non-Christians already have some degree of faith in the true God and thereby already are participating in Christ. The belief that the unevangelized can hear the gospel in the “limbo of the just,” D’Costa notes,
Does not negate or downplay the historical lives lived by people and communities as building God’s kingdom in “inchoate” ways, in seeking goodness, truth, and beauty, as best they can. It is precisely in these ways that such peoples already begin to participate in the life of the triune God.
This notion is consistent with Karl Rahner’s notion of the “anonymous Christian,” which influenced the inclusivism of the Catholic Church’s Vatican II documents. In D’Costa’s proposal, when such people are confronted by Christ in the “limbo of the just,” their epistemic response completes the inchoate grace and faith they experienced and demonstrated in life. Even for baptized Christians, he notes, the “Beautific Vision” – the eternal and direct knowledge of God — is available only in heaven, where all of the corruptions of sin are eliminated. In other words, even baptized Christians lack full knowledge of God in this life and must meet Christ at death in order to complete their salvation.
If non-Christians can participate by grace and inchoate faith in the life of Christ, what is the purpose of the Church?
More on D’Costa’s perspective on this – with some important missiological implications – in my next post.
Postmillennialism is another fascinating part of the story told by Daniel Walker Howe in What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Many Christians today who buy into the narrative of “American Exceptionalism” cite Christian and Biblical influences on the U.S. Constitution as a key reason for America’s success — in particular, the Calvinist-inflected idea that checks and balances are necessary to limit the sinful tendencies of government officials. But very few would embrace a much more important driver of the link between religion and the early belief in American exceptionalism: postmillennial eschatology.
In brief, postmillennialism is the belief that the evangelistic and reform efforts of the Church will result in the conversion of substantially the entire world and will produce the peaceful and prosperous thousand-year reign of Christ alluded to in Revelation 20:4-6. I think it’s fair to say that most serious, trained Christian theologians today are Amillennial — that is, they understand this text to be metaphorical and symbolic, not a reference to a “literal millennium” (this is my view). It’s also fair to say that, in terms of historical theology, the most widely held position throughout Church history has been “premillennialism” — the belief that temporal judgment will occur before a literal millennium.
Particularly in North American evangelical Christianity, of course, many if not most believers at the popular level are “premillennial,” with a “dispensationalist” flavoring — that is, they think a literal millennial reign will occur after Christ first judges the world with terrible destruction (the “Great Tribulation”) and removes Christians from the earth (the “Rapture of the Church”). Premillennialist Christians disagree on the timing of the “Rapture,” but the most popular version asserts that it will occur before the Tribulation (this is the view underlying the “Left Behind” franchise of books and movies). The belief in a “Rapture” is not a significant part of historic premillennialism.
Most American protestant Christians in the Nineteenth Century, however, including nearly all evangelicals, were postmillennial. They believed that their efforts were spurring on a golden age to be capped by Christ’s return. As Howe notes, for example, revivalist Charles Finney once “told his congregation that if evangelicals applied themselves fully to the works of mission and reform they could bring about the millennium within three years.” “Postmillennialism,” Howe suggests, “provided the capstone to an intellectual structure integrating political liberalism and economic development with Protestant Christianity.”
The sort of evangelical Christianity that is now emerging among many educated North American Christians has taken on some of this dynamic. Although this small but growing segment of American evangelicalism largely rejects dispensational premillennialism in favor of amillennialism, it (we) are emphasizing the this-worldly aspects of the Gospel — the ways in which the already-present “Kingdom of God” is concerned with freedom from oppression and material relief for the poor. Missional theology, for example, incorporate the dynamic of postmillennialism without the Biblicism of a literal millennium. On the whole, I think this is a positive development, particularly in that it properly separates the Kingdom of God from any earthly polis. And the need for this sort of separation ultimately renders talk of any sort of National Exceptionalism idolatrous.
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What God Hath Wrought: Jacksonian America
I’ve been reading lots of history lately. Nothing cures shallow thinking like a rich dose of history. Recently I finished reading Daniel Walker Howe’s sweeping narrative of the period between Colonial and Civil War America, What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. This was a period dominated in many ways by Andrew Jackson. Anyone interested in contemporary debates over “American Exceptionalism” should study this period carefully.
Jacksonian America defintely was “exceptional” — the question is in what way. The brash entrepreneurial drive and populist dynamism that imbued this time remains a prominent, quintessentially American characteristic. Howe’s summary of the political dynamics of this period could map comfortably onto our times:
As the historian Daniel Feller has noted, ‘A newly functioning system of gathering an disseminating information [the telegraph] made people aware of a larger world and gave them the power to change it. This increased ‘power to change’ encouraged controversy and contest. Equal rights for the two human sexes was but the newest subject over which Americans divided. The disputes that raged among the people of the young republic between 1815 and 1848 cannot be reduced to a single fundamental conflict (such as the working class against the capitalists). Rancorous competition between the major political parties reflected real disagreements over policy as well as mutual distrust between their constituencies…. Constitutional and legal ambiguities combined with fierce ambitions to produce a culture of litigation. Racial, ethnic, and religious divisions spilled over into public violence.
Does any of this sound familiar? But Howe notes that the signature driver of this period was white violence against African slaves, Native Americans, and Mexico:
The most bloody conflicts, however, derived from the domination and exploitation of the North American continent by the white people of the United States and their government. If a primary driving force can be identified in American history for this period, this was it. As its most ardent exponents, the Jacksonian Democrats, conceived it, this imperialist program included the preservation and extension of African American slavery as well as the expropriation of Native Americans and Mexicans…. Above all, westward expansion rendered inescapable the issue that would tear the country assunder a dozen years later: whether to expand slavery.
This isn’t liberal revisionism. It’s the reality that America has been “exceptional” both in spreading liberty and promoting oppression; in creating prosperity and destroying livelihoods; in justice and peace and in brutal violence. It’s the messiness of all human history.
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The Human Microbiota
There’s an interesting article in Nature on the human microbiota — “the vast population of microorganisms that live in and on the human body.” I’m not sure I can think of a theological angle at the moment, but this description is oddly compelling:
An infant’s first exposure to microbes is at birth, as it slides out of the sterile womb, slurping up and smearing itself with its mother’s vaginal fluids and faeces. From then on, life is one long microbial onslaught. New bacteria, viruses and fungi colonize every exposed organ — skin, eyes, lungs, gastrointestinal (GI) tract.
Makes you think a bit differently about that face in the mirror: a walking, talking universe of germs. Yum!