Category: Political Theology

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Political Theology Public Theology

Review of D. Stephen Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial Ethics (On Loving Enemies)

This is my review of D. Stephen Long, Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics: On Loving Enemies (Lanham: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic 2018) to appear in the Englewood Review of Books.

Steve Long has a talent for seeing a way through tensions between competing movements in contemporary theology. In his 2014 book Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2014), Long addressed the debates over natural theology and the analogia entis that still divide Protestant theology in a Barthian key from Catholic theology sympathetic to von Balthasar. As Long showed in that book, while there are real differences, contemporary theology can benefit from insights from both of these great thinkers, even as Barth and von Balthasar benefitted in their own lifetimes from their personal friendship.

Now, in Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics, Long takes up a related set of differences in Christian ethics, between “neo-Anabaptists” and “neo-Augustinians.” The “neo-Anabaptists” – or, as Long comes to refer to them, the “ecclesial” ethicists, are represented by John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, James William McClendon, and others who have taken up their work. The “neo-Augustinians” are represented by Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank, Eric Gregory, Charles Mathewes, Jennifer Herdt, and others who are more sympathetic to the “Augustinian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr. In many ways, the ecclesial ethicists represent the Barthian side of Saving Karl Barth, while the neo-Augustinians represent the von Balthasarian side (though O’Donovan is perhaps a Barthian Augustinian).

In his introduction, Long notes a common experience for many readers who have felt chilled both by right wing fundamentalism and left wing progressivism: ecclesial ethics “gave us a way to embrace Christian orthodoxy without coupling it to a bankrupt populist, evangelical Christianity.” Further, Long, suggests, people attracted to ecclesial ethics “saw it making common cause with what appeared to be a similar movement in the UK – radical orthodoxy.” Unfortunately, Long admits, “[w]e were, overall, wrong.”

I count myself as one of those disappointed hopefuls. I even did a Ph.D. in the home of radical orthodoxy (the University of Nottingham) based on those hopes. I still very much appreciate radical orthodoxy’s early promise and energy, just as I remain grateful for the influence of Stanley Hauerwas and other ecclesial ethicists, but I think Long is correct that the vision of a more unified trans-continental movement has dissipated.

The bulk of Long’s text traces the lineaments of both the ecclesial and neo-Augustinian approaches in particular through the criticisms each approach has brought against the other. Long’s discussion suggests that one of the key reasons we were wrong in hoping that ecclesial ethics and radical orthodoxy could draw together Anabaptist and Augustinian streams of the tradition is the need for more attention to differences in ecclesiology and eschatology. The most basic, historic differences between these approaches, of course, concern how the Church should relate to the temporal governing powers in this present age. Long offers some important and helpful suggestions for how both ecclesial ethicists and neo-Augustinians could temper their views and move just a bit closer to each other, even if they finally also hold some of their differences in creative tension.

Long summarizes these places of convergence and creative tension in three main theses in his conclusion: first, any common project must agree that neither America nor any other nation-state is a “salvific institution”; second, the church’s role in relation to the nation-state is as a “conversation partner,” not as an institution that seeks control over the levers of temporal government; and third, the conversation must entail deeper reflection on the meaning of human “freedom.” As Long asks, “[w]ho will sustain an ancient, positive view of liberty,” that is, freedom as a freedom from evil that facilitates a positive vision of authentic human flourishing, rather than freedom primarily as negative liberty, a freedom to live however one pleases free of external restraints, so long as that freedom does not unduly impinge on another individual’s basic negative liberties, regardless of any other broader conception of the good. I think this is one of the most important points Long makes. The argument between today’s “conservatives” and “progressives” usually assumes the same radically libertarian view of “freedom” as negative liberty, which is not the predominant view of “freedom” in the Biblical literature or the Christian tradition.

There is one area in which I’d like to see more discussion on this front, which reflects my own background and interests: the role of the rule of law and its effect of mitigating the inherent violence in the exercise of police powers. Any discussion of the rule of law raises the question of “natural law,” which is not really addressed in Long’s text. This is perhaps not surprising, since both the ecclesial and neo-Augustinian ethicists Long surveys are contemporary Protestant theologians – indeed, even the moniker “theological ethics,” rather than “moral theology,” reflects a Protestant bent. This is true even of the Anglo-Catholic neo-Augustinians, notably John Milbank, who claim to be extending Roman Catholic social teaching rather than doing “Protestant” theology.

Part of the problem with any discussion of “natural law” in relation to Long’s central theses is the influence today of the “new natural law” – a school of thought led by John Finnis that emphasizes the capacity of human reason, apart from any specifically religious claims, to discern objective principles of the good. The ecclesial ethicists generally echo Barth’s “nein” to this kind of natural theology, and the neo-Augustinians for the most part likewise reject the claim that a meaningful account of social order can derive from human reason without at least glaringly begging the question of God — or, in Milbank’s case, without starting with the question of God. But there are also Catholic neo-Augustinians, such as Jean Porter, writing on natural law from a more classically theological perspective in ways that could help further bridge the gaps Long identifies.

For any reader of this Review who is disturbed by our current political culture, Long’s Augustinian and Ecclesial Ethics is important reading. If you are not already deeply versed in the contemporary political theologians Long surveys it may be difficult reading at points, but keep at it, and take notes. Even as someone knee-deep in this world already, I have two pages of notes for further reading in the flyleaf of my copy of Long’s book. This is what thoughtful, engaged contemporary political theology looks like.

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Political Theology

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

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

Introduction

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

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

Thornwell’s Biblical But Not Biblicist Defense of Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thornwell’s Response to Polygenism and the Curse of Canaan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thornwell, Slavery, and Law

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Endnotes

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

[2] Ibid., 57-58.

[3] Ibid., 58.

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

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

[6] Ibid., Introduction.

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

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

[9] Ibid., 94-198.

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

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

[12] Sermon, 15.

[13] Sermon, 40.

[14] Ibid., 41.

[15] Ibid., 44.

[16] Sermon, 31.

[17] Ibid., 33.

[18] Sermon, 45.

[19] Ibid., 32.

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

[21] Ibid., 14.

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

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

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

[25] Ibid., 173-180.

[26] Ibid., 180-182.

[27] Gen. 9:20.

[28] Gen. 9:22-25.

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

[30] Ibid.

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

[32] Sermon, 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[39] Sermon, 24.

[40] Ibid., 40-41.

[41] Ibid., 27.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

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

[45] See ibid.

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

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

Categories
Philosophical Theology Political Theology Science and Religion

Book Review: Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Categories
Biblical Studies Justice Political Theology Public Theology

James Cone: A Black Theology of Liberation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid.

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

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 12.

[9] Ibid., Ch. 2.

[10] Ibid., 34.

[11] Ibid., 25.

[12] Ibid., Chapter 4.

[13] Ibid., 64.

[14] Ibid., 65.

[15] Ibid., Chapters 5 and 6.

[16] Ibid., 69.

[17] Ibid., 145.

[18] Ibid., 140.

[19] Ibid., 150.

[20] Ibid., 130.

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

Categories
Music Political Theology Public Theology

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

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

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

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

 

Categories
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
Political Theology Public Theology

Three Qualities Political Leadership: Acting, Performing, Speaking

djt_headshot_v2_400x400Like many others, I’ve been reflecting on the theological and pastoral significance of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency.  And, like many others, I’ve been troubled by the support Trump garnered from some evangelicals.  As a law professor and theological ethics professor, I feel I need to risk a few public thoughts about political leadership, so here they are:

  1. Character Matters.  Character matters because a leader’s character will inform his or her substantive policy decisions, particularly on hard, contested, urgent issues.  Character also matters because a leader in high office serves a symbolic role that sets a baseline for conduct in every sphere of the commonwealth.  A person invested with the authority of political office bears a heave responsibility to act wisely, with gravity and restraint.

  2. Symbols Matter.  Human beings are a symbolic species.  It is part of our created nature to respond to symbols that identify authority and power.  This is no less the case for an elected President than it is for a hereditary King.  A person entrusted with stewardship of powerful symbols — whether they are clerical vestments, a royal scepter, judicial robes, or the Oval Office — bears a heavy responsibility to perform wisely, with gravity and restraint.

  3.  Words Matter.  Words are among the most powerful human symbols.  Language signifies both specific concepts and broader attitudes, and invokes transcendent realities of thought and truth.  Through his or her words, a political leader represents these transcendent realities to the commonwealth and in a mystical but real sense represents the commonwealth before these transcendent realities.  A person entrusted with the responsibility to speak to and for the commonwealth bears a heavy responsibility to speak wisely, with gravity and restraint.

There is nothing novel about these convictions.  They are present, I think, in the great tradition of political theology running through the Torah, the Old Testament histories and prophets, the New Testament’s reworking of the Hebrew scriptures, and in great Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas.  Until recently, I think they were widely acknowledged by most serious Christians on the right, left, and in between.

In recent American history, when Bill Clinton defiled the Oval Office by exploiting a female intern, even engaging in illicit sexual conduct literally at the President’s desk, most Christians agreed that it mattered.  When he lied to the public about the affair, it mattered.  When his defenders dismissed this conduct as a meaningless “sex lie,” it mattered.  Many of us, myself included, were outraged by this dishonest, facile defense.  I thought Bill Clinton was generally a good President on policy questions, particularly on economic issues, but such conduct cannot pass unchecked.  Whether or not this conduct merited impeachment and removal from office, it rightly provoked grave concern and approbation.

Many conservative Christians have now abandoned proper concerns about character, symbols and words because they think Trump is “pro life” and “small government,” in contrast to the deficiencies, real and perceived, of President Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton.  There are many reasons to doubt Trump’s commitments to these policy positions, and many reasons to question the strange brew of restorationism and libertarianism that characterizes much of the religious right.  Even granting those concerns, however, it is wrong, unprincipled, and dangerous to surrender the historic Christian conviction that earthly political leaders play a central role in mediating truth to and for the commonwealth through actions, performance and speech.  We must now hold President Elect Trump to account in this role.

(Image Source = @realDonaldTrump Twitter profile).

Categories
Church Epistemology Law and Policy Missiology Political Theology Spirit

Atheists, Christians, the Pope, and Doing Good

The headline of a recent Huffington Post article caught my eye:  “Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics.”  Another HuffPo article notes that “Atheists Like What They See in Pope Francis’ New Openness.”  What’s going on here?  Good things, I think.

We need to dig a bit into the homily delivered by the Pope for the Feast of Santa Rita – Patron Saint of impossible things – to understand the theological undercurrents of these remarks.

The cornerstone of the Pope’s homily is a concept of natural law:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart:  do good and do not do evil.  All of us.  ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic!  He cannot do good.’  Yes, he can.  He must.  Not can:  must!  Because he has this commandment within him.

This is not a new teaching.  Some notion of natural law has been part of Christian theology from the first century New Testament writings until today (see, for example, Romans 1:20, the locus classicus for Christian natural law thinking).  Atheists, of course, will reject the concept of a natural law implanted in universal human nature by God.  They will offer other reasons for the good that they do.  But Christian theology has always held that all human beings in their created humanness bear the image of God and have a “natural” sense of what is good.

Christian theologians, however, have often disagreed about how or whether or to what extent sinful human beings can follow the natural law.  The key question here is the effect of sin on human nature and the accessibility of God’s grace to sinful humans (again, a locus classicus is Romans 1).  We can illustrate this through two historically important Christian thinkers:  Pelagius and Martin Luther.  Pelagius held that even after sin, a human being could theoretically follow his or her created nature and obtain perfection through the natural law alone.  One of Pelagius’ concerns was to preserve human freedom to follow or not follow God.  Luther, in contrast, wrote a tract titled “On the Bondage of the Will” in which he argued that sin has erased human freedom.  A sinful human person always does evil.

Both Pelagius and Luther were more complex as thinkers than this sketch suggests.  Just as some sense of natural law has always been a part of Christian thought, so has Christian thought always recognized the weight and tragedy and depth of human sin and the utter dependence of human beings on God’s grace.  Both Pelagius and Luther – as well as St. Paul and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Barth and many other great Christian thinkers throughout history – have wrestled with this tension.  As is always the case, distortions (“heresies,” in the historically freighted lingo) crop up when one node of a tensioned web of thought is amplified so that the web snaps. 

In this case, the nodes are human freedom and human bondage to sin.  Or, stated in more common theological terms, the nodes are “nature” and “grace.”   The tensioned web of robust Christian thought (“orthodoxy”) holds that all human beings are both (1) created morally free and accountable and (2) thoroughly sinful and utterly in need of God’s grace.

At the equilibrium point of this tension we find another passage in Pope Francis’ homily that caught the attention of the HuffPo headline writers:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ:  all of us, not just Catholics.  Everyone!  ‘Father, the atheists?’  Even the atheists.  Everyone!  And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class!  We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all!  And we all have a duty to do good.

For a journalist unacquainted with Christian theology, as well as for many Protestant evangelicals, a statement like this sounds like bland universalism.  Many of us from evangelical backgrounds are trained to think of “redemption” as something utterly separate from our created selves that only becomes part of our experience when we forcibly take hold of it.  That is, we completely sever “nature” and “grace.”

A more careful account is that sin’s corruption of human “nature” in fact makes us into something “un-natural.”  We are not now as we are created to be.  This is one of the essential points of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Eden.  The literary genre of that story surely is not “literal history” (whatever that would mean), but it tells a basic truth.  We cannot, because of sin, be or become what we truly are, without God’s help.  But the help – the grace – God gives us does not erase or replace “nature.”  “Nature” is already grace-shaped.  “Nature anticipates grace,” as Aquinas said, and grace perfects nature.  Redemption, then, is not alien to who we are in our created humanity.  What is “alien,” in fact, is the separation and death and emptiness of sin.

We – evangelicals and Americans more broadly – also are accustomed to think of “redemption” to mean “who goes to heaven.”  It’s as though redemption were a magic potion on a store shelf.  We might be directed to the correct aisle and grab the bottle of potion and force the potion down our throats, or we might not.  Even if the bottle is in theory universally accessible to every shopper – indeed even if there is a voice on the PA system announcing “attention shoppers, Redemption Potion is in the bottles in aisle four” — not many find it or grab it or swallow the bitter draught.  Some in very severe Reformed traditions might even say the bottle is hidden behind other things and is only made accessible to a chosen few.  Maybe a clerk whispers in the ears of those who are chosen – “psst, check out aisle four….”  In any event, it’s all about this magic potion, which instantly transforms those who drink it from “unredeemed” to “redeemed.”

I think the Pope had a different notion of “redemption” in mind in this quote.  I think he had in mind the redemption of all creation, including human nature as something universal in which all particular human beings share.  In this sense, all human beings are already redeemed by the blood of Christ.  The defects of universal human nature were assumed by Christ and are healed in Christ.  All particular human beings are capable of doing good, since all particular humans participate in universal human nature, which Christ has healed.  And to the extent any particular human is doing good, he or she is already in some fashion participating in the new humanity, the new Adam, brought about by the faithfulness of Christ. 

This concept is of course contrary to hard-line Reformed theologies that suggest the “good” done by non-Christians is only a sort of “civil good” and not genuine good.  But it is, I believe, thoroughly consistent with scripture and the broad Christian tradition, and it is a truth recognized by most Protestants today outside some narrow circles.  At the very least, God’s prevenient grace allows every human being to know and do the good to some extent.   Those of us within the Church, in fact, ought to be the first to acknowledge how far we regularly fall short in doing good, even with the benefits of regular Christian worship and sacramental life.

Does this mean that every particular human being is “going to heaven?”  No.  The freedom available to us because of Christ’s victory over sin and death remains contingent on our participation by faith.  We are free to reject the freedom of Christ and to accept instead the bondage of sin.  And in Catholic theology, along with the broad tradition of Christian thought, it is clear that this centrally involves the freedom to respond or not respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is made known to us.  But, broadly speaking, Catholic theology is much more reticent to claim knowledge of precisely how God reveals Himself to others and precisely how others are or are not responding to God’s grace.  It may be that every atheist is beginning to respond and will finally respond “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  It may be that every professing Christian has expressed and will express a fundamental “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  Scripture suggests that only God finally knows the wheat from the tares, the sheep from the goats.

Does this then mean that anyone can “earn” heaven by “doing good?”  Again, no – and I don’t think the Pope would say so.  We are “justified” by faith, not by works.  Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, this is a basic and beautiful truth of the Gospel.  But the scriptural content of “justification” involves being made “just” – not only in name or by judicial declaration, but in fact.  We are made just only as a free gift of God’s grace made available to us by the faithfulness of Christ in his death and resurrection.  To accept that gift means, by the power of the Holy Spirit, gradually being made into a person more like Christ.  It means “abiding” in Christ, like a branch on a vine (John 15).  It means participating in the loving life of the Triune God.

The Pope’s conclusion is also important because it reflects this holistic notion of justification and redemption:

And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good:  we will meet one another there.

Notice that “redemption” in this picture is about making culture and meeting one another – starting here and now!  It is not only about getting to heaven someday.  And notice that this redemptive construction of culture does not, and cannot, happen all at once.  I love the notion of creating culture “gently, little by little.”  How often I fail that ideal!  In a world where grave violence persists, it is not always possible to go “gently” (I am thinking at the moment of efforts to combat human trafficking and child pornography).  Nor does going “gently” mean avoiding clear articulation of differences or eschewing evangelism.  But in this process of recognizing the genuine “good” done by the other, maybe this gift of gentleness – which, after all, is among the particular fruits of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:23) – can be realized.