Author: dopderbeck

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Eschatology Ezekiel

Ezekiel, Eschatology, and Fishing

Ezekiel 47 continues Ezekiel’s eschatological vision.  This vision features a renewed Temple, with impossible dimensions, suggesting that the Temple is a figure for God’s presence.  Ezekiel sees a river flowing from under the Temple and is led by his guide into the water.  The water gets progressively deeper until it became “deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed.”  (Ez. 47:5, NRSV).  Back on the riverbank, Ezekiel’s guide tells him that

This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes. People will stand fishing beside the sea from En-gedi to En-eglaim; it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea.  But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.

(Ez. 47:8-12.)  This amazing vision of a river teeming with living creatures and fish, and trees laden with fruit and healing leaves, echoes the creation creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2 and is picked up again in Revelation 21-22.  As a fisherman, I love this image of people spreading nets and enjoying abundance all along the banks of the river or sea.  Here, the locations Ezekiel mentions are along the Dead Sea, so the image seems to reflect a change in at least part of that hyper-salty basin so that fish and other wildlife can thrive.  Since the Temple Ezekiel describes seems metaphorical, we probably can assume this is also a metaphor for a broader renewal of creation.  But the eschatological picture is not ethereal or abstracted from created reality.  It is of regular people, doing regular things, in a real world.

IMG:  Wikimedia Commons, Peter Van der Sluijs

Categories
Political Theology

James Henley Thornwell on “The Rights and Duties of Masters”: Lessons from the Civil War Era

I’m very interested in the theological debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War.  I’ve read many of the sermons, books, and tracts written by pro-slavery preachers and theologians from that era.  I find them a fascinating, and chilling, reminder of how a theological system in one era can justify something that comes to be clearly seen as an evil in another era.  Here’s the text of a paper I recently wrote on a famous sermon by James Henley Thornwell (pictured at left), titled The Rights and Duties of Masters.

Introduction

James Henley Thornwell, called by some of his contemporaries “Our Southern Giant” and “the Calhoun of the Church,” was a leading figure among Antebellum Southern Presbyterians.[1]  He served as Professor of Sacred Literature and the Evidences of Christianity at South Carolina College starting in 1840, and became a strong advocate of “Old School” Presbyterianism.[2]  He was a founder of the Southern Presbyterian Review, a prominent orthodox Presbyterian publication, and later became president of the South Carolina College, a highly prestigious position in South Carolina life at that time.[3]

Like other conservative Southern Presbyterians, Thornwell offered a vigorous theological defense of African Slavery.[4]  This defense is set out most directly in his sermon “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”[5]  Thornwell preached the Sermon on May 26, 1850 in Charleston, South Carolina, at the dedication of a church “erected for the religious instruction of the Negroes.”[6]  In many ways Thornwell’s arguments are typical of other pro-slavery preachers and theologians, but in some respects, particularly relating to his political theology, his arguments are more subtle than those of other apologists.  This paper argues that the subtleties of Thornwell’s arguments flow from his nuanced views about the relationship between faith and reason.  This study demonstrates how difficult it is to assess a pro-slavery theologian such as Thornwell from a modern perspective, and also how difficult it can be for a capable apologist such as Thornwell to notice his or her moral blind spots.

Thornwell’s Biblical But Not Biblicist Defense of Slavery

Pro-slavery apologists argued that both the Old Testament and New Testament sanctioned slavery and that the abolitionists therefore were distorting the plain sense of scripture.[7]  These arguments usually were offered in what today seem like naively Biblicist terms.  In his book A Defence of Virginia, for example, Southern theologian Robert Louis Dabney thundered that

Our best hope is in the fact that the cause of our defence is the cause of God’s Word, and of its supreme authority over the human conscience.  For, as we shall evince, that Word is on our side, and the teachings of Abolitionism are clearly of rationalistic origin, of infidel tendency, and only sustained by reckless and licentious perversions of the meaning of the Sacred text.[8]

Dabney argued that the Old Testament explicitly recognized and sanctioned slavery (in the examples of the Curse on Canaan, Abraham, Hagar, the Mosaic Law, and the Decalogue), and that in the New Testament, slavery was never condemned by Christ and was approved by Paul.[9]  This was a typical laundry list of pro-slavery Bible passages.  In the literate, polemical context of the Bible wars over slavery, however, “[s]outhern preachers had to be careful with biblical citations” because “[a] mere grumble from a few congregants would send others scurrying to check their Bibles.”[10]  Thornwell knew this and tied his Biblical arguments to a broader political philosophy.

In the Sermon, Thornwell focused his Biblical arguments primarily on one passage, from Colossians 3:22 – 4:1.[11]  As Thornwell summarized this text, “[t]he Apostle briefly sums up all that is incumbent, at the present crisis, upon the slaveholders of the South, in the words of the text – Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.”[12]

Thornwell believed this command was not merely arbitrary because, although all persons, white and African alike, were equally human, God had ordained people to different stations and responsibilities.  In response to the Abolitionist argument that the relationship of master and slave violates a fundamental human right of the slave, Thornwell argued that there is a distinction between basic human rights of all persons and the rights and duties of persons within specific relationships.[13]  Paul’s injunctions to masters and slaves, Thornwell claimed, embedded a moral principle of duty particular to the roles God had providentially assigned:  “[l]et masters and servants, each in their respective spheres, be impregnated with the principle of duty . . . .”[14]  Thornwell saw this kind of difference in right and duty based on contingent relationships throughout society, such as between parent and child or husband and wife.  The slave is just another “actor on the broad theatre of life” whose reward depends on playing his role appropriately.[15]

Thornwell conceded, however, that slavery was not an intrinsic good.  “Slavery,” Thornwell argued in the Sermon, “is a part of the curse which sin has introduced into the world, and stands in the same general relations to Christianity as poverty, sickness, disease or death.”[16]  Colossians 3:22 – 4:1 encoded a form of positive law relating to a set of relationships – master and slave – that was contingent on the present fallen state of the world and that would be erased in the eschaton.  Slavery, like other differences in social condition, was “founded in a curse, from which the Providence of God extracts a blessing.”[17]

Even more directly, Thornwell conceded that the initial enslavement of Africans, like the beginnings of any enslavement, was violent and morally wrong.  But, he insisted, “the relations to which that act gave rise, may, themselves, be consistent with the will of God and the foundation of new and important duties.”[18]  In fact, Thornwell claimed, in the present fallen state of the world, “an absolute equality would be an absolute stagnation of all enterprise and industry.”[19]

Thornwell equated the demand for “absolute equality” with “[t]he agitations which are convulsing the kingdoms Europe,” a reference to the Revolutions of 1848.[20]  For Thornwell, the parties in the conflict over slavery “are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders – they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.”[21]  This appeal to established order was a “central theme” in Old School Presbyterianism, and Thornwell certainly echoed this theme.[22]

Thornwell’s focus on this principle of duty appealed to the Southern honor culture and removed his Biblical reference from the category of mere Biblical proof texting.  It tied together a kind of natural law argument with Calvinist theology in a systematic defense of slavery as at least a contingent feature of some social structures.  It also allowed Thornwell to sidestep some of the roiling “scientific” arguments over the origins of Africans and to claim that in the end his intent was to defend blacks as fully human along with whites.

Thornwell’s Response to Polygenism and the Curse of Canaan

Scholarly Old School Presbyterians such as Thornwell were deeply interested in the emerging natural sciences and believed proper scientific methods would verify their beliefs about social order.[23]   Thornwell departed from pro-slavery scientists and clergy who argued that black Africans were cursed or sub-human, either because of the “curse of Canaan” or through some theory of biological polygenesis.

There was an interesting tension in Thornwell’s day between apologetics for African slavery based on polygentic theories and “Biblical” defenses of African slavery based on the “curse of Canaan.”[24]  Polygenetic theories developed by figures such as Samuel George Morton in the “American School of Ethnology” drew on the emerging evolutionary science of the day to argue that the present races had different biological origins – not a monogentic origin in a literal “Adam and Eve” – and that these differences in origin accounted for presumed differences in mental and cultural capacity.[25]  Some Southerners were happy to use these theories in their defense of African slavery, but conservative theologians and churchmen thought these theories contradicted the Biblical account of humanity’s origin in a single couple.[26]  Many of these Southern religious conservatives argued that black Africans did descend from Adam and Eve, but that the Africans were a degenerate race because of the “Curse on Canaan” narrated in Genesis 9.

Genesis 9 describes events shortly after the great flood of Noah.  The hero of flood story, Noah, plants a vineyard, gets drunk on the resulting wine, and passes out naked outside his tent.[27]  Noah’s son Ham sees Noah’s nakedness and tells his brothers, Shem and Japeth – perhaps meaning to make a scene or mock his father.  Shem and Japeth cover Noah, taking care to cover their eyes in the process.  When Noah awakes, he curses Ham’s son, Canaan:

“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”[28]

The honor culture reflected in this narrative resonated with antebellum Southern readers, who were quick to identify black Africans as Ham and Canaan’s descendants.[29]  Many Southerners adapted the New American School of Ethnology’s “scientific” views about racial differences to a genealogy that preserved Adamic monogenism with a divergence via the curse on Canaan.[30]  Some of the leading Southern theologians were reticent to make this connection, but still used this narrative as a key illustration.  Robert Louis Dabney, for example, agreed that “[i]t may be that we should find little difficulty in tracing the lineage of the present Africans to Ham,” but thought the actual scientific evidence lacking .[31]  For Dabney, the overall shape of the narrative was more important than the scientific details:  this was one example among many of the Bible’s moral sanction of slavery in general.

Thornwell was even more reluctant than Dabney to connect African slavery with any sort of genealogical or biological curse.  In his Sermon, Thornwell never mentioned the curse on Canaan and directly rejected polygenetic views.  Instead, Thornwell argued that “the Negro is of one blood with ourselves” and stated that “[w]e are not ashamed to call him our brother.”[32]  This reflects not only a tactical decision to “soften” Southern rhetoric, but also a commitment to integrate the Old Presbyterian theology with a form of contemporary science – that is, to reject the polygenist theories on Biblical and scientific grounds while upholding African slavery.

Thornwell stated in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Theology at South Carolina College, the “true method” of theology

is to accept the facts of revelation as we accept the facts of nature. We are by enlightened interpretation to ascertain the dicta; these are to be received without suspicion and without doubt. They are the principles of faith. Then from these principles proceed to the laws, the philosophy if you please, which underlies them, and in which they find their explanation and their unity. In this way we shall reach truth, and shall be partially able to harmonize it with all other truth.[33]

Here, Thornwell reflects a relatively strong, but not absolute, view of the “integration” of faith and reason, including of the findings of the natural sciences.  Like most of his Old Presbyterian contemporaries, Thornwell cautiously accepted the findings of the new Lyellian geology, which showed the Earth was far older than a simple reading of the Biblical records seemed to suggest.  In this sense, Thornwell’s views were consistent with his contemporary at Princeton Seminary, B.B. Warfield.[34]  Thornwell departed somewhat, however, from the synthesis of Baconian science and common sense realism characteristic of Warfield by prioritizing “faith” in his epistemology.[35]  Thornwell was careful to note that “[a]ll knowledge begins in faith; principles must be accepted, not proved, and it matters not whether you call them principles of faith or reason.”[36]

Thornwell applied his subtle understanding of faith and reason not only to the natural sciences, but also to the newly developing social sciences.[37]  The notion that society could be studied according to principles of reason rooted in faith, particularly a Calvinistic faith in the slow, inexorable, often hidden workings of providence, underpinned Thornwell’s belief that established social institutions such as slavery should not be upset by radical change.[38]  The same belief affected Thornwell’s treatment of the role of the law law in relation to slavery in the Sermon.  In his assessment of the law of slavery, the limits of Thornwell’s method are evident.  He could not countenance rapid legal change, and as a result – somewhat ironically in light of his views of scripture – he had to dance around the law’s plain meaning.

Thornwell, Slavery, and Law

For Thornwell the Bible did not sanction the ownership of one person by another person as “property.”  Rather, the Bible, and the natural law, gave the master a kind of contractual right “not to the man, but to his labor. . . .”[39]  This right came with corresponding duties, also reflected in Ephesians 4:5-9, upon the master to treat the slave properly.[40]  This relationship was not literally contractual, because it was grounded in Biblical and positive law, and the slave’s obedience, rendered in response to the moral obligation of the natural and Biblical law, could properly be considered “voluntary.”[41]  The motion of the slave’s “limbs or organs of the body” are voluntary in the literal sense, Thornwell argued, and the slave’s internal “moral character” determined whether his or her actions were “voluntary” in an ethical sense – an ethical obligation that rested entirely on the slave.[42]

Thornwell’s argument was ingenious, but it was belied by the actual law of slavery.  In the Sermon, he offered only a passing glance at “the technical language of the law, in relation to certain aspects in which slavery is contemplated” before claiming that “the ideas of personal rights and personal responsibility pervade the whole system.”[43]  The law in South Carolina and across the slave states, however, in fact held that “slaves are chattels personal,” that is, a form of personal property.[44]

The slave codes did provide some limitations on how slaves should be treated.  The slave codes also gave slaves some ability to form enforceable contracts and legitimated other aspects of commerce engaged in by slaves, but these provisions were designed to facilitate the use of slaves as business agents by the master, not to enable slaves to work for their own benefit.[45]  While the slave was in one sense a legal “person,” the ascription of personhood was not in recognition of any basic human rights, but only for the benefit of the master.  As one modern commentator has suggested, under South Carolina law and the Southern slave codes more broadly, “slavery marked an ownership so utter that the status of property was insufficient to describe it.”[46]  To the extent Thornwell actually was concerned about describing the social and legal structure of slavery in the Sermon, his description was wildly inaccurate.

Conclusion

How could a well-educated intellectual leader such as Thornwell have been so wrong about slavery?  Was he driven to self-delusion, or merely disingenuous, because of a cultural need to defend this Southern institution?[47]  In the intense hot-house of the slavery debate, some degree of delusion or dissembling cannot be discounted.  Thornwell, however, was a rigorous and meticulous person, who was well read in historical theology and classical literature and who did not shy away from controversy.  His arguments about the personhood of slaves, notwithstanding the “technical language of the law,” were rooted in deeper beliefs about the priority of the Bible, or more directly the priority of his theological system, in relation to what he considered the “scientific” understanding of society.  Careful study of Thornwell’s Sermon and its context might help us avoid overly simplistic, anachronistic judgments of Thornwell and his motives.  Perhaps also it can serve as a cautionary tale about how social, political, theological and Biblical views can converge into a system that justifies oppression.

Endnotes

[1] James O. Farmer, Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy:  James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon:  Mercer Univ. Press 1986), 41.

[2] Ibid., 57-58.

[3] Ibid., 58.

[4] See generally Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press 2006).

[5] Thornwell, James Henley, The Rights and Duties of Masters:  A Sermon Preached at the Dedication of a Church Erected in Charleston, S.C. for the Benefit of the Coloured Population (Charleston:  Steam Power Press of Walker & James 1850) (hereinafter “Sermon”).

[6] Ibid., Introduction.

[7] Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Chapter 3.

[8] Robert L Dabney, A Defense of Virginia (and Through Her, of the South) in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party (New York:  E.J. Hale & Son 1867), 21.  This book was was published two years after the conclusion of the Civil War.  Dabney had staunchly supported the Southern cause before and during the War, and hoped and believed that God would raise the South again in providential judgment against the North.  See ibid., 5.

[9] Ibid., 94-198.

[10] See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class:  History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview (Cambridge:  CUP 2005), Kindle Loc. 14819.

[11] Sermon, 15.  In the modern NIV translation, Col. 3:22 and 4:1 read as follows:  “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. . . .  Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.”

[12] Sermon, 15.

[13] Sermon, 40.

[14] Ibid., 41.

[15] Ibid., 44.

[16] Sermon, 31.

[17] Ibid., 33.

[18] Sermon, 45.

[19] Ibid., 32.

[20] Ibid., 12.  For background on the revolutions in Europe during this period, see generally R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds, The Revolutions in Europe 1848-1849:  From Reform to Reaction (Oxford:  OUP 2000).  For a discussion of how these revolutions affected the views of Southern slaveholders in the U.S., see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Chapter 2.

[21] Ibid., 14.

[22] See Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Inductive and Deductive Politics:  “Science and Society in Antebellum Persbyterian Thought,” The Journal of American History 64:3 (Dec. 1977), 704-722; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, ”James Henry Thornwell, Pro-Slavery Spokesman Within a Calvinist Faith,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 87:1 (Jan. 1986), 49-64.

[23] See Farmer, The Metaphysical Conspiracy, Chapter 3; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Chapter 18.

[24] See David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors:  Race, Religion & the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press 2008), 182-190.

[25] Ibid., 173-180.

[26] Ibid., 180-182.

[27] Gen. 9:20.

[28] Gen. 9:22-25.

[29] See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse:  The Biblical Justifications of American Slavery (Oxford:  OUP 2002), Chapter 4 (noting connection between Southern honor culture and the Genesis 9 narrative).

[30] Ibid.

[31] Dabney, A Defense of Virginia, 101-104.

[32] Sermon, 11.

[33] John B. Adger, The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, Vol. 1, (Richmond:  Presbyterian Committee of Publication 1871), Appendix A, 582, ¶4.

[34] See Mark A. Noll & David A. Livingstone, eds., B.B. Warfield, Evolution, Science and Scripture, Selected Writings (Grand Rapids:  Baker 2000).

[35] Farmer, The Metaphysical Conspiracy, 141-151.

[36] Adger, Collected Writings, Vol. 1, Appendix A, 579, ¶3.

[37] See Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics:  Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought,” 704-722; Bozeman, “Joseph LeConte:  Organic Science and a ‘Sociology for the South,’” The Journal of Southern History 39:4 (November 1973), 565-582.

[38] Bozeman, “Joseph LeConte:  Organic Science and a ‘Sociology for the South,’” 707.

[39] Sermon, 24.

[40] Ibid., 40-41.

[41] Ibid., 27.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] John Belton O’Neall, The Negro Law of South Carolina (Columbia:  John G. Bowman 1848), 5.

[45] See ibid.

[46] John Samuel, Harpham, “Two Concepts of a Slave in the South Carolina Law of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition, May 25, 2017, available at  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1323704.

[47] Cf. Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy, 196 (noting that some modern historians “have seen the proslavery argument as a clear case of self-serving rhetoric”).

Categories
Philosophical Theology Political Theology Science and Religion

Book Review: Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

This is a book review I wrote of Francis Beckwith’s book Taking Rites Seriously:  Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith, for the journal Science & Christian Belief.

This book is a curious amalgam of philosophical theology, liberal political theory, and American Constitutional Law.  It succeeds reasonably well on the first count and less well on the third.  The space in the middle – liberal political theory – is the bridge that would connect the two but that ultimately betrays the author’s philosophical and theological presuppositions.

In many ways the value of this book to any reader likely will depend on his or her view of the importance of America’s culture wars.  Beckwith, who teaches at Baylor University, is well known as a scholarly participant in those culture wars.  At one time the President of the Evangelical Theological Society, in 2007 he returned in much-discussed fashion to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth.  The dedication of this book to Robert P. George, a leading proponent of the new natural law theory, reflects Beckwith’s orbit within a constellation of Catholic and Evangelical intellectuals who seek to advance philosophical arguments for traditional values in the public square, including opposition to abortion, rejection of same sex marriage, and strong views of religious liberty.  The arguments offered in this book ably present the kinds of views advanced by this school of conservative social thought, although they have been presented at length elsewhere.  If there were nothing else to the book it would not seem of much unique interest to readers of this journal.

In his discussion of philosophical theology, however, Beckwith presents some material of interest to the theology-and-science conversation.  First, Beckwith addresses an approach to public discourse he labels “Secular Rationalism” (SR), exemplified in the thought of legal theorists such as Brian Leiter, evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, and various New Atheist public intellectuals.  As Beckwith defines it, SR is essentially a form of logical positivism, scientism, and/or narrow foundationalism.  Beckwith dismantles SR along the familiar lines that it is circular, self-defeating, and fundamentally undermined by its own need to presuppose some truths about reality without the kind of evidence it purports to require.  Some of the sources in Beckwith’s footnotes, such as Alvin Plantinga, David Bentley Hart, and N.T. Wright, have done the same work in far more winsome fashion; some of Beckwith’s sources, such as J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, are apologists of a certain narrow stripe whose work might be of more dubious value; and other important sources, including anyone from a critical realist perspective (say, John Polkinghorne or Alister McGrath), a process perspective (say, John Haught), or other strands of religious epistemology (say, Conor Cunningham’s take from Radical Orthodoxy) are absent entirely.  Nevertheless, Beckwith’s contribution to the literature showing the intellectual bankruptcy of “SR” is welcome, particularly in taking on the extension of “SR” to secularist fundamentalists in the legal academy such as Brian Leiter.

Of further direct interest to readers of this journal, Beckwith’s past defense of Intelligent Design (ID) theory and association with the Discovery Institute stand in stark contrast to his arguments against ID in this volume.  Beckwith now argues, from a Thomistic perspective, that ID undermines the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation because ID theory subverts creation’s causal integrity.  He shows that the Thomistic arguments for God’s existence do not imagine God as a huge, physical “finger” within creation, pushing things into motion and perhaps giving things a special poke here and there where “design” might be detected, but rather that God is the formal and final cause of the material and efficient causes within creation.  The overall beauty and order of creation in its material and efficient causes, viewed holistically, point towards formal and final causes outside of themselves.  If, as ID theory suggests, creation lacks an organic integrity, with “irreducibly complex” gaps that suggest a need for constant direct Divine intervention, this would undermine the classical Christian account of creation.  It is gratifying to see an erstwhile defender of ID theory recognize these problems.

Notwithstanding his theological and philosophical criticism of ID theory, Beckwith persists in arguing that the “ID case” in the United States, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, was wrongly decided.  He criticizes the federal trial judge in the case for adopting a legal test under which a “reasonable, objective observer” (ROO) must assess whether the challenged policy had an improper religious motivation under the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  There is something trenchant about Beckwith’s critique on this point, because, as he points out, notions of “reason” and “objectivity” require reference to metaphysical perfections that would seem ruled out of court by SR.  But this highlights the major structural problem with the book:  Beckwith wants to defend his socially conservative policies on the grounds of a kind of reason that would be accessible to anyone in society and amenable to adjudication within a Constitutional framework by the Supreme Court.  This simply does not work, because classical liberalism and the American Constitutional framework embed Enlightenment epistemology and values, not Christian epistemology and values.

A good example of this fundamental problem arises in Beckwith’s qualified approval of the result in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, upholding a business’ ability to exclude itself from a legal mandate to provide insurance coverage for certain contraceptives.  Like most “religious liberty” advocates, Beckwith skates over the question whether a corporation should have standing to assert “religious liberty” rights under the U.S. Constitution.  There is plenty of case law about Constitutional rights that are afforded (such as the right to freedom of speech) and not afforded (such as the right to vote) to corporations, so from the perspective of U.S. legal doctrine, the question of how the First Amendment’s religion clauses might apply to corporations is not by any means out of bounds.  From the perspective of philosophical theology, however, it is far from clear whether business corporations should have any personal “rights” at all, or what, if anything, a business corporation is — never mind whether Christian owners of a business corporation that employs non-Christians ought to have, or ought to exercise, a “right” to excuse themselves from a generally applicable social program if they otherwise choose to receive benefits the state provides to business corporations.  From a Christian theological and praxis perspective, the Hobby Lobby case is a mess.

Another example surfaces in Beckwith’s discussion of same sex marriage.  He offers the familiar refrain that the legalization of same sex marriage will invoke a parade of horribles for non-conforming religious institutions, which for the most part has not materialized, and he unconvincingly tries to distinguish the same sex marriage issue from the history of miscegenation laws and practices, which Bob Jones University fought in the Supreme Court only a generation ago.  He even suggests that same sex marriage was never really “banned” or “illegal,” unless sacramental Catholic marriage also was banned or illegal, because the state has never explicitly sanctioned all the religious elements of Catholic sacramental marriage.  It is difficult to tease out the overly-clever logic here, but it seems to be a variant on the argument that withholding a government benefit, such as a marital tax deduction, from one group (same sex couples) while providing it to another (opposite sex couples) is not a “prohibition.”  That may be true, but then one wonders what all the fuss has been about.  Let everyone have the public benefits, or take the public benefits away from everyone, and let private associations such as churches define the terms however they want.  Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

The fuss, as Beckwith goes on to argue, is that “marriage” relates to deeper metaphysical concepts about the human person.  People care about the same sex marriage issue on both sides not because it is about an arcane tax benefit but because it has something to do with human dignity.  Either same sex marriage undermines human dignity because it denies something basic about human biology and difference, or disapproval of same sex marriage undermines human dignity because gay relationships are not intrinsically disordered, or at least the question is uncertain enough that dignity demands that each person have the liberty to decide the question without state coercion.  Beckwith and the new natural law thinkers with which he is associated think there are forms of rational argument apart from specifically religious claims that can establish their case decisively in the liberal institutions of modern legislatures and courts, if only the underbrush of scientism / SR can be cleared away.  Ultimately, however, clearing away that underbrush must involve a theological critique of modernity’s epistemological pretensions and metaphysical vacuity.  It seems that Beckwith and his compatriots do not wish to venture that critique, but believe instead that the modern liberal state can and should advance their goals.  The irony is that this move immediately surrenders the metaphysical and epistemological ground, ensuring not only that their culture war will be lost, but also that plenty of collateral damage will occur along the way.

 

Categories
Ecclesiology Islam

Christians and Muhammad

Here is the text of a paper I had to write for a class I took this summer through Fuller Seminary on “understanding Islam.”  It was a really interesting class, and as you can see from this paper, there was lots of material to wrestle over.  The prompt for the paper was “Who is Muhammad according to Islamic sacred text and tradition, and what do I, a Christian, say about him?”  I don’t claim deep expertise here, and this is only my student paper, but I hope some readers might find it interesting

I.  Who is Muhammad According to Islamic Sacred Text and Tradition?

In Islamic text and tradition, Muhammad is the Prophet of God.  (Hillenbrand, p. 38; Esposito, p. 5; Forward, Chapter 2.)  As God’s Prophet, Muhammad received and conveyed the Divine revelation of the Qur’an.  (Esposito, p. 19.)  Muhammad’s teaching and life beyond the text of the Qur’an are also normative for Muslims.  The primary sources for Muhammad’s life and significance in Islamic piety are the Qur’an, the hadith (canonical sayings of Muhammad), and the sira (biographical materials about Muhammad).  (Hillenbrand, p. 38).  The hadith and sira together form the Sunna, the report of Muhammad’s “customary or normative behavior.”  (Ibid., p. 39.)  In both the Sunni and Shi’ite traditions, the hadith reports play a “legislative” function over many details of daily life.  (Ibid.)

The sira includes various miraculous signs that confirm Muhammad’s status as Prophet and place him a line of Prophets running from the Hebrew Scriptures to Jesus.  These include the foretelling of Muhammad’s coming by Jewish and Christian sources, the literal cleansing of his heart as a child by angels, and the recognition of his Prophetic status by Bahira the Christian monk.  (Hillenbrand, p. 43-44.)

A major challenge for any Christian assessment of Muhammad is the Islamic claim that Muhammad not only follows in line with the Hebrew prophets and Jesus but that by his reception and recitation of the Qur’an he acts as God’s messenger (rasul) to correct corruptions that had crept into the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  This includes the claim that Jesus cannot have been the divine Son of God.  Moreover, the Qur’an states that Muhammad is “the Seal of the Prophets,” which most Muslims believe means Muhammad is God’s final Prophet.  (Ali, Qu’ran, Sira 33:40; Forward, p. 32.)

In addition to his role as Prophet and lawgiver, many Muslims focus on Muhammad’s personal piety and mystical relationship with Allah.  Particularly in the Sufi tradition, Muhammad is an exemplar of the mystical path.  (Forward, pp. 42-49.; Hillenbrand, Chapter 8.) The figure of Muhammad also plays a vital role in popular religious life and piety.  Many Muslim boys are named after the Prophet, and the Prophet’s name and reputation are jealously guarded.  (Forward, pp. 49-53.)  Some forms of popular piety involve supposed relics of the Prophet, even though orthodox teaching frowns on such practices.  (Ibid.)  In addition, Muhammad was a political and military leader and serves for Muslims as an example of effective, pious leadership over the Islamic community or umma.  (Hillebrand, pp. 45-47.)

With all the status accorded to Muhammad by Muslims, he is not considered in any sense divine.  The central Islamic theme of God’s transcendence and unity (tawhid) precludes any notion that Muhammad could be in any sense a divine being.  (Hillenbrand, p. 90; Esposito, pp. 24-25.)  The first “pillar” (arkan) of Islam, the basic confession of faith (the shahada), asserts that “I testify that there is no god by God.  I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of God (rasul Allah).”  (Hillenbrand, p. 89.)  The shahada makes clear both Muhammad’s unique role and his absolute distance from God’s own person.

II.  What do I, a Christian, Say About Muhammad?

Polemics between Christians and Muslims historically have focused substantially on the nature of God (the Trinity), the nature of Jesus (Christology), and the status and role of Muhammad. (Tieszen, p. 249.)  These are interrelated themes because the Qur’anic claims of God’s tawhid, in contrast to Christian claims about Jesus’ Divine Sonship, flow from Muhammad’s role as God’s authorized messenger.  The question of Muhammad is also vexing for Muslim-Christian relations because of the central importance within Islam – reflected in the shahada – of recognizing Muhammad as God’s messenger.  (Cragg, p. 1.)

Many early Christian responses to Muhammad emphasized his alleged sexual immorality and violence.  (Marshall, p. 162.)  Some early Christian sources attributed Muhammad’s ecstatic prophetic experiences to epilepsy.  (Ibid.)  Today some Christians adopt the same kind of approach, often with an emphasis on claims that Muhammad’s revelations were the result of demon possession.  (Ibid.)  This latter approach intensified starting with the first Iraq war and adopted an even more urgent tone after the September 11 attacks, as some influential popular Christian teachers equated the rise of Islam with dire apocalyptic scenarios focused on the nation of Israel. (Hagee.)  Pastor John Hagee’s book Jerusalem Countdown, for example, claims that Islamic leaders in Iran will launch a nuclear war against Israel, which will trigger the “Great Tribulation” at the end of history.  It includes a chapter on “Unveiling Islam.”  (Ibid.)  This book was a New York Times bestseller and sold over one million copies.[1]  It is only the tip of the iceberg in a vast network of evangelical and other Christian media enterprises that closely links an extreme form of dispensational chiliasm with the threat of Islam.

The narrative offered by Hagee and others of his ilk powerfully combines themes of American exceptionalism, nativism, and presumptive Biblical piety.  It is widely influential in popular American evangelical religion.  It undoubtedly has played a role in evangelical support for President Donald Trump, and might even directly influence U.S. policy.  (Mathias.)  It is also exegetically, theologically, and historically unhinged.

Nevertheless, both the historical and contemporary polemic does illustrate some of the difficulty for any Christian perspective on Muhammad.  The prompt for this paper asks “What do I, a Christian, Say About Muhammad” (emphasis added).  To identify first as “a Christian,” I must make certain claims about Christ that at points will conflict with orthodox Islamic claims about Muhammad.  The core of these differences are not only matters of detail, but also may comprise basic differences in theological outlook.

Some of these differences are explored helpfully in Kenneth Cragg’s groundbreaking book Muhammad and the Christian.  (Cragg.)  Cragg acknowledges that Christians should recognize the value of Muhammad’s call to abandon idolatry.  “The Christian has every reason, conceptual, compassionate and contemporary,” Cragg says, “to recognize how vital that call is in the common world, how kin to the Biblical claim, and how relevant to what he believes to be the goal of the Gospel.”  (Cragg, p. 150.)  And yet, Cragg notes, this recognition “in no way ends our quarrel:  it could mean we continue it as a quest.”  (Ibid.)  For Cragg, the heart of the difference inheres in what he calls the “Gospel’s patterns” of nonviolent redemption.  (Ibid.)  The Gospel, Cragg says, discloses that God relates to humans “not only in law and education, but in grace and suffering.”  (Ibid., p. 158.)  Cragg thinks the Islamic emphasis on God’s transcendence limits the Islamic imagination’s frame of reference to the domain of power more than the domain of grace.  This means Muhammad was a great teacher of law and morals, but not, from a Christian perspective, a messenger of the deeper truths of grace.

As David Marshall notes, although it seems that Cragg does affirm Muhammad as a prophet (at least with a small “p”), Cragg’s characterization is in fact ambiguous.  (Marshall, p. 167.)  Reading through all of Cragg’s Muhammad and the Christian, the sense conveyed is one of sympathetic engagement, a degree of perplexity, and some reservation, with a hope that Muslim interlocutors might come to see more of what Christians think about Christ.

Hans Küng’s work on Islam provides an interesting comparison to Cragg’s.  (Küng.)  Küng notes that, “[i]n the Qur’an Muhammad is presented as a prophet in the strict sense:  he is not just a nabi, not just a usual kind of prophet, but a rasul, a messenger of God who – like Moses, David (the Psalms) and Jesus – has brought his people a book.”  (Ibid., p. 94.)  And yet, Küng suggests, “[a]t the same time the Qur’an emphasis that Muhammad is no more than a prophet, no more than a human being.”  (Ibid.)  Küng suggests that this emphasis on Muhammad’s humanity, and correspondingly on the absolute ontological distance between God and the Prophet, can help Christians overcome the fear that Muhammad supplants Jesus, even while acknowledging the Islamic claim to Muhammad’s prophetic finality.

In many ways Küng here makes arguments that are similar to Cragg’s, but Küng departs from Cragg in his assessment of Muhammad’s role as a warrior.  Cragg sees the violent aspects of Muhammad’s life, compared to the life of Jesus, as a real difference between a faith rooted in law and a faith rooted in grace.  Küng, in contrast, portrays Muhammad as a defender of justice for his marginalized community, in line with the tradition of the Hebrew prophets.  (Küng, p. 98-100; 119-120.)  Küng thinks it is appropriate for Christians to inquire critically into Muhammad’s actions, but he notes that we must remember how we contextualize the actions of our prophets.  As Küng asks, “isn’t it perhaps simply a dogmatic prejudice for Christians to recognize Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah and the extremely violent Elijah as prophets, but not Muhammad?”  (Küng, p. 123.)

Küng then, like Cragg, suggests Christians should appreciate the Qur’an’s ethical imperatives and, beyond Cragg, clears away some underbrush concerning comparisons between Muhammad and prophets in the Jewish-Christian pantheon regarding violence.  But this does not yet reach the central issue of how Christians, committed to Christ the suffering servant, can appropriate Muhammad, which is really Cragg’s central reservation.  Here, Küng makes some moves that distance him further from Cragg.

Küng notes that, in the Qur’an, Jesus (“‘Isa”) is portrayed, like Muhammad, as an entirely human messenger of God.  (Küng, p. 489.)  But ‘Isa is not just any human:  he is also called “the Messiah” (al-masih), “word of God” (kalimah min Allah), “spirit of God” (ruh min Allah), and “servant of God” (‘abd Allah).  (Küng, p. 490; Ali, Qur’an, Sura 3:39, 45; 4:171; 19:16-37; 19:88-93; 43:57-65; 3:39.)  Yet, as Küng acknowledges, the Qur’an clearly warns against teaching that Jesus is God’s Son or that God is Triune.  (Küng, p. 491; cf. Ali, Qur’an, Sura 5:72.)  Küng tries to connect these exalted Qur’anic titles for Jesus, together with the Qur’anic rejection of Jesus’ divinity, with contemporary Biblical scholarship about the title “Son of God” in the Gospels.  (Küng, pp. 491-493.)

Küng here draws on a strand of historical-critical scholarship, rooted in von Harnack and others, that takes the later Christian creedal Christological formulations as unwelcomed “Hellenistic” or “Greek” glosses on the more reticent original Hebraic understanding of the Gospels.  He suggests that, “[a]s a pious Jew, Jesus himself preached strict monotheism.  He never called himself God. . . .”  (Ibid, p. 492.)  In the Gospels, Küng suggests, Jesus is portrayed as God’s messenger and God’s Messiah, but this is short of a clear claim to divinity.  This more limited Christology, according to Küng, was adopted by some kinds of “sectarian Jewish Christianity” that persisted from the Apostolic era through the age of creedal orthodoxy, which unnecessarily squelched the “sectarian Jewish Christian” stream of Christianity.  (Ibid., p. 496.)

Küng does not argue, like some modern neo-Gnostics, that the only authentic Jesus is one who is reduced to a non-divine soothsayer-prophet.  But he suggests that the high Christology of the creeds can exist in dialogue with the lower Christology of the Gospels and that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can then engage in a “trialogue” about God, Jesus, and Muhammad.  (Ibid., pp. 501-502.)  If it is at least an option for Christian thought that Jesus’ role and mission might be much more ambiguous than the high Christology suggests, then perhaps there is more room for discussion about Jesus and Muhammad among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

There is much to commend in Küng’s approach, but much to criticize.  It can be helpful and important to clarify carefully what Christians mean or do not mean by ascribing divinity to Jesus.  Orthodox Chalcedonian Christology is nuanced and difficult, offering at best limited analogies drawn from Platonist thought forms (which, contrary to Harnack, are helpful if we recognize their limitations as analogies).  Even Christians who want to adhere to a high Christology have to admit that we really have very little idea what “fully God and fully man” means.  It is also helpful to engage the full range of Biblical scholarship on the historical setting and claims of the New Testament.  Any claim to find an exalted Chalcedonian Christology in Mark’s Gospel, for example, is likely not a fair, critical look at the text.  This kind of careful, nuanced scholarship, in conversation with careful, nuanced Jewish and Islamic scholarship on the foundational scriptures of those communities, encourages mutual understanding and perhaps even produces new insights about common themes.

On Biblical scholarship grounds alone, however, Küng’s argument is pinched at best.  Scholars such as Richard Hays, Richard Bauckham, N.T. Wright, and others, situate Jesus squarely within Second-Temple Judaism without adopting the radical Harnackian thesis that the Gospels never in any way assert Jesus’ divinity.  (Bauckham; Hays; Wright.)  There is, of course, lively debate over the work of these scholars, but they cannot simply be ignored.  Further, Küng’s dismissal of creedal development, consistent with overly reductive forms of historical-critical scholarship, ignores the function of the Bible within the Christian community.  The Biblical text never properly stands alone as a merely historical witness to its own setting, but lives and breathes in the life of the Church as it experiences the presence of Christ and the Spirit.  (Gorman; Green.)  This is also true, of course, for the Hebrew Scriptures within the varieties of Judaism, and, albeit with a different tonality, for the Qur’an within the varieties of Islam.

Beyond the issue of Küng’s selective Biblical scholarship, it does not seem helpful to suggest a fundamental limitation on the central historic Christian confession that Jesus is Lord.  Reading Küng charitably, perhaps he suggests only admission of a variety of Christologies that in different ways elucidate the meaning of Jesus’ Lordship.  Even so, if we would not ask Muslims simply to abandon their central confession that Muhammad is Allah’s Prophet, we should not ask ourselves to limit our central confession that Jesus is Lord.

Other Christian thinkers, perhaps falling somewhere between Cragg and Küng in the spectrum of “mainstream” contemporary Christian-Muslim dialogue, suggest that Christianity and Islam could be understood as differing modes of God’s revelation.  (See Beaumont, pp. 157-160.)  In this view, Muhammad could be understood as authentically a “Prophet” by Christians, even if perhaps not with the same sense of finality required by Islamic orthodoxy.  One of the most interesting thinkers in this vein is David Kerr, who suggests that Muhammad could be conceptualized in a liberation theology framework as a prophet sent particularly to the Arab peoples. (Kerr.)  Kerr argues that notions of “prophecy” in Islam and Christianity can be understood as compatible when viewed through liberation theology.  (Kerr, p. 166.)  If the Hebrew prophets came to liberate the Jewish people, and Jesus continued that mission, extended by St. Paul to the Greek-Gentile world, Muhammad furthers the mission to the Arab peoples.

Since the prompt for this paper uses the personal pronoun “I,” I will break scholarly convention a bit and speak in the first person.  Kerr’s proposal is very attractive to me as a legal scholar who is interested in political theology.  It offers the benefit of moving the conversation back from the specifics of doctrine to the universal concerns of human beings regardless of creed.  This move is consistent with broader conversations about the rule of law and human rights that are so much the focus of “law and religion” scholarship.  However, ultimately Kerr’s proposal embodies an eschatological frame that is unsatisfactory to me as a Christian theologian.  I appreciate Christian liberation theology, but it can be criticized for rendering the Kingdom of God into an entirely immanent political key that elides anything distinctive about Christ and the future fulfillment of the Kingdom.  As John Milbank has noted, particularist conceptions of justice underlie any authentic call for liberation, and those concepts as we usually express them in the West have deep roots in the philosophical tradition running from Greek thought through Christianity.  Christianity’s particular frame of reference therefore is implicated by any meaningful discussion of “justice.”  (Milbank.)[2]  And, in the end, much of liberation theology is inconsistent with what I as a lawyer want to say about the rule of law, particularly to the extent the more radical versions of liberation theology are rooted in Marxism, anarchism or even violence.  (See, e.g, Cone.)[3]

In Kerr’s summary of other possible middle ground views, he refers to Orthodox theologian George Khodr, who discusses the presence of the Holy Spirit everywhere in the world.  (Kerr, p. 159.)  Khodr wrote some of the materials quoted by Kerr in the context of ecumenical dialogue with other Christian churches.  Consistent with his Eastern Orthodox perspective, Khodr emphasizes the Eastern view of the filioque and the process of the Spirit and the Son directly from the Father.  (Khodr, p. 305-307.)  For Khodr, this means the Spirit – and therefore the Father and the Son – are present even where the Church is not fully present.  This means that, not only in non-Orthodox Christian communions, but also in Judaism and Islam, the Father and Son also can be present, even if not fully recognized, through the Spirit.  Khodr argues that, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was poured out on all people, so that “[t]he Spirit is present everywhere and fills everything by virtue of an economy distinct from that of the Son.”  (Ibid., p. 305.)  For Khodr, this means that the Spirit “appears through the scriptures of the non-Christian religions” and that Christians should approach an adherent of another religion “as someone who has something to teach us and something to manifest to us of God.”  (Ibid, p. 306.)

I appreciate Khodr’s approach, but I do not want to make the East-West distinction regarding on the filioque is as important as he suggests.  If the Church is sent within the economy of the missio Dei, and the Church is the body of Christ, and the Church prays for the salvation of the world, then in and through the presence of the Church’s prayers and emanating from the center of the Church’s Eucharistic practice, Christ is present to the whole world.  (See Guder; Newbigin; Milbank.) I do not think a robust Christian response to Muhammad can elide either an essentially “orthodox” Christology or a robust ecclesiology.  All of the nodes of Christian theological reasoning hang together and cannot be dramatically sundered without grave damage to the whole web.

At the conclusion of his essay The End of Dialogue, John Milbank suggests that Christian dialogue with other faiths should “pursue further the project of securing harmony through difference and a continuous historical conversation not bound by the modern constraints of dialogue around a neutral common topic.”  (Milbank, p. 300.)  Within this project, Milbank notes, “we should indeed expect to constantly receive Christ again, from the unique spiritual responses of other cultures.”  (Ibid.)  This seems to me a sound instinct.  It is in fact in returning to a deeply “orthodox” Christology and a truly robust ecclesiology that we can recover the universal vision of the Gospels, of St. Paul, and of the entire New Testament.

We can understand, then, that the truth of Islam does not arise in a vacuum.  The truth of Islam is truth about God’s tawhid, about creation, about the value of human life and endeavor, about justice and moral life, because God has sent that truth within the economy of the missio Dei.  I would offer a qualified agreement with Kerr that we Christians can affirm Muhammad as a “prophet” sent to the Arab peoples and others within a context that was not prepared to receive Christ in the direct, material presence of the Church.  I would go a bit further than I think Cragg does in suggesting more consonance between the redemptive themes in Islam – indeed even the elements of “grace” in Islam – with the Christian Gospel.  I can understand Muhammad at least as the Church Fathers understood Plato and other Greek thinkers, as the logos spermatikos, the seeds of the Word. (Justin Martyr, Ch. 10.)  But, at the same time, I would not go nearly as far as Küng.  The central Christian confession is that Jesus is Lord, and this does mean that at points, at least for the present, Muslims and Christians will need to disagree on at least some of the implications of the Islamic claim that Muhammad is “the Seal of the Prophets.”

Milbank also notes in The End of Dialogue that he does “not pretend that [his] proposal means anything other than continuing the work of conversion.”  (Milbank, p. 300.)  The title of that essay itself is a play on words:  not that dialogue should cease, but that the end, the goal, of dialogue ultimately is conversion.  If Milbank here means our own continual conversion, the continual conversion of the Church, as well as the continual conversion of people of other faiths, I agree wholeheartedly.  If Milbank’s notion of “conversion” runs only in one direction (I do not think it does, but the traffic for him might be thicker in one direction than another!), then I would strongly demur on that point.[4]  I hope we can yet look forward to a day, ultimately an eschatological day but perhaps an eschatological day that breaks into hidden spaces of the present, in which Muslims and Christians can understand each other better under the providential care of the one God – even as, or because, I continue to hope and believe that this will include Muslims better coming to know Jesus in ways that exceed the traditional Islamic understanding of the limits on Jesus’ divinity set by the revelation received by Muhammad and recorded in the Qur’an.

Notes

[1] See Christian Book Expo sales awards, 2008, available at http://christianbookexpo.com/salesawards/.

[2] I am aware here that I refer to “the West,” which raises numerous questions about dialogue between Christians and Muslims.  Space precludes me from dealing with the ways in which I would want to nuance and limit Milbank’s fixation on “the West.”  (Milbank deals with this distinction somewhat in the cited essay at pages 294-295.)  Nevertheless, Milbank is correct to point out that the values of liberation theology are drawn either from classical liberalism or Marxism (which contends with classical liberalism) and that, therefore, liberation theology exists as a phenomenon in relation to Western modernity, which only exists in historical relation to Christian and Greek thought.

[3] I do not want to suggest an easy dismissal of liberation theology or of Cone’s work.  For a review I wrote on A Black Theology of Liberation, see https://davidopderbeck.com/tgdarkly/2017/08/29/james-cone-a-black-theology-of-liberation/.

[4] Again, space limits a full consideration of Milbank’s various, often inconsistent, and in recent years increasingly polemical writings on Islam.  I appreciate his general instinct that Christian theology and practice should proceed from unapologetically Christian grounds in our consideration of and relations with other faiths.  I disagree with some of what he thinks that means, particularly in relation to Islam.

Bibliography

Ali, A. Yusuf, An English Interpretation of the Holy Qur’ān (Lahore:  Sh. Muhammad Asfraf 2010).

Bauckham, Richard, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:  The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2008).

Beaumont, Mark, “Christian Views of Muhammad Since the Publication of Kenneth Cragg’s Muhammad and the Christian A Question of Response in 1984,” Transformation 32(3), 145-162 (2015).

Cone, James H., A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis 2011).

Cragg, Kenneth, Muhammad and the Christian:  A Question of Response (Oxford:  Oneworld Publications 1999).

Esposito, John L., Islam:  The Straight Path, Fourth Ed. (Oxford:  OUP 2011).

Forward, Martin, Muhammad:  A Short Biography (Oxford:  Oneworld Publications 1997).

Gorman, Michael J., Scripture:  An Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible and its Interpretation (Grand Rapids:  Baker Academic 2005).

Green, Joel, Seized by Truth:  Reading the Bible as Scripture (Nashville:  Abingdon Press 2010).

Guder, Darrell L., ed., Missional Church:  A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 1998).

Hagee, John, Jerusalem Countdown:  A Prelude to War (Frontline 2013.)

Hays, Richard B., Reading Backwards:  Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco: Baylor University Press 2016).

Hillenbrand, Carole, Introduction to Islam:  Beliefs and Practices in Historical Perspective (London:  Thames & Hudson 2015).

Justin Martyr, “Second Apology,” Trans. by Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0127.htm.

Kerr, David A., Muhammad:  Prophet of Liberation – A Christian Perspective from Political Theology, Studies in World Christianity 6, No. 2, 139-174 (2000).

Kohdr, Metropolitan Georges, “Christianity in a Pluralistic World – the Economy of the Holy Spirit,” in The Orthodox Church in the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva:  World Council of Churches 1978).

Küng, Hans (trans. John Bowden), Islam:  Past, Present, Future (Oxford:  Oneworld 2007).

Marshall, David, “Muhammad in Contemporary Christian Theological Reflection,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 24:2, 161,172 (2013).

Mathias, Christopher, “Anti-Muslim Hate Group Brags About Influence in Trump’s White House,” Huffington Post, December 14, 2016, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/act-for-america-trump-influence_us_58508f98e4b092f086861e1c.

Milbank, John, “The End of Dialogue,” in The Future of Love:  Essays in Political Theology (Eugene:  Wipf and Stock 2009).

Newbigin, Lesslie, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Eerdmans:  Grand Rapids 1989).

Tieszen, Charles, A Textual History of Christian-Muslim Relations, Seventh-Fifteenth Centuries (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 2015).

Wright, N.T., The Resurrection of the Son of God, Volume 3:  Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 2003).

 

Categories
Biblical Studies Justice Political Theology Public Theology

James Cone: A Black Theology of Liberation

This is a book review I wrote on James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation for a class on modern theology.  I’m primarily posting it here because I need to reference my thoughts in another paper, but I hope readers might appreciate the review.

James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation was first written, as Cone notes in the Postscript to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition, at the height of the civil rights and black power movements in 1969.[1]  Cone says that “[n]o one can understand this book apart from the social and political context in which it was written.”[2]  In particular, at the time he wrote this book, Cone had become frustrated with theology written by “white privileged intellectuals.”[3]  He wanted to write a specifically black theology within, to, and for the black experience.

The book begins with a description of Cone’s theological method.  For Cone, “Christian theology is a theology of liberation.”[4]  In particular, Christian theology “is a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ.”[5]  This definition of theology seems consistent with other kinds of liberation theologies, and indeed seems somewhat conventional.  Cone draws his existentialist approach from noted white theologians such as Barth and Tillich.  However, Cone not only argues for “liberation” as a central motif in an existentialist theology, but further states that “black theology affirms the black condition as the primary datum of reality . . . .”[6]

The centrality of blackness to existential reality and therefore to theology, for Cone, means that “whites are in no position whatever to question the legitimacy of black theology.”[7]  White theology, Cone argues throughout the book, is a theology of oppression, beginning with the extermination of Amerindians and running through the enslavement of blacks.  Indeed, for Cone, “whites have only one purpose: the destruction of everything which is not white.”[8]  The rationality of black theology therefore need not, and should not, remain subject to the criterion for legitimacy drawn from white theology.

Notwithstanding this strong affirmation of the independence of Black theology, Cone proceeds to describe the sources and methods of Black theology in apparently conventional terms:  they include scripture, experience, and above all Jesus Christ.[9]  The “experience” Cone thinks is relevant, however, is the black experience of oppression.  The black experience is in fact the lens Cone uses to interpret scripture and Christ:  “[t]he meaning of scripture is not found in the words of scripture as such but only in its power to point beyond itself to the reality of God’s revelation – and in America, that means black liberation.”[10]  The meaning of “black liberation” is crucial to Cone’s theology in this book.  As noted above, Cone wrote the book in the midst of the black power movement.  Cone’s view of “black liberation,” therefore, included potentially violent resistance to white America.  For Cone, “[t]he black experience is the feeling one has when attacking the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white-owned building and watching it go up in flames.”[11]

Cone then proceeds to a discussion of what “God” means in black theology.  Consistent with his existentialist bent, he understands the term “God” to point to a transcendental reality that interprets history.  For Cone, this means in particular the history of God’s liberation of Israel as narrated in scripture and the history of God’s liberation of black people.[12]  At this point in the text, an apparent contradiction arises in Cone’s argument.  While “[t]he black theology view of God must be sharply distinguished from white distortions,” Cone suggests that “[t]his does not mean that black theology rejects white theology entirely.”[13]  Nevertheless, on the very next page after this statement, Cone says “[t]he goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods.”[14]

This contrast should be read as intentionally dialectical, as begins to become clearer in the next two chapters on theological anthropology and Jesus Christ.[15]  While Cone does identify blackness with black bodies, he also notes that “[i]n the literal sense a black person is anyone who has ‘even one drop of black blood in his or her veins.’”[16]  In Cone’s chapters on anthropology and Christology, blackness begins to seem more like an existential condition summed up in the black American experience rather than merely a skin color.

The final chapter discusses ecclesiology, culture, and eschatology.  Cone’s eschatology is strongly immanent.  He criticizes futurist eschatologies as means by which whites have encouraged blacks to remain docile in their servitude in hope of a future reward.[17]  His view of culture is similarly immediate to the lived experience of oppressed black people:  “[t]he world is not a metaphysical entity or an ontological problem. . . . It is very concrete.  It is punching clocks, taking orders, fighting rats, and being kicked around by police officers.”[18]  Similarly, eschatology, for Cone, must be realized in the present struggle for black liberation.  Nevertheless, he also recognizes the importance of “the future reality of life after death” as “grounded in Christ’s resurrection” because this hope supplies the courage to face death in the struggle for liberation.[19]

It is somewhat jarring for me – a white middle-aged lawyer, studying theology in a historically mostly white evangelical context – to read this text.  Cone’s frequent use of terms like “whitey,” his apparent calls to violence by blacks against whites, and his insistence that whites cannot critique black theology, initially seem to suggest that this text bears little value for a broader theological conversation, if it is not in fact completely unhinged.  But a more careful reading of the text within its own historical context argues for a subtler interpretation.  Cone brilliantly deploys modern white existentialist theology to challenge the very notion of “whiteness.”  He shows that what American culture has assumed as “normal” – the white middle class – is in fact not consistent with the fundamental norms of scripture and Jesus Christ.  Cone challenges us to see that what white American culture has despised – blackness – is, in fact, the true Christian norm precisely because it has been despised.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to know how to interpret some of the passages in this text that seem to call for black violence against whites.  At times Cone seems seriously to endorse immediate violence, and at other time he seems to suggest that violence is more of a possibility than a necessity.  In his chapter on eschatology, for example, Cone concludes that “[l]ooting, burning, or the destruction of white property are not primary concerns.  Such matters can only be decided by the oppressed themselves who are seeking to develop their images of the black Christ.”[20]  Although even the suggestion that violence might be appropriate seems shocking, Cone repeatedly invokes Nat Turner, the heroic leader of a slave rebellion prior to the Civil War, in a way that brilliantly disarms modern white liberals who eschew violence.[21]

Ultimately, I suppose I must accept Cone’s judgment that, as a white man, I cannot judge black theology.  As a white man, I learn from Cone what the experience of “blackness” in America can mean in relation to the existential core of the Gospel.  I cannot endorse the calls to violence in this text, but I can at least recognize how my requirement of nonviolent social change implicates a long history of racism that is anything but peaceful.

[1] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll:  Orbis Books 40th Anniv. Ed. 2010), 152.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., Preface to the 1986 Edition.

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 12.

[9] Ibid., Ch. 2.

[10] Ibid., 34.

[11] Ibid., 25.

[12] Ibid., Chapter 4.

[13] Ibid., 64.

[14] Ibid., 65.

[15] Ibid., Chapters 5 and 6.

[16] Ibid., 69.

[17] Ibid., 145.

[18] Ibid., 140.

[19] Ibid., 150.

[20] Ibid., 130.

[21] See, e.g., ibid.

Categories
Comparative Religion Islam

Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an

Ingrid Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an:  Its History and Place in Muslim Life (London:  Blackwell 2008).

This is another review of a book assigned for an “Understanding Islam” course I’m taking at Fuller Seminary.  This book provides an overview of Muslim perspectives on the history, nature, interpretation, and role of the Qur’an.  I have often heard critics of Islam cite verses from the Qur’an that they believe incite violence or that they think reflect a corruption of the Gospels concerning Jesus.  It was always obvious to me that these cherry-picked citations were not the whole story, but I hadn’t previously studied the context for myself.  The Mattson text helped me better understand how Muslims think about the Qur’an.

I was particularly interested to note the many ways in which these aspects of the Qur’an in Muslim life are resemble the Bible in Christian life.  Like the Bible, the Qur’an contains a diverse array of content that requires contextualized reading.  I appreciated Mattson’s discussion of different Islamic hermeneutical schools and of the principle employed by most Islamic scholars that the Qur’an must interpret itself.  This is similar to any serious school of Biblical hermeneutics:  we recognize the Bible speaks in different voices and that part of the interpretive process is to take any passage within the context of how the rest of scripture treats a question.  For example, when God commands Joshua to wipe out the pagan nations, we don’t take that as normative for Christians today, in no small part because we interpret that command in light of Jesus’ later teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

I also note an interesting but perhaps subtle difference here, however, which is the role of history in hermeneutics.  A good Christian hermeneutic of the Bible’s conquest narratives would also stress the historical context of those narratives, which in a sense relativizes the immediate commands they contain.  As Mattson suggests, there is a similar issue in Qur’anic hermeneutics, because the unique occasion on which a revelation is given provides context.  There is also a difference, however, because much of the Biblical revelation is embedded in historical narratives, while the Qur’anic revelation is largely in the form of statements rather than narratives.  Moreover, the Biblical narratives span thousands of years of history, while the Quranic revelations all occur during Muhammad’s life.  In a sense, it’s easier to contextualize much of the Biblical revelation, because the narrative itself is a key part of the context.

This dynamic also relates, I think, to the question of the Qur’an’s ontology, which Mattson also explains ably.  I find the question of whether the Qur’an is eternal or created endlessly fascinating.  For Christians, the Bible itself is not eternal, and indeed it is a fully human, fully historical product, even while it is also divinely inspired.  Again, the difference is subtler than it seems at first glance:  Christians also must try to explain what it means for the transcendent, eternal, timeless God to speak in history.  Even more directly, we finally locate God’s “speech” to us in the eternal Logos, which is Christ.  So here, this most basic difference between Islam and Christianity – the question of the incarnation of the Word – is central.

Categories
Ezekiel Luther Science and Religion

Jenson on Secondary Causes and Divine Hiddenness

Continuing in my reading of Ezekiel with Robert Jenson, I come to his commentary on Ezekiel 30:20-26.  This pericope is unremarkable, in that it is part of series of judgments against Gentile nations found in this part of the overall text.  Here, God pronounces judgment against Egypt:  “Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon and he brandishes it against Egypt.”  (Ezekiel 30:25).  Jenson’s interest in his theological commentary is about how God acts through agents within the created order, like the King of Babylon.  I’m going to set out Jenson’s commentary at length because I think he states the problem correctly, with one qualification I mention at the end of this post.  I don’t think his proposed approach, rooted in a Lutheran sense of God’s hiddenness, however, is really all that fruitful.  Here is how Jenson describes the problem.  (Quotes below are from Jenson, 237-239.)

[T]he theologically most striking feature of this prophecy is its drastic identification of the Lord himself as the one who determines and indeed fights the battles waged by created armies. An actual pharaoh is or will be made militarily incapable; it is the Lord who breaks his arms. Nebuchadnezzar has been or will be victorious; the sword that wins victory is the Lord’s own, put into Nebuchad­nezzar’s hand. Leaving aside at this point the question of God’s involvement in violence (7 7:10- 27), how are we to understand the relation between God’s act and creatures’ act, when the event itself is but one?

The question has been posed and debated throughout theological history. Traditional scholastic theology, Catholic and Protestant, has said that God is the “primary cause” of created events, which within creation have also created “secondary causes.” Thus God is here the primary cause of Egypt’s disaster, and Nebuchadnezzar the secondary cause. The doctrine is descriptively correct, but it is doubtful that it does much more than restate the problem. Through the latter part of the previous century, several movements attempted to place the scheme within a more substantive theory-in my judgment, without great success.

Jenson then describes contemporary efforts to solve the problem (and I love here his reference to the fact that Christian philosophers really are doing theology — the presumptions of Christian analytic philosophy of religion irritate me to no end):

Thus some Christian members of philosophy departments have taken to doing what is in fact theology. They are especially occupied with the question: How is an eternal God’s agency within time possible? In my view they pose the question in a way that makes a faithful answer impossible, for they tend to use words like “eternal” or “agency” or “time” so uncritically within an Aristotelian frame that the notion of an eternal reality’s agency in time becomes a simple oxymoron. If to be “eternal” is simply to be “not temporal;” than an eternal entity cannot do a temporal act, and  there is little more to be said.

Some other recent movements have taken an opposite, drastically revisionary path. Process theology among liberal theologians and open theism among evangelicals have produced metaphysically more or less coherent accounts of primary divine agency and secondary temporal agency. But they have done so only by revising Christian language about God past all biblical recognition. A God who is one pole of a universal process is not the God of Ezekiel or any other prophet.

So far, I think Jenson has rightly diagnosed the problem, and that he has rightly suggested that process theology and open theism are not viable alternatives.  He then makes another move I think is vital, which is to note that in the classical theological tradition God is not an entity within the universe, so any talk of God’s causality, whether “primary” or otherwise, can only be analogical:

I have a diagnosis and suggestion. At least since the advent of modernity, West­ern thought has tended to see the universe as a system, a self-contained process determined by immanent regularities; much modern theology has-sometimes subliminally-accepted this vision. When the world is envisioned in this fashion, God is willy-nilly envisioned as a second something external to the world. Then the question necessarily becomes: How does the eternal God intervene in the temporal system, without wrecking it? And the obvious answer  is that he cannot: either it is simply closed to him, or his entry will compromise its constitutive laws.

But scripture does not envision the creation as a system at all, but rather-as Ezekiel and this commentary have all along construed the matter-as a history.

This vision poses quite a different question: How does God  present himself as an actor in the drama of history?

After this useful diagnosis and suggestion, however, I think Jenson’s proposal relies too heavily on a Lutheran theology of God’s hiddenness:

In ancient drama, the actors brought the gods and heroes into the theater by and as masks behind which the actors hid and through which they spoke; within the ceremony  the masks were the dramatis personae. Martin Luther adduced this phenomenon, but reversed the relation of actors and masks. God brings the created heroes and villains of the temporal drama onto history’s stage as masks that hide him-for were he to appear barefaced creation would perish. Thus Nebuchadnez­zar and his like are larva dei, God’s masks-as indeed are all creatures in one way or another. And we masks truly are the personae  of the drama; we are not puppets manipulated by someone distant from us. Yet behind us hides the Creator.

Calling the created carriers of history masks of God may at first sight seem to be a figure, not to be taken with ontological seriousness. But we should remember that the great metaphysical categories are always created by drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty. To instance Scholasticism’s language for our present matter, God is of course not  a “cause” within any such cluster of cause and effect as quotidian language presumes; thus when the tradition calls him the primary cause of created events it drafts “cause” to serve in an alien discourse. And when Luther and I propose instead to draft “mask” for metaphysical duty, we perform the same move-but, just possibly, more appropriately.

Although I do think there are some important insights in this perspective, I’m not sure how it advances the ball over the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories of primary and secondary causality.  In particular, I think Jenson’s view of causality here tends to eliminate the genuine agency and freedom of creatures that the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories seek to preserve within the domain of secondary causation.

And here is my qualification about how Jenson states the problem:  I think the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework does much more than merely “restate the problem” and that contemporary philosophers of religion have mostly abandoned the “Aristotelian frame” in favor of a materialist-naturalist frame.  Much of the work in philosophical theology on these problems of causality, along with much of the modern philosophy of science, rejects formal and final causality and focuses on on what an Aristotelian frame would consider material and efficient causes.  This makes sense if the material universe is all there is, because the rules of energy and matter tell us that physical causation is a closed system.  But Christian theology insists that the material universe is not all there is, and that in fact the material universe was created by God, who is by definition transcendent of creation and not material.  The question, then, is how to speak of God’s transcendent causality while retaining the contingent freedom and reality of causality within the universe.

Of course, as Jenson notes, anything we say here is bound to involve “drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty” — that is, to require analogical reasoning.  But the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework is a way of expressing God’s transcendent causality as the source and goal of the acts of creatures within their appropriate sphere of creaturely freedom.  This brings a bit more clarity and sharpness to our thinking, which is of course not an “explanation,” but is more than a mere restatement.

In addition, concerning creaturely freedom, the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis emphasizes that no creature has the absolute freedom God enjoys, but rather creatures have certain limited range of powers, dispositions, and capacities of action given to them by God.  Nebuchadnezzar, then, was created with the power and capacity to act as God’s agent of judgment, and he was capable of various dispositions to act or not act.  That God gave Nebuchadnezzar these created powers and capacities, and that God may have influenced (though not determined) Nebuchadnezzar’s disposition to exercise them on a particular occasion, involves both God’s “action” and Nebuchadnezzar’s free agency, and seems consistent with the Biblical text.  I’m not sure why the rubric of Lutheran “hiddenness” is better on these fronts — or even if it is really much different.

 

Categories
Islam

Hillenbrand, Introduction to Islam

For the “Understanding Islam” class I’m taking this summer, we were assigned Carole Hillenbrand’s text “Introduction to Islam:  Beliefs and Practices in Historical Perspective.”  I recommend this text to anyone interested in the subject.  Here are a few thoughts.

This book provides a helpful historical and contemporary survey of the development and diversity of Islam.  I was already familiar with most of the basic historical outlines, but Hillenbrand provides some useful reminders.  I became interested in Arab and Islamic history more than twenty years ago when I first read Albert Hourani’s book A History of the Arab Peoples.[1]  Over the years I have also done lots of reading on the history of the Crusades.  Occasionally I teach a Church History class at a local seminary, in which I cover the rise of Islam and the Crusades.  All of this left me with a deep respect for the achievements of Islamic societies along with a sense of the complexities of historical and contemporary relations between Arab states and the West and between Muslims and Christians.

Hillenbrand significantly added to my understanding of the diversity of religious movements within Islam.  I had known of some the distinctions between Shiites and Sunnis, but Hillenbrand deepened that understanding.  I had not previously known much about the role of Sufism or of the varieties of Sufism.  This raises interesting questions because, as Hillenbrand notes, the role and “orthodoxy” of Sufism is questioned within various parts of Islam itself.  As I read these materials I tried to consider how I would feel about reading an “outsider” account of “Christianity,” when I know as an “insider” that one’s location within Christianity often determines how broadly applicable that term could apply.  I think this shows that there are many overlapping ways to define or describe a “religion”:  doctrinal, sociological, historical, phenomenological, emotive, and so-on.  This is true for Islam no less than for Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other variety of religion.

Hillenbrand also significantly added to my understanding of the Qur’an and its place within Islam.  I had not appreciated the Qur’an’s uniqueness as a literary creation in its historical context, that is, before there was any significant written literature in Arabic.  I loved reading the “Verses of Light” and I can relate to how the textures, cadences, and phrases of the Qur’an become part of a person’s cultural DNA, just as this is true for me with the Bible.  I also appreciated Hillenbrand’s contextualization of the concept of jihad and the distinction between the lesser and greater jihad.

There are two aspects of Hillenbrand’s book that unfortunately are already outdated:  (1) her repeated optimistic references to the Arab Spring; and (2) her focus on Al Qaeda rather than ISIS.  I did appreciate the contextualization of Usama bin Laden, whom I had assumed was serious religious scholar (as Hillenbrand makes clear, bin Laden was not a scholar of any sort).  I would be interested to learn more about how ISIS has exploited and amplified Al Qaeda’s ideology.  It also would be helpful to understand the role of the military in contemporary Arab states and how military leaders exploit Islam to quell populist movements such as the Arab Spring.

[1] Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Harvard Univ. Press 1992).

Categories
Music Political Theology Public Theology

Thoughts on the U2 Joshua Tree Tour: Running into the Arms of America

My wife persuaded me at the last minute last night to go with her and my son to the U2 Joshua Tree concert at MetLife Stadium.  She got nosebleed seats on Stubhub.  I have to admit I was reluctant.  Big stadium concerts aren’t my thing, particularly when you’re far from the action.  And though at times in my life I’ve been a huge U2 fan, I haven’t followed them much lately.  But this was really an extraordinary event in our present cultural moment.  You know Bono is going to hit you with some social activism, and you wonder what he might say or do in the Age of Trump.

Between the warm up act (The Lumineers) and U2 the stage screens displayed scrolling poems from some great American poets — Walt Whitman, of course, but also poets such as Carl Sandburg and Sherman Alexie.  How many rock concerts involve that kind of literary performance art?  During the show the big scrolling screen behind the stage showed video vignettes of a American themes — rolling prairies, jagged mountains, deserts, middle aged veterans putting on their helmets. a Salvation Army band, and much more.  I was waiting for the irony to drop, but it didn’t.  This was a sincere tribute.  Bono noted at one point how America had historically been a great partner to his native Ireland.  This was, of course, a reference to immigration, but it was sincere, not angry.  He also expressed admiration for Presidents Bush and Obama for leading the global charge against AIDS, what he termed a historic bipartisan victory.  There was one really stinging moment, featuring an old video clip with a character name “Trump,” but that was the most heavy-handed it became.  (The clip really is from a 1950’s TV show featuring a character named “Walter Trump” who claims only he can prevent the end of the world by building a wall!).

I came away from this show having enjoyed some great rock songs performed by a great rock band and thinking this Irish guy really, deeply loves America.  And I came away myself feeling a bit of a deeper love for what America is and can be at its best.  That alone is pretty amazing these days.

 

Categories
Culture Film

Wondering about Wonder Woman’ Feminism

I’m about to do something ill-advised:  I’m going to comment on why I think Wonder Woman represents the wrong kind of feminism. Let me get out there that as a middle aged male I have no business commenting on feminism. But here we go.

Many critics celebrated the fact that Wonder Woman featured a strong female lead in a compelling action film under a female director. The showing I attended was filled with the usual suspects for a superhero movie — teenage boys — but also included a healthy portion of young girls, many with their moms, looking for a female hero.

Of course, in the abstract, these are facts worth celebrating.  But I wonder about what the “action” element says about Wonder Woman’s feminism.  The movie sees Wonder Woman fighting with the Allies in World War I.  The German army is under the control of the Greek god Ares, who — spoiler alert, though you’ll see it coming a mile away — is actually a British intelligence officer.  To end the war, Wonder Woman must kill Ares.  To get to Ares, Wonder Woman must waste bushels of German soldiers.  A big part of Wonder Woman’s feminist strength is her ability to amp up the German body count without any emotion, aside from righteous anger.

The problem is that the average German soldier, like most average soldiers, is just a regular guy thrust into the hell of battle and trying to stay alive.  Why is it so empowering that Wonder Woman can dehumanize the enemy just as well as the boys who usually run wars?  The feminist message here seems to be that women can be just as self-righteously violent as men.  I guess if “empowerment” is just about the power of violence, this is a win, but it hardly seems a game worth playing.

There is a bit of classic superhero movie banter/monologuing during Wonder Woman’s boss-battle with Ares in which Ares sort of raises some of these points.  Don’t you see, Ares says, you and me are really the same, the Germans and the Americans area really the same, and it’s all about power and domination?  No, Wonder Woman replies, I’m better than that, and so are these humans (at least the ones who aren’t Germans)– then she summons the inner strength to squash him.  Subtle moral dilemma avoided.  Does this kind of feminism just offer equal-opportunity nihilism?

Well, maybe I’m getting too old-guy-grouchy about a summer popcorn superhero movie.  But I would point out the trailer for another presumably empowering movie about to slink into the multiplex, Atomic Blonde.  This film apparently features a sex-crazed mega-hot lesbian assassin.  In the trailer we see quick cuts of Charlize Theron alternatively blowing peoples’ heads off, french kissing a sexy female spy like a thirsty snake (literally with the tongue flicking around), and writhing passionately on a bed with the same target in what can only be described as a scene from girl-on-girl supermodel soft porn.  (They are, of course, supermodel hot, skinny, big-breasted, instantaneously and incandescently orgasmic babes — that is, this isn’t Mary and Sally who live down the block, but the kind of action a horny hetero cisgendered teenage boy dreams about).  Now we get the kinky violence and the kinky sex together in one empowering package.  And this teasing trailer plays to the theater full of young girls and moms who came to see Wonder Woman.  Truly, I’m astonished that they allowed this trailer to play before a film that everyone knows will be attended largely by adolescents.  If this is the revolution, show me to the early bird dinner somewhere in the old folks home and count me out.