Author: dopderbeck

Categories
Islam Theology of Religions

Learning About Islam and Islamic-Christian Relations

I’m taking a class on “Understanding Islam” this summer through Fuller Seminary.  One of our first readings is a chapter by Martin Accad from “Toward Respectful Understanding and Witness Among Muslims.”  I’m looking forward to learning more about the Muslim tradition and about how I may dialogue with and bear witness to my own Christian faith among Muslims.  Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working on some legal projects with Muslim scholars and have learned a great deal from them.

Accad notes that:

Christians are also met with a serious challenge today when attempting to witness in a Muslim context. The message that the media and leadership-political and religious-set forth is one that either demonizes or idealizes Islam. In the Christian church context, the attitude is more often one of demonization. Christians have always advocated that we are to love sinners but hate sin. This is a moral distinction that is fairly easy to maintain, as it is accompanied by the notion that we are all sinners outside the grace of God. However, there is today a parallel notion, which is spreading alarmingly fast, that we are to love Muslims but hate Islam. This notion is disturbing, for it is a very short step from the demonization of Islam and Muslims altogether. In reality, one observes that most people are unable to maintain such a theoretical separation between an ideology and its adherents.

Actually I think it’s difficult to maintain the “moral distinction” Accad mentions even in matters of ethics, but certainly I agree with him that it’s impossible concerning an entire cultural and religious identity.

In his chapter, Accad sketches a spectrum of possible Christian responses to Islam, ranging from sycretistic to polemical, as follows:

He advocates the “kerygmatic interaction,” approach, which he discusses as follows:

I want to retain from this Pauline usage the difference between the kerygma and the apologia, the difference in attitude between an apologetic defense of one’s beliefs on the one hand, and a positive proclamation of it on the other. The kerygmatic approach to Christian­-Muslim interaction is thus devoid of polemical aggressiveness, apologetic defensiveness, existential adaptiveness, or syncretistic elusiveness; not because any of these other four approaches is necessarily wrong, but because that is the nature of the kerygma: God’s gracious and positive invitation of humanity into relationship with himself through Jesus. It needs essentially no militant enforcers, no fanatic defenders, no smart adapters, and no crafty revisers.

For the kerygmatic Christ follower, religions are recognized to be an essential part of the human psychological and sociological needs. At the same time, God is seen to be above any religious system. Although God is the absolute Truth, no single religious system is infallible or completely satisfactory. I would contend that the Gospels indicate that Jesus himself, who is never seen as denying his Jewishness, had this attitude. He was at peace with his religious identity as a Jew, practiced the requirements of the law from childhood, entered the Jewish places of worship, and was trained in Jewish theology and methods. At the same time, whenever Jesus expressed frustration in the Gospels, it was generally either toward some stratified religions institutional form such as the Sabbath, or toward stubborn institutional religious leaders. His message cut through the safety of the legalistic boundaries of righteousness, and his invitation to relate to God was extended to the marginalized and outcast of his society. Further, through carefully crafted parables, Jesus proclaimed himself to be the inaugurator of God’s kingdom in fulfillment of God’s promise to the nations, and he established himself as the final criterion of admission into that kingdom as the way to the Father.

Therefore) in recognition that social organization is a natural human phenomenon toward which we are all inclined, the kerygmatic position and attitude does not consist in rejecting one’s religious heritage, for it would soon be replaced by another form of ideol­ogy. In the kerygmatic approach it is Christ himself who is at the center of salvation rather than any religious system. The kerygma is never a message of condemnation, but it brings condemnation to those that arc stuck within religious boundaries. The principal difference between this position and the other positions on the dialogical spectrum is that the conversation is removed entirely from the realm of institutionalized religious talk. One theologian who captured this worldview was Karl Barth. In a chapter he titled “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion,” he said, “We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern) indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man.”

The kerygmatic approach that we are here advocating is therefore the equivalent of this Barthian revelation of God. The kerygma upheld by this approach is nothing less than God’s own revelation in Christ.

The invocation of Barth here is interesting, and I’m not sure I agree with Barth’s theology of religions.  In fact, I’d say I lean more towards the “existential interaction” approach to the theology of religions (for this, Accad identified Karl Rahner), because I’m not sure Barth appreciated how God providentially works within religions to point towards the kerygma of Christ nor how important religious “institutions” are for human interaction.  But on the whole, Accad’s approach seems to me much more faithful and fruitful than any of the extreme ends of the spectrum.  It also both grows out of, and helps encourage, a more patient, gentle Christian spirituality of mission.

Categories
Political Theology Public Theology

Religious Speech, Conscience, and Political Office

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Amari opines that progressives are targeting conscience by censoring leaders with unpopular religious opinions.  This is a key front in today’s culture wars, and as usual, both sides fail to appreciate the question’s difficult nuances.

I think Amari is right to note that there are issues conservative religious people should be able to raise in the public square without vitriol.  Hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage remain subject to reasonable debate.  Many, many religious people have views about those issues that are not palatable to progressives, and the progressives don’t have the only morally defensible views.

But one of the missing nuances is that the problem folks like Amari raise is about political censure, not legal punishment.  The politicians highlighted in Amari’s article are not in any danger of criminal prosecution for their expressed opinions.  Rather, they are unwelcome in progressive political circles, and progressive politicians criticize them in the public square.

It would be better, I think, if we could debate issues like abortion and gay marriage without overheated rhetoric from either side, but we’re still free to debate.  Of course, one of the subtexts in pieces like Amari’s is that legal censorship and the suspension of freedoms of speech and association is just around that corner.  There’s room here for an appropriate call for vigilance, but not for alarmism.

A much more difficult missing nuance is that neither Amari nor anyone else really believes that all religiously motivated speech should be expressed without any political censure — or indeed, without any legal censure.  Amari is offended that Bernie Sanders publicly questioned President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought, over a blog post in which Vought said that Muslims “do not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”  Amari suggests “Mr. Vought’s was a particularly stark summary of the basic Christian teaching that faith in the God-Man is essential to salvation.”  Amari finds Sanders’ rebuke of Vought as Islamaphobic “depressing” because he thinks “Mr. Sanders implied that a devout Christian can’t hold fast to his faith’s most demanding claims and at the same time exercise public authority with decency and honor. If you disagree with someone’s theology, in other words, it must mean you hate him.”

But what if Vought were writing about Jews?  If Vought’s theology is consistent, he must think the same about Jews as he does about Muslims.  For Vought, it must be the case that Jews “do not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”  I suspect that many serious Jewish people would — rightly — be horrified by such a statement.  I also suspect that in a civil society after Auschwitz, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who claim in the public square that all Jews “stand condemned.”

Now, Vought, I presume, would say that his statement about condemnation is taken out of context because he is referring to a particular doctrine of justification for sin and not to the political sphere.  I suspect Vought’s understanding of prevenient or common grace, justification, eschatology, and so-on is confused, that he’s misusing some Pauline language here, and that he’s forgetting Romans 2.   Most Christians in fact don’t hold these views as starkly as Vought or Amari suggest, even while still maintaining the salvific uniqueness of Christ (see, for example, the Roman Catholic Vatican II document Nostra Aetate and related statements:  “The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.”).  But, fine — Vought can hold some kind of quasi-hyper-Calvinist view about all this if that’s what he thinks.  Yet the observation that such extreme or at least poorly explained theological views can have serious implications when expressed by a public figure is not out of line.

Imagine, for example, that a political leader opined that

  • White people should be allowed to enslave black Africans, because slavery is approved by the Bible and is the process God has ordained for the eventual Christianization of Africans.
  • Women should not be allowed to vote or hold elected office, because God has ordained that only men should be political leaders.
  • Marriage between races should be forbidden, because God has ordained differences between the races.

All of these, of course, were opinions previously held and vigorously defended in American politics, and encoded into American law.  The defenders of these views often claimed they faced religious persecution because their views were being censured as society changed — and indeed we fought the Civil War over slavery, which both sides viewed in religious apocalyptic terms.  Today, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who express such views.

Or, perhaps closest to home, what if a political leader opined that “all non-Muslims are infidels and must either convert of face execution.”  I’m pretty sure that Russel Vought himself would publicly censure this opinion, because it is of course the view of radical Islamic extremist groups such as ISIS.  And Vought or anyone else would be right to censure this opinion, because it is abhorrent to a diverse society that values religious freedom.  Moreover, expressions of opinion such as this one might even become legally actionable if they incite specific acts of violence.

We could go on with many more examples like these.  The point is that Amari’s stark caricature of the problem is unhelpful.  Religious people should be free to express specifically religious views in the public square, but at the same time a society of diverse people with different religious views can respond vigorously to religious views that clash with common public values.  So long as we’re free to engage in such public debate, and so long as we’re free to form associations with like-minded people and to leave associations when disagreements become too basic, this is a feature of civil democracy, not a bug.

IMG SRC (Constantine holding a cross and sword)= Staro 2, Wikimedia Commons

Categories
Political Theology Public Theology

Political Theology from Augustine to Hobbes

Here’s a clip from one of my videos for a Christian Theological Ethics class I teach.  This discusses the nature of the “state” from Augustine to Hobbes.

Categories
Science and Religion

Nagel on Materialism

I mentioned Thomas Nagel in my previous post about Dennett, which reminded me that I had published a review of Nagel’s book Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press 2012) in the Englewood Review of Books a while back.  Here’s my review of Nagel.

It has become fashionable in recent years to assume that all human behaviors, including all concepts of the human “mind,” finally are reducible to biochemistry.  This presents a conundrum for governance, law and policy.  As Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society puts it, “[t]he idea that behaviour is determined by physical causes is hard to reconcile with the intuitive notions of free will and moral agency on which our legal systems are based.”[2]  Some “neuroLaw” scholars, such as David Eagleman, Director of the Initiative for Neuroscience and the Law at the Baylor College of Medicine, argue that the legal system should abandon concepts of intentionality and fault, and that the justice system should replace traditional punishments with “prefontal workouts” designed to recondition the brains of lawbreakers.[3]  These neuroLaw scholars represent a species of Darwinist / materialist reductionism that seeks to subsume all notions of morality and ethics within an evolutionary paradigm.[4]

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University, steps boldly into this fray with his book Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.[5]  Mind & Cosmos is at once a convincing refutation of Darwinian reductionism and a frustrating misstatement of religious / theological alternatives to such reductionism.

On the convincing side, Nagel ably argues that consciousness, cognition and value cannot be adequately accounted for by reductionistic materialism.  Nagel’s basic argument is familiar:  reductive materialism eliminates the epistemic basis for the phenomena of consciousness, cognition and value.  If human beings are nothing but complex gene replicators, there is no reason to think that we possess any capacity to get outside of ourselves and understand the world, beyond what is immediately required for survival.  This would mean, among other things, that the practice of a science that could establish the objective truth of reductive materialism itself would be impossible.[6]  Belief in reductive materialism requires a kind of epistemic realism that, for reductive materialism, must represent merely an epiphenomenal delusion.  And this uncomfortable fact further implies that “[f]rom a Darwinian perspective, our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless.”[7]  The “entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up … by practical reflection and cultural development” would represent mere adaptations and not necessary truths about the world.[8]

For those versed in the debates between reductive materialists and their interlocutors, these arguments are likely to seem persuasive or unpersuasive depending on prior inclinations.  I find the epistemic argument compelling:  natural selection cares only about survival, not truth.  The retort that an organism with an inaccurate perception of its environment is unlikely to survive is demonstrably false, at least if we understand “accurate” to involve a capacity to see beyond immediate circumstances and to take in the bigger picture.  The fly on my window has no idea that it is sitting on a “window” in a “building” filled with “people” writing “book reviews” and other things on “computers.”  Nor does the fly possess any capacities that would enable it to conduct investigations into these phenomena.  The fly can, of course, sense the surface under its feet, and it can feel the oncoming pressure wave in time to zip off before my copy of Nagel’s book smashes it into mush – that much, and only that much, is required for its survival.  More than that would be inefficient and wasteful, and natural selection abhors wasted energy.  Nevertheless, it is possible to construct just-so stories to explain how perceptual capacities evolved by our hominid predecessors in the crucible of the ancient African savannah have since been exapted for the purpose of higher-order reasoning.  This likely is a debate that can never be resolved without resort to prior assumptions about what is and is not possible – that is, without first assuming the truth or implausibility of materialism.  Still, Nagel does a fine job of presenting the anti-reductionist arguments clearly and concisely.[9]

The most frustrating part of Nagel’s book is his lack of comprehension of traditional theological conceptions of God in relation to creation.  Nagel suggests that “[a]t the outer boundaries of the world, encompassing everything in it, including the law-governed natural order revealed by science, theism places some kind of mind or intention, which is responsible for the physical and the mental character of the universe.”[10]  He argues that for this “theistic” view to work, “the existence and properties of God and therefore of his creation, cannot conceivably be other than they are,” and claims that theists “tend to believe” in this view of God and creation.[11]  Nagel finds this approach unsatisfactory because, among other things, “[i]t amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hangs together is of a certain type, namely, intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates except what is found in the results to be explained.”[12]  Nagel further assumes that theistic accounts of creation must involve Divine “intervention,” for example by “assembling the genetic material that would result eventually in conscious life.”[13]

Nagel’s description of “theism” might apply to some contemporary analytic philosophers and “intelligent design” advocates who try to defend an abstract, deracinated, generic “Designer” apart from the particulars of a Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other traditioned understanding of “God.”  It is not, however, a description of what “God” means in any of the great theological traditions.  God is not the “mind” or “intelligence” at the end of a long string of temporal / physical causes, for God is neither temporal nor physical.  By definition, God is transcendent of creation, not merely another being-in-creation.  To render God as if Godself were just a “first cause” within creation, in fact, would constitute heresy.  Nor does the traditional doctrine of creation require Divine “intervention” to “assemble” the building blocks of life.[14]

It is true that the Abrahamic faiths traditionally understand God to have created the universe ex nihilo.  But it is not as though God were floating in outer space and suddenly decided to flick the pre-big-bang singularity with a finger in order to get things rolling.  Properly understood, creation ex nihilo means that at every moment, the universe’s existence is contingent on God’s loving power and will – it does not even, technically, require a temporal “beginning.”  When classical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas speak of a “first mover,” they mean an a-temporal, eternal source towards which the universe is drawn, not a force in the temporal past that overcame the inertia of static matter.  In fact, the notion of pre-existing static matter contradicts creation ex nihilo.  “The love that fires the Sun,” for Augustine, was a love that ever draws creation into God.[15]

Nor would the Abrahamic faith traditions conceive of God as having “properties” that are concomitant with properties of the physical universe, as Nagel suggests.  In classical Christian theology, God is “simple,” meaning without parts or divisions.  God does not “have” goodness; He is good.  God does not “have” love; He is love.  God does not “have” intelligence and wisdom; He is the Logos.  And God’s goodness, love, wisdom, and will are inseparable and unbreakable.  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” says the shema.[16]  It is therefore improper to speak of the “properties” of God.  It is because God is one and because God transcends all physical “properties” that He can be the creator-God of the Bible and the Qur’an, and not just the Very Powerful Designer of Enlightenment Deism.[17]

Finally, Nagel is only partly correct when he claims that there is “nothing more to say” about God’s intentions for creation except by observing what creation is.  For Christians, Jews and Muslims, observation of creation does tell us some things about God, in particular that He is creative, beautiful, powerful and glorious.[18]  But all of the Abrahamic faiths rely on revelation – on their scriptures, and on God’s actions through his messengers and prophets (and for Christians, in the incarnate Jesus) – to discern more fully God’s purposes for His creation.  The possibility of “revelation,” of course, is one of the big sticking points between materialism and these religious views.

Nagel’s personal preference, as an atheist, is for a sort of process theology of human emergence.  He suggests that human cognition “was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well.  Each of our lives is part of a lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”[19]  This is also a familiar refrain in debates about theology, science, and transcendence, which in contemporary discourse are often heavily influenced by process thought and process theology.[20]  “God” no longer is the transcendent creator of the universe, but rather Godself or God-consciousness or human consciousness is an emergent property within the universe.[21]  Perhaps process thought and process theology represent improvements over the sort of God-of-the-gaps interventionism that Nagel thinks represents the only option for “theists.”  It is less clear, however, whether process models offer a better account than an option that Nagel ignores:  the traditional theological belief that God is the eternal transcendent source and goal of a creation graced with its own integrity – an integrity that makes scientific investigation possible – as a gift of Divine love.

[1] Cf. my article The Problem With NeuroLaw, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2214601.

[2]Martha Farah, “Responsibility and Brain Function,” available at  http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/penn-neuroethics-briefing/responsibility-a-brain-function

[3] See Daivd Eagleman, Incognito:  The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon 2011).

[4] See, e.g., David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone:  How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Ourselves (Delacorte Press 2007); Michael Graziano, God Soul Mind Brain:  A Scientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World (Leapfrog Press 2010); Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape:  How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press 2010).

[5] Thomas Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press 2012).

[6] Id., Chapters 3 and 4.

[7] Id. at 109.

[8] Id.

[9] Even this presentation, however, is marred by Nagel’s sympathy for “intelligent design” theories that posit gaps in natural processes represented by “irreducible complexity” in certain chemical pathways or physical systems.  See id. at 10.  The epistemic argument against reductionist materialism does not require any such Design-in-the-gaps claims, since “consciousness” might transcend the physical without gaps in the physical.

[10] Mind & Cosmos, at 21.

[11] Id. at 21-22.

[12] Id. at 25.

[13] Id. at 59; see also id. at 94 (“for theists there is the intentional alternative:  divine intervention to create life out of the basic material of the world, and perhaps also to guide the process of evolution by natural selection, through the intentional production and preservation of some of the mutations on which natural selection operates along the way.”).

[14] For good discussions of these distinctions, see, e.g., David Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Univ. Notre Dame Press 1993); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdman’s 2004); Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea:  Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Eerdman’s 2010);

[15] See Augustine, Confessions (Oxford Univ. Press 2009); see also Bruce Cockburn, “Lord of the Starfields,” on In the Falling Dark (Remastered, Rounder Records 2009).

[16] Deut. 3:23.

[17] See supra Note 13.

[18] See Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”).

[19] Id. at 85.

[20] See, e.g., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy, “Process Thought,” available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ (last visited February 12, 2013) and “Process Theism,” available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-theism/ (last visited February 12, 2013); The Center for Process Studies website, available at http://www.ctr4process.org/ (last visited February 12, 2013).

[21] See id.

Categories
Science and Religion

Dennett on Bristling

I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett’s latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back:  The Evolution of Minds.  At the start of the book, Dennett acknowledges that some of his ideas about the mind — in particular, that consciousness is an illusion — are disturbing.  He seeks to disarm what he calls a “bristling” response to these threatening ideas.  A bristling response, he suggests, is a conditioned response rooted in evolution that produces cognitive distortions.  He implies that we should recognize and defuse the bristling response so that we can calmly and rationally evaluate his ideas.

There’s no doubt that immediate emotional reactions such as “bristling” in response to threats are rooted in our evolutionary history.  There’s also no doubt that Dennett’s strategy of pointing out this response among readers who feel threatened by the notion that human consciousness is an illusion reflects a powerful rhetorical strategy.  But Dennett’s suggestion that a person interested in the truth ought to recognize this response and set it aside makes no sense within the framework of his overarching claims.

“Bristling” is pervasive in nature because it works.  Creatures in nature face real threats every day.  A response that puts an organism on high alert and that deters the threat helps the organism survive.  Far from always representing a cognitive distortion, in nature, bristling often is a truthful, adaptive response to real threats.

The notion that consciousness is an illusion —  including, for Dennett, all of our sense of will, intentionality, and moral reasoning — seems like a real threat to human existence.  If everyone truly believed and acted on the belief that there is no truth content to consciousness nothing would prevent power and violence from having the final say.  Basic structures of law and society might fall away.  Bristling here seems like an appropriate response.

But Dennett seems to imply that “bristling” presents cognitive distortions because the response is overdetermined to real threats.  That is certainly correct.  This overdetermination itself likely is adaptive.  Let’s say, for example, that for every twenty “knee-jerk” reactions you have, only one of them responds to a danger of serious injury to your knee.  It seems like you’ve expended wasted energy on nineteen useless knee-jerks.  But the injury to your knee on that one occasion would have been serious, meaning that the injury would have cost you as much or more, perhaps far more, than the energy you spent on the nineteen “false positive” knee-jerks.  On balance, the overdetermination of knee-jerks was relatively efficient because the abundance of caution avoided a serious injury.

No doubt, then, that “bristling” behavior is overdetermined to threats.  The next step in Dennett’s rhetorical move is a suggestion that we sometimes need to exercise a higher level of control over our immediate threat reaction in order to assess the situation rationally.  This kind of rational control allows us to calibrate our knee-jerks and move to a higher level of efficiency.  If we can recognize and avoid the bristling response, we can use our calm, scientific rationality to acknowledge that, in fact, consciousness is an illusion.  Further, if we use that same calm, scientific reasoning, we can show why basic structures of law and society that limit power and violence need not fall away and might even be improved.

The obvious problem here is that Dennett’s metaphysical project precludes any such higher level of rational control.  Rationality is part of consciousness, so in Dennett’s universe “rationality” cannot exist.  You might think you’re exercising rational control over your bristling response, but that, too, is an illusion.  Indeed, your “rational” response to your bristling reaction is merely another adaptive response.  And Dennett’s own rhetorical move of seeking to appease the bristling response through a “friendly” gesture of appealing to reason likewise is yet another merely adaptive response.  It’s either “nothing buttery” all the way down, or something else is going on.

As Thomas Nagel suggests in his review of Dennett’s book,

[t]here is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of science. . . . To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain.

I’d go further than Nagel here and suggest that there are plenty of truths that science simply cannot explain because the natural sciences are not the only, nor even the most basic, way of understanding truth.  Understanding truth always, necessarily, begins with metaphysics — and, therefore, with theology — whether acknowledged or not.  Dennett assumes a materialist metaphysic with a corresponding (though ultimately incoherent) epistemology and an attendant a-theology, and that, finally, is the rub.

IMG SRC = National Geographic Video; NY Times

Categories
Economics Eschatology Ezekiel

Ezekiel, Nature, and Grace

In my ongoing reading of Ezekiel along with Robert Jenson’s Brazos Commentary, I came to the amazing poem in Ezekiel 27:1-36.  This text is a lament over the fall of Tyre, a pagan port and trading city on an island.  The poem pictures Tyre as a splendid ship:

They made all your planks
    of fir trees from Senir;
they took a cedar from Lebanon
    to make a mast for you.
From oaks of Bashan
    they made your oars;
they made your deck of pines
    from the coasts of Cyprus,
    inlaid with ivory.
Of fine embroidered linen from Egypt
was your sail,
    serving as your ensign; 
blue and purple from the coasts of Elishah
    was your awning.

The texts lists every sort of valuable good traded with Tyre by surrounding nations, including Israel:

silver, iron, tin, and lead . . . human beings and vessels of bronze . . .horses, war-horses, and mules . . . ivory tusks and ebony . . . turquoise, purple, embroidered work, fine linen, coral, and rubies . . . wheat . . . millet,honey, oil, and balm . . .wine of Helbon, and white wool . . . wrought iron, cassia . . .saddlecloths for riding . . . lambs, rams, and goats . . . all kinds of spices, and all precious stones, and gold . . . choice garments, . . . clothes of blue and embroidered work, and . . .carpets of coloured material, bound with cords and made secure. . . .

Notwithstanding its prosperity, Tyre ultimately is set up for judgment and ruin:

Your riches, your wares, your merchandise,
    your mariners and your pilots,
your caulkers, your dealers in merchandise,
    and all your warriors within you,
with all the company
    that is with you,
sink into the heart of the seas
    on the day of your ruin.

It’s tempting to suggest Tyre is judged because of its luxuries, but the text doesn’t exactly say so.  In fact, in his commentary, Jenson suggests that God regrets that Tyre must face judgment:

In our text, God regards humanity’s natural achievements with admiration, but he does so within a context of sorrow for their failure, a failure that is measured by the supernatural demands and promises made to his own people.  This suggests, for one thing, that the gift of natural goods to all humanity is not finally independent of the gifts made in history to God’s people:  the story of the Lord’s conflicts with and benefits to his people encompasses the stories of the Lord with the Gentile nations — how that is to be worked metaphysically currently divides the theologians.  And it further suggests that that the Lord’s supernatural regard to natural gifts is always at once affirming and mournful.

Jenson Commentary, 217.  Jenson’s comment puts the lament of the fall of “Babylon the Great” in Revelation 18 — clearly, I think, an echo of this text from Ezekiel — into a somewhat new light for me.  Revelation 18:11 contains a similar list of luxury cargo:

And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives.

Perhaps here, too, God regrets the destruction of these cultural artifacts, although I think both here and in Ezekiel the inclusion of human beings / slaves suggests part of how the culture became corrupt.  Yet in Revelation 21, we see the New Jerusalem, a city built of gold and jewels, to which the “kings of the Earth” bring their glory (Rev. 21:24), suggesting that the finest things of culture are not finally destroyed after all.

Categories
Economics

William Cavanaugh, Trade, and Scarcity

William Cavanaugh is a contemporary theologian everyone should read.  In his book “Being Consumed:  Economics and Christian Desire,” Cavanaugh brings his scholarship on Augustine’s treatment of “desire” into the contemporary economic sphere.[1]   As with Luther, however, I have to take issue with some of the ways in which Cavanaugh characterizes “the market.”  He relies heavily on Milton Friedman for the concept that “[a] market is free if people can satisfy their wants without harming others, even if there are utterly incommensurable ideas about what people ought to desire.”[2]  I think there is some confusion here between Friedman’s general views on market economies in relation to macro-economic factors and basic principles of microeconomics.  From a microeconomic perspective, it is also true that a “free” market responses to consumer preferences, but the measure of a truly free, efficient, competitive market is that the price of goods sold equals the producer’s marginal cost.  A lower price eventually would put the producer out of business, and a higher price would allow the produce to obtain a surplus above a competitive level.  The reason it is generally a bad idea for governments to set quotas or prices on consumer goods is that government quotas or price regulation interferes with the market efficiency that leads to what Luther had in mind:  the price is what the market price on both the producer and consumer side will bear, no more and no less.

I think Cavanaugh also is somewhat mistaken in one of his central arguments:  that “[t]he very basis of the market, trade – giving up something to get something else – assumes scarcity.”[3]  Much here depends on what we mean by “scarcity.”

Scarcity can mean that if I possess something necessary for survival, you cannot simultaneously possess an adequate supply of the same kind of thing, and therefore we cannot both survive.  If there are 100 total units of food available, and I possess 75 units, you can possess only 25 units.  Whatever food I possess takes away from your food.  If we both need 75 units of food to survive, one or both of us must starve.

Scarcity also can mean that there are not enough goods to satisfy everyone’s desires — which is not the same as everyone’s needs.  Perhaps there are 150 units of total food available, and we each need only 75 units to survive.  I am a glutton, however, and I desire 125 units.  If I can fulfill my desire, you will starve.  But if some portion of my desire goes unfulfilled, we can both survive.

I think what Cavanaugh wants to suggest is that scarcity in this latter sense often produces scarcity in the former sense because human desire is often so twisted.  Tonight I will go to a restaurant, and I will eat far more than I need to survive.  Meanwhile, not far from where I live there are cities with food deserts, where young children cannot obtain enough quality food to grow healthy, while in yet other places people are starving to death.  But it is not necessarily the case that the food I will eat tonight takes food out of the pockets of those other people.  In the first sense of scarcity, far more than enough total food is produced in the world for me to enjoy a nice meal at a restaurant and for everyone else at least to eat well enough to live in decent health.

Moreover, it could be possible for trade to supply what people need. Indeed, trade could provide a mechanism for disciplining excessive desire. Perhaps I have a 10 acre field, and I can grow enough wheat for my family’s needs, plus a surplus, but I cannot at the same time raise sheep.  I have a surplus of wheat, but a deficit of wool.  Perhaps I am a glutton and I would like to eat all the wheat myself, but meanwhile I am freezing to death because I lack clothing.  At the same time, perhaps you have a 10 acre field that supports sheep, but not wheat.  You have a surplus of wool, but a deficit of wheat.  Perhaps you are a clothes hound and you would like to hoard all the wool for yourself, but at the same time you are starving.  In this context, it is possible for us to engage in a market exchange that allows us both to obtain adequate bread and adequate clothing, even though that requires some compromise of each of our desires.  Cavanaugh does not seem to imagine a world in which this sort of market exchange could be part of a just society, but this is precisely the kind of exchange a truly free market is supposed to foster.  Even though in economic terms there is “scarcity” here, it seems to me that there is also a kind of “abundance,” of the very sort God had in mind when he gave humanity dominion over creation while at the same time giving us responsibility to work the Garden.

Of course, Cavanaugh is not fundamentally wrong about misplaced desire and its distributional consequences.  More than enough food is produced globally to feed everyone, with plenty left over for nice restaurant meals, but poverty and inequality prevent at least a billion people from obtaining enough to eat.  There are many causes of this poverty and inequality, including corruption and the failure of the rule of law, but some of it is caused by those of us in the developed world who desire certain kinds of goods and lifestyles that are supported by unjust laws and policies, including exploitative labor conditions in much of the developing world, unbalanced intellectual property rules, lack of access to capital, the legacy of slavery and colonialism, and so-on.  My point here is just that “trade” is not in itself the problem, but rather “trade” is part of our created stewardship.

[1] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed:  Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2008).

[2] Ibid., Kindle Loc. 107.

[3] Ibid., Kindle Loc. 936.

Categories
Economics Luther

Martin Luther on Economics

Martin Luther fascinates me, not least because he is such a bundle of contradictions.  This is true as much in his economic thinking as anywhere else.  In his sermon “On Trading and Usury,” Luther argues that it is sinful for merchants to sell their goods for the highest possible profit. [1]  Here, he says, “occasion is given for avarice, and every window and door to hell is opened.”[2]  Luther says the ideal civil law would involve a government agency that would set a fair price, but he thinks “we Germans have too many other things to do; we are too busy drinking and dancing to provide for rules and regulations of this sort.”[3]  Since government regulation of this kind is not feasible, he suggests that “the next best thing is to let goods be valued at the price for which they are bought and sold in the common market, or in the land generally.”[4]  He also suggests that crafts people should price their goods based on the amount of labor they put into creating them, at a rate comparable to a day laborer in some other occupation.[5]

Luther’s argument here is interesting because, to anyone with a sense of how economics works, it seems incoherent.  The “highest possible profit” for any commodity is simply the price the market will bear, which is one of Luther’s suggestion for a fair price.  It may be that Luther is writing against the backdrop of an economy that is not really a free market because of the influence of trade guilds and general lack of consumer information.  Perhaps candle makers in Wittenberg could charge much higher prices than candle makers in Münster because the markets were so localized.  Or, perhaps the furniture maker’s guild artificially inflated prices because of its monopoly on the trade.  In any event, in modern regulatory economics, that kind of problem is addressed through antitrust law, not through government price-setting.

Luther’s alternate suggestion of setting a price equal to the value of labor in another occupation – in addition to being inconsistent with looking to an ordinary competitive market price – makes no sense unless the other occupation involves comparable skill, training, precision, and so-on.  Even then, the monetary “value” of a unit of labor is not something that can be established ex ante without reference to the market for whatever commodity the labor produces.  What Luther seems to have in mind here is luxuries versus necessities.  He might have a point on this score.  Modern microeconomics recognizes that demand for luxury goods (sometimes called “Veblen” goods after the economist who first described this effect in detail) is highly price inelastic – that is, the quantity demanded does not vary significantly as price is raised.[6]  This is why a mid-range Mercedes costs $25,000 or so more than a comparable quality Toyota.

[1] Martin Luther, “Trade and Usury,” in William C. Placher, ed. Callings:  Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2005).

[2] Ibid., Kindle Loc. 3091.

[3] Ibid., Kindle Loc. 3113.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] For a description of this and other price elasticity effects, see David W. Opderbeck, Patents, Essential Medicines, and the Innovation Game, 58 Vanderbilt Law Review 501 (2005).

Categories
Biblical Studies

Thoughts on Romans 11:25-26 and Jewish-Christian Relations

This semester I took a class on Romans through Fuller Seminary.  Studying this text was an incredible challenge and delight.  We had to complete two one-sitting readings of the text, which gives a great sense of its sinewy power as a letter.

I had to write a short (5-page) exegetical paper on a short passage.  The paper was supposed to raise questions more than answer them, and to address some issues of “reading from location.”  I chose Romans 11:25-26.  FWIW, here’s what I wrote.

The section I have chosen is Romans 11:25-27.  This section raises challenging and related questions about (1) Israel’s historical role in the economy of salvation; (2) the future of the Jewish people in the economy of salvation, particularly those who do not become Christians; (3) the relationship between Jews and Christians; and (4) the scope of God’s final salvation.

Paul begins this section by stating that he is disclosing a “mystery” (μυστήριον) to the “brothers and sisters” he has been addressing in the letter.[1]  (Rom. 11:25.)  The Pauline corpus regularly uses μυστήριον to refer to Christ’s death and resurrection as something not previously revealed or know as part of God’s saving plan (see 1 Cor. 15:51; Eph. 1:9; Eph. 3:3; Eph. 6:19; Col. 1:26; Col. 4:3; 1 Tim. 3:9).  Here, the focus of the μυστήριον is different:  “part of Israel” has experienced a “hardening,” which will last “until the full number (πλήρωμα) of Gentiles has come in (εἰσέλθῃ – enters).”  Paul’s rhetorically dramatic disclosure of this “mystery” is puzzling because he has already spent the past 10 ½ chapters explaining that Israel has been “hardened” to the Gospel to make room for the Gentiles.  It seems that Paul wants to make this point very carefully, so that his Gentile readers are not at all tempted to become “wise” in themselves.  (Rom. 11:25.)

Immediately after disclosure of this μυστήριον Paul says “[a]nd so all Israel will be saved. . . .”  (Rom. 11:26 (NRSV)).  A key question for this part of the text is what Paul means by “all Israel,” and, relatedly, what he means by “will be saved.”  Is Paul referring here to every ethnic Jewish person in all of history, to ethnic Jewish people alive when Romans was written, to a perhaps small remnant of Jewish people who recognize Jesus as the Messiah, or to something else?  And by “salvation” is Paul referring to an immediate this-worldly reality, to an immanent this-worldly judgment, to a future other-worldly eschatological state, or to something else?

Modern commentators note the difficulty of addressing these questions after the Holocaust.[2]  Thoughtful Christians today recognize the Church’s terrible history of anti-Semitism and painfully remember that this history helped feed the Holocaust.  These concerns are an important part of what motivated many commentators in the generation immediately following World War II to argue for a Sonderweg – an alternative path or “two covenant” theology, informed in significant part by this text in Romans, under which the Jews remain God’s people apart from any specific recognition of Jesus as Messiah.[3]  The post-Holocaust reading of Romans can be seen as an important example of reading from location.  Indeed, the kind of liberation theology reflected in our reading from Justo González, and the feminist theology reflected in our reading from Elsa Tamez, developed starting in the 1950’s and 1960’s in no small part because the shock of the Holocaust forced the Church to reevaluate its rhetoric and dogmas about race, class and creed.[4]

Most contemporary commentators agree, however, that whatever the merits of a Sonderweg, this is not what Paul had in mind in Romans.[5]  Nevertheless, James Dunn asserts that “[t]here is now a strong consensus that πα̑ς ᾿Ισραήλ must mean Israel as a whole, as a people whose corporate identity and wholeness would not be lost even if in the event there were some (or indeed many) individual exceptions.”[6]  In contrast, other commentators, particularly from Reformed and evangelical perspectives, argue that Paul’s use of “all Israel” here invokes either a “spiritual Israel” or a “remnant” theology, under which Paul envisions true “Israel” to include only followers of Jesus.  I was surprised that N.T. Wright adopted a particularly strong form of the “remnant” perspective in his commentary.[7]  Yet other commentators suggest a sort of middle ground approach, under which all ethnic Jews will recognize Jesus as Messiah at the Parousia.  There are multiple variants of this middle ground approach, under which either (1) all ethnic Jews alive at the time of the Parousia will recognize Jesus when he appears; or (2) all ethnic Jews who did not recognize Jesus in life but who have died before the Parousia will be resurrected and recognize Jesus at the Parousia; or (3) some combination or variant of (1) and (2).[8]

It is helpful to note that the exegetical question here is not solely driven by post-Holocaust concerns.  An interesting pre-modern source for this discussion is Thomas Aquinas.  Scholars have only recently begun to focus on Aquinas’ understanding of the Jews in his Commentary on Romans.[9]  Some Aquinas scholars today argue that in his commentary on Romans, Aquinas indicates that all the Jews eventually will be saved, perhaps in the eschaton.[10]  A principal passage from Aquinas’ commentary for these scholars is the comment on Paul’s use of the word “until” in Romans 11:25.  Aquinas there noted that

the word until can signify the cause of the blindness of the Jews.  For God permitted them to be blinded, in order that the full number of the gentiles come in.   It can also designate the termination, i.e., that the blindness of the Jews will last up to the time when the full number of the gentiles will come to the faith.  With this agrees his next statement, namely, and then, i.e., when the full number of the gentiles has come it, all Israel should be saved, not some, as now, but universally all . . . .[11]

Another exegete who is controversial on this point for some modern commentators is Karl Barth, who of course wrote in part as an opponent of Hitler and an exile during the Holocaust.[12]  In the Römerbrief, Barth understood the relation between Israel and the Church in terms of the existential crisis through which God brings salvation.[13]  While Barth here sounds supercessionist, his overall perspective is eschatological:  “[b]ut men are saved on in the Futurum resurrectionis, when they perceive the unobservable existentiality of God.”[14]

Barth’s exegesis of Romans 9-11 is far more extensive in the Church Dogmatics II.2 as he develops his doctrine of election.[15]  Since Barth’s doctrine of election focuses on Christ as both the rejected and the elect one – as both Jacob and Esau – he understands the “branch” in Paul’s metaphor of the vine to represent Christ.  It is then from Christ that both Israel and the Church spring.[16]  In CD II.2, Barth does not understand Paul’s statement that “all Israel will be saved” to “mean the totality of all Jewish individuals,” but at the same time he thinks the phrase is not limited to “the totality of the elect members of Jesus Christ from the Jews” – that is, to Jews who become Christians.[17]  Barth therefore says that “in accordance with the election that has happened to Israel . . . even the Jews who do not now believe are beloved of God for their fathers’ sake.”[18]  Israel’s status as elect and beloved, Barth says, is “the last word which in every present and in respect of every member of this people has to be taken into account in relation to Israel’s history from its beginning into every conceivable or inconceivable future.”[19]

I do not find any of the proposed solutions fully satisfying, either in terms of the worlds “behind” the text – Paul’s location as a Second Temple Jewish convert to Jesus – “within” the text – Paul’s unique rhetorical style and use of the Old Testament – or “in front of” the text – our location after the Holocaust.

Concerning the worlds “behind” and “within” the text, Paul connects his statement that “all Israel will be saved” to a quotation from scripture (καθὼς  γέγραπται, “as it has been written,” a common invocation in the New Testament and in Paul of the Old Testament), which seems to be derived from the Septuagint versions of Isaiah 59:20-21 and Isaiah 27:9:

“Out of Zion will come the Deliverer;
he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.”
“And this is my covenant with them,
when I take away (ὅταν ἀφέλωμαι) their sins.”

The actual text in Isaiah 59:20-21 differs from Paul’s paraphrase or allusion in syntax, content, and meaning in some important ways:

And he will come to Zion as Redeemer,
to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, says the Lord.

And as for me, this is my covenant with them, says the Lord: my spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouths of your children, or out of the mouths of your children’s children, says the Lord, from now on and forever.  (NRSV).

In the actual text in Isaiah 59, the Redeemer (גָּאַל, LXX ῥυόμενος) comes “to those in Jacob who turn from transgression,” and God’s “covenant” is that His “spirit” (רוּחַ, LXX πνεῦμα) and “words” (דָּבָר, LXX ῥήματα) will not depart from “them.”  While some of Paul’s specific phrasing seems derived from the Septuagint, the overall flow of Paul’s quotation / paraphrase / allusion suggests a different sequence of events.

First, In Isaiah, the Redeemer comes “to Zion” (לְצִיּוֹן֙ – note the preposition לְ, to) or in the LXX “for the sake of / because of Zion” (ἕνεκεν Σιων) while in Romans the Redeemer comes “out of / from Zion” (ἐκ Σιὼν.).  Why has Paul apparently flipped the Redeemer’s origin in such a significant manner?  Dunn suggests that “a deliberate alteration by Paul is quite conceivable: even though he quotes the passage as a foundation or confirmation of his hope of Israel’s salvation, he does not wish to rekindle the idea of Israel’s national primacy in the last days,” because Paul “is in process of transforming—not merely taking up—the expectation of an eschatological pilgrimage of Gentiles to Zion.”[20]

Second, in Isaiah, the Redeemer comes “to those in Jacob who turn from their transgression,” while in Romans, the Redeemer “will banish ungodliness from Jacob” when he appears.  It seems that, in Isaiah, God sends the Redeemer to the repentant remnant, while for Paul, there is no faithful remnant except for the Redeemer, who rises up from within the community to purify it.  Here, Dunn notes that “for Paul ὁ ῥυόμενος is to be understood as a reference to Christ in his Parousia (Cf. 7:24, and particularly 1 Thess 1:10), whereas the original reference was probably to Yahweh himself.”[21]

Finally, in Isaiah, God presently makes or affirms a covenant that his spirit and words will never depart from Zion, while in Romans, the subject and timing of the covenant is unclear.  Here Paul apparently substitutes a quote from Isaiah 27:9 in his final line instead of the further covenantal language in Isaiah 59:21.[22]  Dunn suggests that “[t]he association of forgiveness of sins with Israel’s final vindication or specifically with renewal of the covenant was sufficiently well established in Jewish expectation . . . for Paul’s adaptation of it here [from Isaiah 27:9] to be reckoned a justifiable variation.”[23]  But in Romans, is the covenant a present promise that God will take away Jacob’s sins in the future?  Or is the covenant the promise that God will send a Redeemer to banish ungodliness from Jacob, with the result that their sins will be taken away?  And if the sense is the latter, how is the “banishment” of ungodliness accomplished?  Are the ungodly purged from the community of Jacob, or do the ungodly repent?

Relating these thoughts to the world “in front of” the text, my tentative conclusions borrow from Dunn, Barth and Aquinas.  I am unconvinced by the hyper-evangelical reading of this passage, including Wright’s approach.  I am also unconvinced by the notion that Paul was thinking of a Sonderweg for the Jews.  It seems to me that Romans 11 is a kind of prophetic-dialectical Christological-eschatological meditation, which indeed concludes in an expressly doxological hymn in verses 33-36.  In the section I have considered closely, verses 25-27, Paul oscillates between the prophetic hope for Israel in Isaiah and the new prophetic hope for all of humanity in Christ.  By noting that Paul’s overall thought here refers ultimately to the eschatological future, I think Dunn, Barth and Aquinas start to capture the sense of Paul’s wrestling.  The final consummation of history in Christ’s return will vindicate all of God’s purposes, both for Israel and for the Gentiles.  Separated Israel remain God’s people, though not in virtue of a separate path of salvation, and also in a unique, difficult role because of their separation.  But in the end, however precisely God will accomplish it, Jew and Gentile will be united again – humanity will be united again – in Christ.

This suggests that Christians act appropriately in relation to their Jewish neighbors when we make our central confession that “Jesus is Lord” and invite Jews to recognize that Jesus is first their Messiah, whom we know only derivatively because he is first their Messiah.  At the same time, it suggests that Christians should recognize Jews in their own particularity, even when they do not yet recognize Jesus, as also God’s people whom God will redeem.

Image:  St. Paul by Rembrandt van Rijn

[1] “Brothers and sisters” is the NRSV’s gender-neutral rendering of ἀδελφοί, which the NRSV presumes must mean the church in Rome.

[2] See N.T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans:  Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in Leander Keck, ed., The New Intepreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville:  Abingdon Press 2002), “Overview” of Rom. 11:1-36.

[3] Ibid.; see also, e.g., Robert W. Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism,” in Carl Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Jews and Christians:  People of God (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2003); Richard N. Longnecker, NICOT:  The Epistle to the Romans (Eerdmans 2016), 629-633, n. 50 (summarizing sources for the Sonderweg position).

[4] See Justo L. González, Out of Every Tribe & Nation:  Christian Theology at the Ethnic Roundtable (Nashville:  Abingdon Press 1992); Elsa Tamez, “Justification as Good News for Women:  A Re-Reading of Romans 1-8,” in Sheila E. McGinn, ed., Celebrating Romans:  Template for Pauline Theology (Essays in Honor of Robert JewettI) (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2004).  As Mark Lindsay has argued, “[i]n a very real way, the event of the Holocaust instantiates the semper reformanda.”  Mark Lindsay, Reading Auschwitz With Barth:  The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology (Eugene:  Wipf and Stock 2014), 4.

[5] See Longnecker, supra Note 3.

[6] James D.G. Dunn, Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 38B, Romans 9-16 (Waco:  Word Books 1988), comment on Rom. 11:25.

[7] See Wright, supra Note 2, commentary on Rom. 11:26a.

[8] See, e.g., supra Note 3, 629-633 (surveying options and noting that “[m]y own view is that Paul is here speaking of the salvation of the Jewish people who will be alive when the course of God’s salvation history is brought by God himself to its culmination.”)

[9] See Holly Taylor Coolman, “Romans 9-11:  Rereading Aquinas on the Jews,” in Matthew Levering, ed., Reading Romans With Thomas Aquinas (Washington D.C.:  Catholic University Press 2012).

[10] Ibid., 104.

[11] St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, trans. Fr. Fabian Richard Larcher, O.P. (Lander:  The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine 2012), Lecture 4, ¶ 916.

[12] See Angus Paddison, “Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Romans 9-11 in Light of Jewish-Christian Understanding,” Journal of Studies in the New Testament 29:4, 469-488 (June 2006).  Barth’s failure to mention the Holocaust in the Church Dogmatics or his other writing, however, presents difficult problems for appropriating his theology for contemporary Jewish-Christian relations.  See Lindsay, supra Note 4.

[13] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford:  OUP 1968), 415.  Commenting on Paul’s statement that “[a]ll Israel shall be saved,” Barth says:  “[t]he salvation of the lost, the justification of those who are not justified, the resurrection of the dead, comes whence the catastrophe came.”  Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 416.

[15] See Paddison, supra Note 12.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Karl Barth, CD II.2 (London:  T&T Clark Study Edition 2009), § 34.4 [300].

[18] Ibid., § 34.4 [303].

[19] Ibid.

[20] Dunn, supra Note 6, comment on Rom. 11:26.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

 

Categories
Biblical Studies Ezekiel

Ezekiel: Jenson on Prophecy

I’ve been enjoying reading through Ezekiel lately with Robert Jenson’s Brazos Commentary.  For any modern Christian reader, one of the problems presented by a text like Ezekiel is that of delayed prophecy.  Ezekiel speaks to the exiles in Babylon, who have grown cynical.  In Ezekiel 12:21-28, this discourse reaches one of many points at which God instructs Ezekiel to announce that judgment will no longer be delayed:

 

Mortal, what is this proverb of yours about the land of Israel, which says, “The days are prolonged, and every vision comes to nothing”?  Tell them therefore, “Thus says the Lord God: I will put an end to this proverb, and they shall use it no more as a proverb in Israel.” But say to them, The days are near, and the fulfillment of every vision.  For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel.  But I the Lord will speak the word that I speak, and it will be fulfilled. It will no longer be delayed; but in your days, O rebellious house, I will speak the word and fulfill it, says the Lord God.  (Ezekiel 12: 22-25 (NRSV)).

From the perspective of the New Testament, and of Christian theology, however, Ezekiel’s prophecies were delayed, initially until the coming of Christ, and subsequently until Christ’s future return.  The premodern Christian interpretive strategy was to view such passages as prefiguring Christ.  One modern strategy, which Jenson calls neo-Protestant, has been to de-historicize all Biblical eschatological hopes within a metaphysical view that negates any possibility of any teleology in history.  Another modern strategy, represented by dialectical theologians such as Karl Barth, was to render the Bible’s eschatological hopes as expressions of an immanent crisis to which each person is subject.  Yet another modern strategy, represented by dispensational theology and fundamentalism, was to render the ancient texts as code books for deciphering contemporary events.

Against such modern trends, Jenson argues for a return to premodern exegesis, although in sympathy with dialectical theology, he is content to let the ambiguity and lack of resolution do its own work.  I appreciate Jenson’s comments here:

Let us suppose that we find neither neo-Protestantism’s nor dialectical theology’s resolutions satisfactory.  What then?

We should — in my view — begin by retrieving the church’s premodern construal.  The New Testament does in fact think that all the promises of God are fulfilled in Christ (e.g., Rom. 15:8), and so should Christian theology.  It is becoming even more obvious:  modern scholars’ insistence that the original sense of Old Testament anticipation cannot be christological or ecclesiological is not itself a scholarly result but an antecedent ideological construal of how history works.  There is no need to share this construal.

We must, to be sure, be very careful not to suggest that, because the promises have been fulfilled in Christ, they no longer apply to the Jews as a people. But a nonsupersessionist construal is indeed possible and in some part already achieved.

If we go on from the fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ, the problems of delay devolve into one:  the so-called delay of the parousia.  And here the first thing to say is that the failure of primal Christianity’s expectation of Christ’s immediate advent is a plausible reason not to believe the gospel that proclaimed it.  If after nearly two millennia we find that gospel so compelling that we continue to hope, we should acknowledge that such a hope speaks a great “nevertheless.”

Finnally, if we ask why the Lord is so slow, we may indeed adapt 2 Peter’s answer.  Those who write an dread this commentary should not complain that God did not end history millennia ago; he lingers to make room for us.

Jenson, Ezekial Commentary, 109-110.