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Author: David Opderbeck
Yesterday I posted a response to N.D. Wilson’s treatment of Rob Bell in Books & Culture. In this post I’d like to take this conversation a bit deeper.
Wilson’s essay strikes me as a classic example of the “divine command theory” (“DCT”) of ethics. According to DCT, something is good or bad simply because God wills and commands it to be so. It is a popular theory with strong Calvinists because it emphasizes God’s absolute sovereignty. This is the perspective, I think, from which Wilson writes.
DCT is vulnerable to the Euthyphro Dilemma. The Euthyphro Dilemma is based on one of Plato’s dialogues. It asks, “does God will the good because (a) it is good, or is it good (b) because God wills it?” If (a), this suggests there is something greater than God, to which God is subject. If (b), this suggests that morality is arbitrary and that statements such as “God is good” are empty tautologies. Neither (a) nor (b) reflect what Christian theists traditionally mean by “God” or “good.” DCT asserts (b), and thereby falls prey to claims of arbitrariness and emptiness.
Wilson seems to think the only other option is (a), which would reduce “God” to something less than the final, soverign being of Christian theism. But (a) is not the only other option. Indeed, neither (a) nor (b) reflect traditional Christian theism. As theologian Stephen Holmes notes in his chapter “The Attributes of God” from The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,“‘goodness is neither merely a name we apply to God’s actions nor a standard beyond God by which he may be judged. Rather, it is God’s own character to which he may indeed be held accountable. . . .”
Note that Holmes asserts that God may be “held accountable” to act in accordance with God’s own character. This is the meaning, Holmes notes, of Abraham’s plea in Genesis 18:25: “Far be it from you to do such a thing–to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham could not make an appeal to a standard of “right” if “right” meant simply whatever God commands. Why is Abraham confident that God will not “kill the righteous with the wicked” — confident enough to challenge God Himself? Because Abraham knows that God will always act in accordance with God’s own character. God is just, and therefore God will not act unjustly.
An epistemological problem, however, remains. How can we as mere humans know enough about what God is really like to expect that God will act in accordance with some standard we perceive as “good?” DCT here must posit a radical, complete inability to know anything about what God is like. All we can do, according to DCT, is hear and obey God’s commands. But this is untenable.
In order to know that we are in fact hearing God’s commands, we must have some knowledge of the content of God’s communication to us. In order to have such knowledge, we must believe God in fact has communicated in a reliable, intelligible fashion. But in order to believe that God’s presumed communication is reliable and intelligible, we must hold such communication (and by extension its putative speaker) to some standard of reliability and intelligibility. If God could tell a lie and command that such a lie is “good,” how could we know that God’s commands are in fact things He wants us to follow? Maybe God is a trickster and wants to lead us astray.
We can make such judgments because we do, in fact, have some creaturely knowledge of what is “good” and “reliable” and “intelligible.” Our creaturely knowledge necessarily is delivered through the cognitive and linguistic structures available to us as human creatures. But these structures are derived from God as our creator, in whose image we are made. Therefore, although we do not have direct knowledge of what “good” and “reliable” and “intelligible” are with respect to God in His essence, we do have analogical knowledge of these things. This analogical argument is found in Thomas Aquinas, and Holmes summarizes it as follows: “we first know derived goodness, and from that begin to understand what it means to call God good.”
Holmes notes a number of problems with Thomas’ argument and further highlights the problem of divine simplicity that underlies this discussion. But Holmes is correct, I think, in affirming the basic insight that God’s perfections are one and that we can know something about what God is like by creaturely analogy. To be sure, such knowledge is only analogical, never direct, and it is always mediated through and accommodated to the limits of human language. Indeed, we can never really grasp what God communicates to us without the presence of the Holy Spirit, who both authenticates to us God’s speech and enables us to perceive and understand it. But all of this means that, like Abraham, we are right to interrogate deeply when some passage of scripture, or some doctrinal claim, is stated in a way that makes God appear less than everything that He is, all at once, and all together: less than perfectly loving and good, less than perfectly merciful and just, less than perfectly sovereign and gracious.
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N.D. Wilson on Bell: Ugly
N.D. Wilson writes on Rob Bell in the current issue of Books & Culture. I don’t agree with some of Rob Bell’s conclusions in “Love Wins” (to the extent I can figure out what he concludes), but Wilson’s piece is just atrocious. Here’s something I sent in to B&C, but I don’t think they’ll have the space to print it. What bothers me most about Wilson’s piece (and about a similar blog post by Jamie Smith, much as I respect Jamie), is the notion that a sense of aesthetics, a gut-sense that God just can’t be how He is portrayed by some folks, is an invalid source of knowledge. I think that aesthetic sense, that pit you get in the stomach when something just sounds wrong, often serves as an important pointer towards truth. Here’s the text of my long letter to B&C:
Apparently, for N.D. Wilson (“Pensive Rabbits,” July / August 2011), God is free to act arbitrarily and call it “good.” There is no sense, it seems from Wilson’s review Rob Bell’s “Love Wins,” in which God’s inherent character might constrain the ways in which God acts. Nor is the any sense in which the imago Dei in humans, or the subtle presence of the Holy Spirit, might prove useful as a hermeneutical lens for discerning whether some particular account of how God supposedly acts really is True. Bizarrely, Wilson the novelist (does he write ugly stories?) decries Bell’s appeal to aesthetics as bizarre. Never mind the vital role aesthetics has played in the development of Christian conceptions of Truth down through the millennia of Christian thought.
Could it be that when something strikes us as terribly “ugly,” that thing is splattering against the Truth of God’s image deep within us? I felt this recently when I took a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland. I was in Krakow for a theology conference on the theme “What is Life.” I learned more during that tour of Auschwitz than I did from any of the papers given during the conference (many of which were excellent). I suppose that, for Wilson, the visceral ugliness of Auschwitz doesn’t convey any Truth at all. For my part, I think the bile I felt in my throat during my tour of Auschwitz was the image of God pressing against every cell in my body — literally, a “visceral” reaction, deep in my viscera — against the horror of the death camps.
This is why I think Bell is entirely right to raise the “hippidy-hipster’s” cynical “Really” in response to the stories of Heaven and Hell we so often like to tell. A young Hindu woman, forced into sexual slavery because of her family’s debts, dies forsaken in a brothel of AIDS, never having heard the name of Jesus. She is immediately escorted to the eternal conscious torment of Hell. All of this ultimately glorifies God. “Really?” Yet that is the story much of popular Evangelical soteriology would force us to swallow. Should we all shout “Sig, Heil!”? “Hail Victory” does sound like a catchy title for a Praise and Worship song. Or does the naked ugliness of this story hint that it isn’t really Truth?
Wilson’s response is a strange, quasi-modalistic fideism. If Jesus thinks “the earth is the center of the universe,” Wilson asserts in his concluding Credo, “[t]hen so do I.” Wilson’s disregard for the other two important persons one might want to consult — the Father and the Holy Spirit — is telling. For Wilson, God’s (or I suppose “Jesus'”) actions can be arbitrary. There is no relation between the economic and immanent Trinity. God does not act as God in His Triune being is — he acts as pure power. So why bother with the Trinity at all?
Wilson’s implied modalism leads to his baffling use of the present tense concerning what “Jesus thinks.” How can we know what “Jesus thinks” (present tense)? We of course know some things that Jesus “thought” as described in the Gospels. We have to employ all sorts of theological and herementuetical grids to begin to get at what those things mean for us, particularly when we try to construct doctrine. Should we, say, hate our parents (Luke 14:26)? What did Jesus mean by that? And we have no idea at all what Jesus “thought” about most things during his life on earth. The doctrines of the incarnation and the kenosis ensure that Jesus the man held many typical first-century Jewish ideas that educated people, including Wilson, don’t hold today. Maybe even things like geocentric cosmology. But all of this is the sort of stuff only smarmy skinny-jean clad seminarians talk about while they sip lattes in the div school cafe. A real man like Wilson can let all that pass.
So how do we know what Jesus — or better, the Triune God — “thinks” today? We do what believers in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ have always done. We exercise faith that seeks understanding. We search the scriptures. We use the minds and the experiences God has given us — including our innate, God-imaging sense of aesthetics — and we listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. We look deep into the tradition of thought bequeathed by those who have gone before us in the faith. If what we come up with seems awfully ugly, if the Spirit within us wants to retch, we keep working on it. We don’t settle for Auschwitz when shalom is who God in His perichoretic being is. Some of Bell’s answers are wrong, but “Really” is the right question to ask of many of the hideous God-stories we tell.
In Al Mohler’s editorial on gay marriage in today’s Wall Street Journal, he states that “[s]ince we [Evangelicals] believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality.” He concludes that “it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.”
Here is a quiz. Did Mohler also say this:
it is a homage we owe to the Bible, from whose principles we have derived so much of social prosperity and blessing, to appeal to its Verdict on every subject upon which it has spoken. Indeed, when we remember how human reason and learning have blundered in their philosophizings; how great parties have held for ages the doctrine of the divine right of kings as a political axiom; how the whole civilized world held to the righteousness of persecuting errors in opinion, even for a century after the Reformation; we shall feel little confidence in mere human reasonings on political principles; we shall rejoice to follow a steadier light.
No, he didn’t. This was written in 1867 by Presbyterian preacher and Confederate Army Chaplain Robert Louis Dabney, in 
his treatise In Defense of Virginia. Dabney, like Mohler, was trying to stem the tide of a cultural revolution that Dabney believed had caught the Church flat-footed. Dabney continued,
The scriptural argument for the righteousness of slavery gives us, moreover, this great advantage: If we urge it successfully, we compel the Abolitionists either to submit, or else to declare their true infidel character. We thrust them fairly to the wall, by proving that the Bible is against them; and if they declare themselves against the Bible (as the most of them doubtless will) they lose the support of all honest believers in God’s Word.
The obvious resonance between Mohler’s and Dabney’s public theology ought to give careful readers pause. Certainly, Mohler is not in favor of Black slavery, nor do I suspect he’s a racist. However, Mohler employs precisely the same reasoning and rhetoric as did Dabney — right down to the claim that only folks who agree with him completely are part of the faithful remnant of the true church. It failed then, and it fails now. It was a misguided form of fundamentalism then, and it is a misguided form of fundamentalism now.
This is not to suggest that the question of African slavery in the 19th Century is morally equivalent to the question of gay marriage in the 21st Century. That sort of argument is anachronistic and fails to account at all for the theological anthropology and ecclesiology that inform both the rejection of slavery and the support of “marriage” as a life-long covenant between a man and a woman.
But Mohler utterly misses the fact that “marriage” is primarily a sacramental covenant inseparable from the life of the visible Church. His Biblicism fails because the Bible simply doesn’t function as a stand-alone rule book for public thought in a liberal democratic state. (This is also why Mohler, like Dabney, must deny the reality of modern scientific theories in favor of earlier mechanistic natural theology — though Dabney’s critique of materialism is relatively sophisticated in some ways.)
Though Mohler speaks in his WSJ editorial of the “believing church,” he doesn’t seem to have any notion of The Church as an institutional alternative to the secular city. But it is precisely and only in this alternative community that the true meaning of “marriage” can be disclosed. It is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in life-long union, in submission to each other and often accompanied by great sacrifice and difficulty; it is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in chaste singleness, submitting their sexuality each day before the cross; and it is only in the Church that gay men and women who are so called by God can live as faithful participants in the life of the Church and for the good of the world, bearing the self-denial that this may involve. The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to read the Bible literally. The problem is that we have forgotten what it means to be the Church.
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Ministry in the 21st Century
There’s a nice interview in the current Christian Century with Josh Carney, Teaching Pastor at University Baptist Church, near Baylor University. Carney is a young pastor in a demographically diverse evangelical / free church congregation that attracts many well educated students — sounds familiar! A few excerpts:
What has the transition toward more age diversity been like? Any bumps?
It’s been exciting. My heartbeat is for families, and as this group grows it presents an opportunity to get to know and love more people. The major hurdle has to do with congregational identity. An increase in families means a need for more resources for them, and when we shift resources we make statements about mission and identity. We are trying to figure out who we are in a way that both affirms the historical and makes room for the new.
What other parts of being in ministry have been challenging?
Working out how specifically to pursue our mission as a church. It hasn’t been difficult for us to identify how God would have us be kingdom people in the world. What’s been harder is determining the best way to accomplish this. For example, we might all agree that the kingdom that Jesus proclaims compels us to work to alleviate suffering. But what is the best, most responsible way to do this?
Is the debate about prioritizing what kinds of suffering to address? Or about direct service versus systemic change?
Both. Because we’re close to a university, we’ve had to learn that on just about every issue—theological or otherwise—our community is full of opinions that are both extremely educated and extremely diverse. A lot of people have had experiences that shape the way they see the world—and what they think the solutions for the world’s ills are.
The challenge is to engage and serve the world in a distinctively kingdom way. Instead most of us quickly let our political ideology dictate how we do this. We need to continually pray that the Holy Spirit would illuminate the countercultural love option that Jesus offers—the third way that comes through gospel imagination.
What’s something important you’ve learned in ministry?
As the world changes, people don’t. Folks do lots of things they didn’t do ten years ago: carry iPhones, send Facebook messages, buy fuel-efficient cars. But people are hurt the same way and need the gospel the same way they did ten years, 100 years or even 2,000 years ago.
There is much within evangelical culture that is now seen as unhealthy and misguided. We at UBC have rejected much of our immediate past. In the constructive phase, the natural tendency seemed to be to look back further by exploring the liturgy of the church. Here we found much that was helpful—and we found that some of our objections had already been addressed.
Slowly, we’ve begun to reidentify what was useful about our immediate, painful pasts as well. It’s been refreshing to create new liturgy and find gifts from all of the church’s seasons.
Has this process of exploring the past been largely about worship and liturgy, or has it touched other areas of the church’s life as well?
I’d say that all the changes we’ve experienced have fallen under the umbrella of ecclesiology. A pastor friend says that everything comes down to ecclesiology, and the longer I do this ministry, the more I agree.
…
What developments would you like to see in your congregation’s mission? In the wider church’s?
I hope that the church—both our local expression and the larger one that we’re part of—learns to be more creative. I feel that a lot of our problems come from a lack of imagination.
When the pesky Pharisees try to trap Jesus by asking if he thinks they ought to pay the temple tax, he offers one of those answers that turns the question on its head. Caesar’s image is on the money, so it belongs to him. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. But what has God’s image on it? Well, we do. The creation testifies about God. In fact, the creation exists because God breathed it, and all of this creation belongs to God.
Jesus both critiqued the world and loved it. He was never satisfied to give a response that lived within the parameters of the question. He found a better way, a third way to respond—and the world stood in awe as it saw God move within history. Our lack of this kind of imagination is evident in our politics, in our wars and unfortunately even in the church. But this can change. My prayer is that Christians will be imaginative Jesus people.
Describe an experience that made you think, “This is what church is all about.”
A lot of what I’ve said so far is about the church’s immanent ministry, how it engages the world. But this has to be rooted in transcendent ministry, in the worshiping community.
One Sunday at UBC the last song the band played was the doxology. It was time to make the transition to the learning portion of worship, but something within me was profoundly content to sit in God’s presence. I found myself standing in the peace of God which transcends understanding, filled with an inexpressible joy and overwhelmed by love.
All the community gardens, mission trips, relationships with local school districts and low-income housing complexes—if all that work is not about this kind of moment, if it’s not about participating in the divine dance that has been going on for all eternity, then it misses the point. We are because God is.
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Auschwitz
Today I visited the Auschwitz museum outside Krakow, Poland. There’s not much intelligent I can say about it at the moment. Probably there’s not much intelligent anyone can say about it. Anyone who wants to teach about the rule of law, and anyone who wants to talk about God, should have to visit this place. No theory of public life and no theology that fails to look this place in the face is worth any attention.
My next post is up on BioLogos: Humanity as and in Creation.
Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life: Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference. It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!). I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul. This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed. I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts. Below is Part VI, and here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
Are Neurobiology and Theology Both Right About Free Will?
If the theological category of “sin” appears to resonate with neurobiology, only on reflection to exist in some tension with it, the category of “responsibility” seems in conflict with neurobiological accounts of the will, only on reflection to find more commonality.
The Christian Tradition’s treatment of “freedom” and “responsibility” seems to conflict at a basic level with neurobiology. “Responsibility” in Christian theology is not merely a human construct. Rather, it flows out of our relationship to God as created beings. We are “responsible” for our actions because we belong to God. God’s law proceeds from God’s transcendent character and will, which does not depend on human social constructs.
Christian moral theology thus emphasizes human responsibility. As Catholic moral theologian William Mattison notes, “Moral theology is all about understanding and evaluating free actions, the things we do intentionally in our quest for happiness in life.”[1] For Mattison, responsibility and freedom go hand-in-hand: “when people act freely,” he says, “they are responsible for their actions, and we may praise or blame them depending on the sorts of actions they perform or the purposes they hold.”[2] This connection between freely chosen intentionality and moral responsibility seems alien to neurobiology. At least for neurobiological reductionists, intentionality is illusory, a ghost in the machine, and responsibility is a social construct shaped by evolutionary history.
Yet, the Christian tradition’s efforts to grapple with the relationship between “freedom” and “responsibility” resonates in many respects with the same dynamic in neurobiology. When we dig deeper into the Christian Tradition, we notice that our “folk” conceptions of “freedom” and “intention” do not entirely cohere with theological categories. As political scientist Larry Arnhart notes, the notion of “‘free will’ as uncaused cause is a Gnostic idea that treats the human will as an unconditioned, self-determining, transcendental power beyond the natural world . . . . Such a notion contradicts biblical religion, because the only uncaused cause in the Bible is God.”[3]
St. Augustine wrestled directly with how the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom impacts our understanding of the purposes of law. In the Book V of the City of God, he summarizes the stoics’ argument against divine foreknowledge:
If there is a certain order of causes according to which everything happens which does happen, then by fate, says he, all things happen which do happen. But if this be so, then is there nothing in our own power, and there is no such thing as freedom of will; and if we grant that, says he, the whole economy of human life is subverted. In vain are laws enacted. In vain are reproaches, praises, chidings, exhortations had recourse to; and there is no justice whatever in the appointment of rewards for the good, and punishments for the wicked.[4]
Augustine responded to this critique by referring in Aristotelian fashion to the order of causality:
it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God, and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills.[5]
Similarly, in characteristically stark terms, the Reformer Martin Luther stated in On the Bondage of the Will that
This, therefore, is also essentially necessary and wholesome for Christians to know: that God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, ‘Free-will’ is thrown prostrate, and utterly dashed to pieces.[6]
We might change Luther’s first sentence to refer to the brain instead of to God and attribute it to a modern neurobiologist.
Yet Luther also famously proclaimed that “[a] Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.”[7] How did Luther reconcile these notions of predestination and freedom? He refers to spiritual freedom, in contrast to bodily slavery:
Man is composed of a twofold nature, a spiritual and a bodily. As regards the spiritual nature, which the name the soul, he is called spiritual, inward, new man; as regards the bodily nature, which they name the flesh, outward, old man. . . . The result of this diversity is, that in the Scriptures opposing statements are made concerning the same man; the fact being that in the same man these two men are opposed to one another; the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.[8]
True “freedom” results only in the inward man when a person receives justification by faith in Christ. “Freedom” is not libertarian free will, but rather the uniting of the person’s inward nature with God through faith, which produces the ability to do good works in accordance with God’s will. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it:
“The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is true and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom that leads to the ‘slavery of sin.” (cf. Romans 6:17 ) . . . . By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom.”[9]
“Freedom,” then, is not libertarian freedom — the freedom to do anything at all — but the increasing flourishing of the human person who pursues the good. Once again, there is consistency here with neurobiology – we are not “free” in terms of folk psychology – but there is divergence in that the Christian concept of “freedom” seems to require a much richer metaphysic than materialism offers.
[1] William C. Mattison, III, Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues (Baker 2008).
[2] Id.
[3] Larry Arnhart, “The Darwinian Moral Sense and Biblical Religion,” in Evolution and Ethics, supra Note 69.
[4] City of God, Book V.
[5] Id. He concludes: “[w]herefore our wills also have just so much power as God willed and foreknew that they should have; and therefore whatever power they have, they have it within most certain limits; and whatever they are to do, they are most assuredly to do, for He whose foreknowledge is infallible foreknew that they would have the power to do it, and would do it.” Id.
[6] Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, available in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/bondage.titlepage.html?highlight=luther,bondage,of,the,will#highlight.
[7] Martin Luther, ON the Freedom of a Christian, available in the Modern History Sourcebook at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/luther-freedomchristian.html.
[8] Id.
[9] Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶¶ 1733, 1740, available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm (last visited March 12, 2010).
Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life: Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference. It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!). I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul. This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed. I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts. Below is Part V, and here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
Neurobiology, the Soul, Moral Agency, and Law
The notion of “moral agency” is precisely what many legal theorists interested in neurobiology are challenging. Martha Farah notes with some understatement that “[t]he idea that behavior 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.”[1] “Free will” – at least “libertarian” free will – is an illusion, they argue. Among their most compelling bits of evidence for this claim are studies suggesting that the brain signals the body to engage in actions before we become consciously aware of the action we will take.[2] This “precognition” suggests that our actions are automatic responses to stimuli and that our conscious “decisions” are really merely ex post determinations not to “veto” what the brain has already signaled its readiness to do. We have, at best, “free won’t” rather than “free will.”[3] Therefore, “according to neuroscience, no one person is more or less responsible than any other for actions. We are all part of a deterministic system that someday, in theory, we will completely understand.”[4] The notion of “responsibility” is only a “social construct,” law is an instrumentalist tool useful for engineering of the society we are constructing, and the society we are constructing ultimately is reducible to the evolutionary history embedded in our brains.
Sin: Parallel or Orthogonal to Neurobiology?
The neurobiological account of personhood and responsibility implies some obvious dissonances with theology, but we might focus for a moment on a possible area of congruence. In one sense, neurobiology confirms St. Paul’s cri de coeur: our wills are not our own. Human beings are bent towards conduct that we label “violent,” “selfish,” “antisocial” or “sinful.”
Evolutionary sociobiology also trades in cooperation and altruism, or at least the appearance of “altruism” through “group selection.”[5] The game theoretic coordination of group activity is a lynchpin of sociobiological theory. For sociobiology, like St. Paul, we often find that we are at war with ourselves, and like St. Augustine, we can discern self-serving motives even behind our most seemingly benevolent actions. In a practical sense, whether we say that positive law is an expression of selection for social traits that promote group survival, or that positive law is necessary to curb the influence of sin, we appear to be saying much of the same thing. The ultimate “good,” whether it is a biological imperative or a Divinely appointed eschatological goal, is human flourishing.
But of course, in some ways the similarity is only superficial. The Christian account of sin is that it is alien, an invader introduced into creation by cosmic evil forces, human will, or both.[6] The Biblical story of the temptation of Adam and Eve must be an imaginative literary portrait if the scientific account of human origins is even close to true, but nevertheless, for Christian theology to have coherence, the story must be ontologically true at some basic level. From the perspective of Christian theology, our essential created nature is “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Humans are God’s image-bearers, created for wholesome relationships with God, each other, and the rest of creation. If the inclinations and brain-mind mechanisms we have inherited from our evolutionary past are called “sin,” is the image of God itself sinful, and is God then the author of sin?[7]
The Christian account of how sin disrupts human “flourishing” also offers a different horizon than that of sociobiology. From the perspective of sociobiology, “flourishing” is simply and only the survival of genes, and the survival of genes is simply and only a material and historical drive. Sociobiology can speak of what “works,” but it cannot speak of what is “good.”
For Christian theology, human “flourishing” derives ultimately from God’s goodness. The telos of creation is peace, the harmony of right relationships and the full flowering of all the gifts God has bestowed on the creation. This teleology of creation derives from the perichoretic relationality of the Triune God Himself. The creation, Christian theology asserts, is “contingent,” in that it depends on God’s creative, sustaining will for its existence. However, the creation is not arbitrary. It had to be and it will be consistent with God’s own loving character because God is love. The telos of creation, including that of human beings, therefore is ultimately eternal and eschatological. The material and historical nature of humanity, although corrupted, is not elided, but is transformed proleptically by the eternal and eschatological.
A Christian account of law and neurobiology in relation to the problem of sin and human flourishing, then, can incorporate the findings of the neurosciences but can never permit human ontology to be reduced to those findings. Whether a nonreductive physicalist Christian anthropology is in this sense truly “nonreductive” remains an open, indeed difficult, question.
[1]Martha Farah, “Responsibility and Brain Function,” available at http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/penn-neuroethics-briefing/responsibility-a-brain-function
[2] Garland, Neuroscience and the Law, supra Note 48, at 56.
[3] Id.
[4] Id. at 68.
[5] For an overview of the concept of group selection, see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Darwinian Evolutionary Ethics: Between Patriotism and Sympathy, in Evolution and Ethics, supra Note 1. Richerson and Boyd summarize their perspective through the following propositions:
(1) that group selection is the basic mechanism explaining human moral impulses; (2) that an immense gap exists between the moral faculties of humans and other animals; (3) that the moral faculties evolved in the common ancestors of all living humans; and (4) that moral progress arises when humans create social institutions that enlarge sympathy and control patriotism.” Id. at 62.
[6] For a good discussion of sin and the problem of evil, see Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side: Putting the Power of Evil in its Place (InterVarsity Press 2003).
[7] In some respects, this question mirrors the debated in Reformed theology between “infralapsarians” and “surpalapsarians.” There also remains the vexing question of the “origin” of evil and the presence of the “serpent” in the Garden (Gen. 3:1). Some contemporary theologians are seeking to recapture the Patristic reflection on a “cosmic fall” that implicates the creation in evil “before” the fall of Adam. See, e.g., John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press 2006). The quotation marks around the notion of something “before” the fall of Adam here reflect the idea that our Western, linear ideas about time do not map neatly onto the Biblical picture of creation, evil, sin and death.
Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life: Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference. It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!). I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul. This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed. I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts. Below is Part IV, and here are links to Part I, Part II and Part III.
Neurobiology and the Reported Death of the Soul
Neuroscience suggests that “the brain is a physical entity governed by the principles and rules of the physical world”,” and that “brain determines mind.”[1] Contemporary neuroscience thereby claims to elide the soul and the mind – what many neuroscientists call “the ghost in the machine.”[2] All of the faculties attributed in Scholastic Christian theology to the “sensitive soul” (“locomotion, appetite, sensation, and emotion”), as well as the intellectual faculties attributed to the human “rational soul,” can or will be accounted for by brain functions.[3] As Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience & Society puts it, “as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms of personality, character, and even sense of spirituality dualism becomes strained. If these are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all? By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge to religion than evolutionary biology.”[4]
Some contemporary Christian theologians have responded to this challenge by doing away with the soul. Protestant theologian Nancey Murphy, for example, argues for “nonreductive physicalism” over against traditional notions of the soul.[5] Her colleague at Fuller Seminary, Joel Green, agrees with Murphy, and argues that the Biblical witness tends towards anthropological monism rather than dualism.[6]
For Murphy, Green, and other nonreductive physicalists, “mind” emerges from “brain” in a way that allows “mind” to exercise “downward causality” – the traditional category of the “will.”[7] Thus, the human person is dependent upon, but not wholly determined by, the brain. Murphy acknowledges that she attempts this non-reductionist move for “theological reasons” having to do with the importance of free will.[8] She notes the concern that reductionists in the neurosciences threaten to “overthrow cherished elements of our self-conceptions,” including notions of “rationality, free will, and moral accountability.”[9] As to the persistence of the person after death, nonreductive physicalists such as Murphy and Green tend to reject any notion of an “intermediate state” of disembodied “soulish” existence. There is only, to the extent the Christian eschatological hope allows for it, a final resurrection, albeit not one that necessarily involves any continuity with the pre-resurrection body.[10]
Other Christian theologians and philosophers continue to hold to more traditional forms of dualism. For some, such as philosophers J.P. Moreland, Stewart Goetz, and Charles Landesman, this involves old-fashioned Cartesian substance dualism.[11] In a recent book, Keith Ward draws on philosophical idealism and process philosophy to offer an alternate version of Cartesian dualism.[12] For others, including John Cooper, as well as for many Catholic theologians, it is reflected in a softer “holistic dualism.”[13] Holistic dualism is the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”[14] Still others prefer a notion of “dual aspect monism” to suggest that humans are of one substance (the physical) with two different “aspects,” one of which corresponds to the concept of the “soul.”[15] In holistic dualist or dual aspect monist views, the “soul” is intimately involved with the body, and the intermediate state after death and before resurrection is something less than complete.[16]
As this brief survey suggests, Christian theologians and philosophers seeking to grapple with neuroscience must account for a variety of sources in addition to the scientific, including scripture, tradition, and experience. They disagree on whether scripture and the Christian tradition, including the important question of disembodied existence after death and prior to resurrection, require dualism of some sort. They seem to agree, however, that Christian theology requires at least that human beings be understood as possessing some degree of moral agency.
[1] Brent Garland, ed., Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind and the Scales of Justice (Dana Press 2004).
[2] See id.
[3] See Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006), at 55-69.
[4] University of Pennsylvania Center for Neuroscience & Society website, available at http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/section-blog/28-articles/72-science-and-the-soul (last visited March 10, 2010).
[5] Murphy, supra Note 50.
[6] Joel B. Green, Body, Soul and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic 2008).
[7] Murphy, supra Note 50, at 71-109. Murphy summarizes here thesis as follows: “I shall argue that bottom-up causal factors often provide only a partial account of how things work. One also needs to consider holistic properties of the entity, as well as the interaction between the entity and its environment. Thus, I shall argue for top-down or downward causation; this is the thesis that factors at a higher level of complexity have causal influences on the entity’s constituents.” Id. at 73.
[8] Id. at 72.
[9] Nancey Murphy, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford Univ. Press 2009), at p. 2.
[10] See id. at 140-45. Murphy’s proposal sounds much like a form of eschatological reincarnation:
[A]ll of the personal characteristics as we know them in this life are supported by bodily characteristics and capacities and these bodily capacities happen to belong to a spatio-temporally continuous material object, but there is no reason in principle why a body that is numerically distinct but similar in all relevant respects could not support the same personal characteristics. . . . My proposal regarding the construal of the ‘same body’ also allows for the possibility of a temporal interval between decay of the earthly body and what is then essentially the recreation of a new body out of different ‘stuff.’
Id. at 141-42. Green seems to head more in the direction of the Eastern Christian notion of theosis by construing the “intermediate state” between death and resurrection as a kind of direct participation in Christ’s being:
How, then is personal identity sustained from this world to the world-to-come? On the one hand, Paul locates the answer to this problem under the category of ‘mystery’ (1 Cor 15:51-57). On the other hand, he hints at a relational ontology — that is, the preservation of our personhood, ‘you’ and ‘me,’ in relational terms: with Christ, in Christ. This suggests that the relationality and narrativity that contitute who I am are able to exist apart from neural correlates and embodiment only insofar as they are preserved in God’s own being, in anticipation of new creation.
Green, supra Note 53, at 180.
[11] See J.P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind: The role of Reason in the Life of the Soul (NavPress 1997); Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Eerdmans 2008); Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford Univ. Press 1986); Charles Landesman, Leibniz’s Mill: A Challenge to Materialism (Univ. of Notre Dame Press 2011).
[12] Keith Ward, More than Matter: What Humans Really Are (Lion Hudson 2010).
[13] See, e.g., John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Deabate (Eerdmans 2nd ed. 2000); Sherlock, supra Note 47. Many of these holistic dualists echo, if not explicitly refer to, the Thomistic concept of the soul as the “form of the body.” Lutheran ethicist Gilbert Meileander summarizes this perspective as follows:
The human person — neither beast nor god — is a real union of body (that ties us to the beasts) and soul (that directs us toward God). When, however, we try to atriculate what this means (especially in religious terms), we may picture the human person as a composite of two things that are in principle separable, that are temporarily glued together in this life, that will (by God’s grace) be separated in such a way that the person continues to live even after the body has died, and that will one day be reunited (in a resurrected life). That picture, as appealing as it has been at different times and places, is more dualism than duality. It does not fully capture our in-betweenness, which is not simply a composite of two essentially different things (such as a horse and rider). . . . Instead of a horse and rider, think of a centaur.
Meileander, Neither Beast Nor God (New Atlantis Books 2009), at 24-25.
[14] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, ¶ 365.
[15] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne 2008) , at 28, 199 (stating “[w]e are not saved as souls but as wholes”); John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions About God, Science and Belief (Westminster John Knox 2009), at 74-77 (stating that “the soul is something logically distinct from our physical bodies, but not a separable physical entity”); Polkinhorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (Yale Univ. Press 2002), at 103-107.
[16] See, e.g., Wright, supra Note 61; Polkinghorne, The God of Hope, supra Note 61, at 107 (proposing that “a human being could e held in the divine memory after that person’s death.”).