Categories
Biblical Studies Theology

Reading Revelation Responsibly

Here is a video promo for an adult education class I’ll be teaching in October at my church.  Below the video clip is a blurb about the class.

Revelation is a strange and often frightening text.  Christians have struggled for almost two thousand years to understand it.  Today, it is often used to support detailed scenarios of what will happen in the “end times.”  Perhaps you’ve read novels or seen movies that take this popular approach.

While these books and movies can be entertaining, they probably don’t have very much to do with what the text of Revelation meant in its original context, or with what it might mean for us today.   We’ll explore the thought world in which the text was produced — the genre of “apocalyptic” literature, particularly among Jewish people in the first century A.D. — to gain insights about the meaning of the text to its first hearers.  Then we’ll consider how the horizons of the text relate to the horizons of our contemporary understanding and concerns.

We won’t try to produce a final or complete interpretation of the mysteries contained in this text.  Instead, we’ll come to appreciate that, like all of scripture, this text points to the glory and beauty of Jesus Christ, the hope of all creation.

Categories
Justice Religious Legal Theory Theology

What is Justice, Part 1

I’m doing a series on Jesus Creed  on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s most recent book, Justice in Love (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion).  Go over there and join the conversation!  Here’s my first post:

Introduction

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a leading Christian philosophical theologian who combines his intellectual erudition with a warm evangelical faith.  Recently he published an important two-part series of books on the theme of “Justice” — Justice: Rights and Wrongs and Justice in Love.  Although both books touch on some difficult philosophical and theological themes, they are readily accessible to anyone.  If you’re involved in justice ministries, legal or law enforcement work, government or military service, or are otherwise interested in the theme of justice, these are books you should read.

Here are some opening questions:  Why two fat books on “justice?”  Don’t we already know what “justice” means?  What do you think comprises “justice?”  Do human beings have inherent “rights”?  Is a concept of “rights” required for a concept of “justice?”

“Justice” and “rights,” in fact, are slippery concepts.  Western liberal theories of justice and rights, after the rise of modernity, generally attempt to avoid reference to God or any other transcendent source of rights and justice.  John Rawls’ highly influential approach, for example, is rooted in social contractarian ideas.  For Rawls, “justice” requires that each individual give to others what she would desire for herself, if all individuals were ignorant of any other person’s desires.  Other theories, such as the “capacities” approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, conceive of “justice” as what is necessary to maximize the innate capabilities of each person in a way that supports human flourishing.  Each of these theories, and others like them, focus only on human or “natural” factors.

Christian theology, of course, must think beyond the human to the divine.  But how do notions of “justice” and “rights” fit into a Christian theistic framework?

In Roman Catholic theology, “justice” is woven into the “natural law,” which is to some degree accessible to all human beings through the exercise of natural reason.  For Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, natural law served as a précis to the fuller understanding of truth and the virtues that could be acquired only through faith.  Following Aristotle, Thomas’ ethical theory is a eudemonistic one – it posits an ideal “good life,” a life in which the vision of God is the ultimate good, and develops virtues and practices required to attain the good life.   Although Thomas considered faith necessary for a fully virtuous live, he believed ordinary human reason could grasp the basic principles of justice.

Wolterstorff argues that eudemonistic theories of ethics fail to supply a stable basis for “rights” and “justice” because they fail to offer an account of inherent human worth.  (JR&W at p. 179).  The “life-goods” of eudemonism, he says, are activities “each of us must choose … with the goal in mind of enhancing one’s own happiness.”  Wolterstorff suggests that, “[t]here is no room in this scheme for the worth of persons and human beings, and hence none for one’s right against others to their treating one a certain way on account of one’s worth.”  (JR&W at p. 179).  This argument against eudemonism is interesting because it turns the usual Protestant / Reformed argument against eudemonism on its head by suggesting that eudemonism is not “humanistic” enough.

Thomistic natural law theory – or at least a version of it – was subject to severe attack during the Protestant Reformation.  Martin Luther, in particular, famously battled with Thomist scholars of his day over the relationship between nature and grace.  This basic question of theological anthropology – to what extent, if at all, can human beings know and do good through natural reason, and what is the necessary role of God’s grace – remains a fundamental question for any Christian theory of justice.

For some strands of Protestant Christian theology, following Luther and to some extent John Calvin, the notion of “human rights” is eyed suspiciously or flatly rejected.  If God’s sovereignty is such that he “can do whatever he wants,” then human beings have no inherent “rights.”  For Reformed thinkers in this vein, the only real basis for “justice” and “rights” is God’s divine command.  The Decalogue provides us with the blueprint for God’s law, which we are bound to obey, and that law gives people obligations to each other, with corresponding rights.  For example, the command not to steal (Exodus 20:15) supports a right against other people to personal property.  But these are not “natural” rights that inhere in persons apart from God’s commands.

One problem with this kind of divine command ethic is that it raises the specter of arbitrariness.  Is theft wrong merely because God says so?  Could God then change the command and at some point declare theft to be lawful and “good?”  On the other hand, is there a standard of “good” to which even God must adhere, suggesting that there is something greater than God?  Most divine command theorists avoid this problem by noting that God Himself is the perfection of good in His being, so that His commands, which are always consistent with His own being, are neither arbitrary nor indebted to a standard above His own being.

Wolterstorff, however, argues that divine command theories fail because they rest on an analogy to human commands.  We know what a “moral command” looks like because we as human beings issue such commands to each other.  But if human beings can issue moral commands to each other, Wolterstorff says, then the standard for morality can be at least in part a human one, which does not rest on God’s commands as divine command theory requires.

Further, Wolterstorff argues that divine command theories fail because all such theories rest on an inherent moral obligation to obey God’s commands, even prior to any specific command from God (JR&W, at p. 275-76).  The reason we are morally obliged to obey God’s commands cannot itself arise from one of God’s commands, or else we become stuck in an infinite regress.  We must be morally obliged to obey God’s commands because of something inherent in the God-human relation that precedes the divine commands.

In other important strands of Reformed thought, the imago Dei, combined with a theology of “common grace” supports a concept of natural human rights.  This seems to be the approach taken by many contemporary protestants who cite Abraham Kuyper as an influence.  But it remains difficult to understand exactly what about the imago Dei grounds a universal concept of rights.  Is it a set of human capacities that arise from the imago?  If so, what about people who have not yet developed all their capacities (infants) or who have lost them (mentally incapacitated adults)?

Wolterstorff argues that “rights” and “justice” cannot derive from eudemonism, divine commands or the imago Dei alone.  Rather, he says, “human rights” flow primarily from the fact that every human being is loved by God and is thereby a “friend” of God (Wolterstorff calls this the “love of attachment”).  The imago is itself the fruit of that love:  God wishes to relate to us and he desires us to share in His creative life, which is what the imago makes possible.  The fact that God loves us and wishes to relate in friendship to us endows each one of us with inherent dignity.  We each have rights in relation to each other because each one of us is loved by God.  As Wolterstorff summarizes his position in Justice:  Rights and Wrongs:

I conclude that if God loves a human being with the love of attachment, then that love bestows great worth on that human being; other creatures, if they knew about that love, would be envious.  And I conclude that if God loves, in the mode of attachment, each and every human being equally and permanently, then natural human rights inhere in the worth bestowed on human beings by that love.  Natural human rights are what respect for that worth requires.  (JR&W, at p. 360).

This notion that “each and every human being” is loved “equally and permanently” by God obviously appears to conflict with some important passages in scripture, notably in Romans 9, particularly when read through an Augustinian / Reformed theology of Divine election.  If God “loved” Jacob and “hated” Esau (Rom. 9:13), and if God shapes vessels for different purposes, as the potter shapes the clay (Rom. 9:19-21), is it possible to say that God loves “each and every human being equally and permanently?”  Wolterstorff devotes an entire chapter to this problem in Justice in Love, which I will leave for another post.  In short, Wolterstorff interprets Romans through the lens of both Karl Barth’s theology of election and the New Perspective on Paul, and argues that Paul is not addressing the question of individual salvation and individual election that occupied the Reformers in their reading of Romans.

In sum, Wolterstorff’s central argument is that “justice” and “human rights” are substantive concepts rooted in the love of God for each and every human being.  Because we are each created to share in God’s own life and are loved by Him, we owe to each other the dignity due to creatures loved in this unique way by God, and have corresponding rights with respect to each other.

What do you think of Wolterstorff’s arguments against eudemonism, the imago Dei as a basis for rights, and divine command ethics?  Is he correct to locate inherent human dignity in God’s “love of attachment” to us?

Categories
Theology

Nominalism and Love

Peter James Causton offers a brief but brilliant article on nominalism in a symposium on Conor Cunningham’s book Darwin’s Pious Idea.  Nominalism, I think, is the scourge of modern theology both on the right and left.

He notes:

That Christianity understands ultimate reality as personal is both its greatest strength and its biggest problem. A problem because it is the source of the question of evil and a strength because it has no difficulty comprehending the existence of rationality, freedom and personality in creation. The theist has a problem of evil. The atheist has a problem of good.

It would be nice to leave the story at this – juxtaposing a nihilistic materialism to a life affirming Christianity – but the reality is far messier, and Christian theology has done much more to contribute to the current climate of nihilism than many of its adherents are willing to admit.

For just as nominalism in its modern guise undermines any conception of the rational and free person, nominalism in its medieval theological guise does as well. The utterly transcendent voluntarist God is an abyss of will. A humanity made in the image of such a God is no longer defined by its rationality or its capacity for love but by its ability to will.

Predictably enough when Ockham wrote of the image of God in humanity, it was humanity’s freedom that he focused on. This turn to the will in Christian theology entered into the stream of early modern thinking and reached its apotheosis in Nietzsche’s will to power.

Indeed it easy enough to conceive Dawkins selfish gene as a brute dumb materialized version of the will to power, for both in Dawkins and Nietzsche’s accounts morality and piety are merely masks worn by an atavistic force. Though at least in Nietzsche it is force worthy of being called life.

All comprehensive systems of thought tend to hide some kind of God within them. Some principle of reality which takes on the characteristic of being unconditioned, eternal or absolute. To reverse Marx’s dictum, systems of thought usually have mystical kernels contained in their rational shells.

The real question for the Christian theologian is what kind of God they find revealed in Jesus Christ. Is it really the voluntarist God of Ockham or the absolutely sovereign God of hyper-Calvinism?

The scandal of much Christian theology is that it privileges the power of God over the love of God. Perhaps this reflects our congenital inability as fallen creatures to take the love of god seriously – to fully realize that the love of God and power of God is really the same thing. That love is not an attribute of God, but what God is.

 

Categories
Spirituality

The Most Beautiful Ikon

My ten year old son painted this shell for me.  The cross-shaped figure at the top is Jesus.

My son has epilepsy.  His seizures in recent years have been under control, but he cannot properly process language.  He can communicate and understand many things, but only in his own unique way.

This shell is one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever received.  It points in to the one who is beyond language, beyond “normal” syntax, beyond appearances.  That one looks out from it over the whole world, his arms outstretched from the cross to embrace and take back into it all of creation’s groaning.

Categories
Religious Legal Theory

Journal of Christian Legal Thought

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Christian Legal Thought is out.  There are a number of thoughtful, brief essays on seminal theological resources for Christian legal thinking (including one from yours truly on Milbank).  It’s a promising start that reflects the unity-within-diversity among American Christian legal scholars.