Categories
Culture

James Davidson Hunter's Provocative New Book

James Davidson Hunter is well known to most of us interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture. His new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World is sure to rock some boats. Here’s a snippet from Chapter Two of the book, in which Hunter lays out what he perceives to be the dominant modes of cultural discourse by contemporary Christianity:

the reality is that politics is the tactic of choice for many Christians as they think about changing the world. This has been most conspicuously true for Evangelicals, though it has also been as true for Christians in the Mainline Protestant traditions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of the Christian churches in America since the early 1980s has been a political witness. This remains true today, again, particularly among Evangelicals who, through innumerable parachurch ministries, assert themselves into one political issue after another and into electoral politics as well.

Hunter goes on to discuss the “worldview” approach to cultural engagement, which encourages individual Christians, even if not directly engaged in politics, to transform culture through the power of ideas. He notes:

At the end of the day, the message is clear: even if not in the lofty realms of political life that he was called to, you too can be a Wilberforce. In your own sphere of influence, you too can be an Edwards, a Dwight, a Booth, a Lincoln, a Churchill, a Dorothy Day, a Martin Luther King, a Mandela, a Mother Teresa, a Vaclav Havel, a John Paul II, and so on. If you have the courage and hold to the right values and ifyou think Christianly with an adequate Christian worldview, you too can change the world.

He concludes, however, that “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

The problem, Hunter suggests, is that “worldview transformation” approaches are rooted in idealism, particularly German idealism — the notion that “culture” is what exists in the “hearts and minds” of ordinary people. He argues that idealism misconstrues the capacity of individuals to change contingent historical circumstances, and ironically reinforces a sort of Cartesian dualism about “culture” “by ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power.”

A great deal of what Hunter says here resonates with me. I think he’s on to something important about how Christian and other religious lawyers and legal scholars should construe their roles as “culture makers.” More on some of Hunter’s specific conclusions in another post.

Categories
Hope Spirituality

Hopeful Thought for the Day

More from Augustine’s Confessions:

Who will grant me to find peace in you?  Who will grant me this grace, that you would come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good?  What are you to me?  Have mercy on me, so that I may tell.  What indeed am I to you, that you should command me to love you, and grow angry with me if I do not, and threaten me with enormous woes?  Is not the failure to love you woe enough in itself?  Alas, for me!  Through your own merciful dealings with me, O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me.  Say to my soul, I am your salvation.  Say it so that I can hear it.  My heart is listening, Lord; open up the ears of my heart and say to my soul, I am your salvation.  Let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you.  Do not hide your face from me:  let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.

Categories
Science and Religion

Resources for Pastors on Faith-Science Issues

A good post from Rev. Scott Mapes.

Categories
Hopeful Thoughts

Hopeful Thought for the Day

In his Confessions, St. Augustine reflects on the relationship between desire, love, and hope:

But what am I loving when I love you? Not beauty of body nor transient grace, not this fair light which is now so friendly to my eyes, not melodious song in all its lovely harmonies, not the sweet fragrance of flowers or ointments or spices, not manna or honey, not limbs that draw me to carnal embrace: none of these do I love when I love my God. And yet I do love a kind of light, a kind of voice, a certain fragrance, a food and an embrace, when I love my God: a light, voice fragrance, food and embrace for my inmost self, where something limited to no place shines into my mind, where something not snatched away by passing time sings for me, where something no breath blows away yields to me its scent, where there is savor undiminished by famished eating, and where I am clasped in a union from which no satiety can tear me away. This is what I love, when I love my God.

Categories
Culture Law and Policy Theology

Justice, Judgment and Love

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the connection between justice, judgment and love in Christian theology. 

When I was in litigation practice, I always felt a bit of awe when I received an order from a Judge, even regarding something mundane like the exchange of documents in a civil case.  That piece of paper represented the power and authority of the United States government compelling some person or corporation to behave a certain way, on pain of sanctions for contempt of court.  When is the exercise of such authority legitimate and just?  This is perhaps the most important question any legal system must address.

In my little corner of Christianity, American evangelicalism, we tend to focus quite a bit on God’s final judgment — the ultimate eschatological question of “who’s in and who’s out” of heaven.  I’m worried that this typical faith narrative of ours lacks much meaningful representation of how justice, judgment, and love relate to each other or to God’s character.  As I see it, the problem with this narrative isn’t that God judges; it’s that the god who is depicted as judge seems to lack any sense of justice or any attribute of love. Here is a god not unlike the gods of ancient mythology — arbitrary, distant, angry, petty, bent on destruction.

It seems to me that our Evangelical god sometimes isn’t really the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.  As my theologian friend Scot McKnight notes in his book A Community Called Atonement, “[j]ustice . . . cannot be reduced to revenge or retribution.  Instead, it is the redemptive grace of God at work in God’s community of faith that preemptively strikes with grace, love, peace, and forgiveness to restore others to selves, and to restore selves to others.”  God’s justice portrayed in the Christian scriptures is a justice of restoration. It is not arbitrary, but rather flows from the relational character of the Triune God, which is a relationship of perfect fellowship and love.

A United States federal district court judge’s orders are legitimate because and to the extent that they are constructed within the communal framework of our constitutional social contract. God’s judgments are legitimate because they are the extension of the communal life of God into the world He created to share in that life.  But if God is love, why would his justice ever exclude anyone from enjoying the benefits of the restored community?

I think Hans Boersma, in his rich book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, offers a helpful (and very Augustinian) response:

Just as divine hospitality requires at least some violence to make it flourish, so also God’s love requires that he become angry when his love is violated. For God not to get angry when he is rejected by people made in his image (and redeemed in Christ) would demonstrate indifference, not love. . . . Love, it seems, requires passionate anger toward anything that would endanger the relationship of love.

Justice motivated by love requires a sort of “violence.”   If God is to restore the community of peace, He must melt away that which opposes peace, just as the refiner melts away that which corrupts the strength and beauty of the metal.  “For he [God] is like a refiner’s fire” (Mal. 3:2).

But how does this particularly Christian and Trinitarian understanding of justice, judgment and love translate into theories of culture and of positive law?  We Christians obviously have a dark history of presuming license to employ physical violence against others — particularly our Jewish neighbors, but also fellow Christians with whom we disagree on matters of faith and practice — in order to establish what we think God’s community of peace should look like on this earth.  Indeed, St. Augustine’s tract against the Donatists itself represents the temptation to appropriate the mechanisms of state violence in the service of a specific Christian view of the peaceable kingdom.

On this point I envy my Catholic friends who can point to Balthasar and the nouvelle theologie behind the Second Vatican Council for a rich contemporary understanding of justice, judgment, and pluralism.  I don’t think the usual evangelical default to Kuyper and “common grace” helps very much.  In fact, for Christian scholars of the law and culture in the evangelical tradition, I think developing a meaningful theology of justice and judgment in a pluralistic world is one of our most pressing tasks.

Categories
Science and Religion

Cosmic Fine-tuning and Natural Theology

This is the conclusion of a good video series on cosmic fine tuning arguments.  Notice the careful use of modest natural theology.

Categories
Science and Religion

The Different Stories of Gen. 1 and 2

On BioLogos, Pete Enns offers a good discussion of the differences between the Gen. 1 and Gen. 2 creation narratives.

Categories
Science and Religion

Daniel Harrell on Scientific Method

A good video from Pastor Daniel Harrell on scientific method:

Categories
Hopeful Thoughts

Hopeful Thought for the Day

Our hopeful thought for today is from Phil. 2:5-11.  Recall our discussion during week one about the fellowship of the Trinity, and reflect on what it meant for Christ to “empty Himself.”  In the midst of your suffering, how does the self-emptying of Christ bring you hope?

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.  Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Categories
Law and Policy

Law at the Jesus Creed: CLS v. Martinez

My latest post on Law at Jesus Creed discusses the CLS v. Martinez case.  Check it out.