I’ve been thinking for a while of blogging regularly again. The last time I tried was February 2015. Looking back over this site, there are materials on it dating from 2004! Some of it’s quite good (I think), most of it shows ways in which I’ve both changed and stayed consistent over more than a decade of writing. So, let me try to get it going again. We’ll start with a wonderful new book that you must read, A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies, by the late Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
Anyone must love a book that opens with a portion of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius asks “Lady Philosophy” to “reveal these mysteries and explain those things that are clouded and hidden.” At this request, Boethius says,
She hesitated a moment, then smiled and at last replied: ‘This is the great question, isn’t it? It is a problem that can never be fully soled even by the most exhaustive discourse. For when one part of the conundrum is resolved, others pop up, like the heads of the Hydra. What is needed to restrain them is intellectual fire. Otherwise, we are in a morass of difficulties — the singleness of providence, the vicissitudes of fate, the haphazardousness of events, God’s plan, predestination, free will. All these knotty questions come together and are intertwined. . . . [So] you must be patient for a bit while I construct the arguments and lay them out for you in proper sequence.’
It is these Hydra-headed problems Oakes addressed in this book. As we will see, Oakes did so gracefully and winsomely, without pretending to offer ultimate solutions.
In the Preface, Machuga sets for himself a big task:
This book addresses five big questions.
Is the existence of God a matter of faith or knowledge?
Does God sometimes act miraculously or are there physical causes for everything?
Is morality absolute or relative?
Are humans truly free or does God’s sovereignty determine everything?
When bad things happen, is God the only cause or are they the fault of humans?
With a set-up like this, it might seem that we’re in for a polemic from one side or the other. Not so in this case. Machuga continues:
Too frequently Christians answer these questions with a Yes to one side and a No to the other side. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth answer Yes to both, in all cases. Following their model, I will defend a ‘third way’ which transcends the dichotomies of fideism versus rationalism, supernaturalism versus naturalism, relativism versus absolutism, free will versus predestination, and God’s justice versus his mercy.
A third way that draws on both Aquinas and Barth? Set the hook, and reel me in! Indeed, Machuga addresses all these questions with careful and eloquent arguments and shows how both Aquinas and Barth can serve as resources for a philosophical theology that avoids the reductionistic trends of modern thought. Next week, we’ll look at Machuga’s take on mechanism and the limits of logic.
For every class I will post a discussion question that will help frame our conversations in class. Often these questions will involve a concrete ethical problem. For the first class, however, our discussion question is a bit more theoretical. It comes from one of Plato’s dialogues and is a classic starting point for thinking about how theology — and particularly the doctrine of God — relates to “ethics.”
Plato’s dialogues are a unique form of literature. They are presented as reports of conversations between a great teacher, Socrates, and some conversation partner or partners, in this case Euthyphro. Socrates probes the assumptions of his interlocutors by asking pointed questions. In the Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro are having a conversaton about goodness and justice. Socrates asks whether it is good and just for the state to punish a murderer, when the punishment results in harm to the murderer. In other words, Socrates asks why it is ethically acceptable to harm a murderer through punishment but not ethically acceptable to harm others by committing murder. Euthyhpro responds by suggesting that the gods have declared murder immoral and subject to punishment. Socrates then asks why the will of the gods should determine what is or is not good and just. Here is a key part of that discussion:
Euth. . . . I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.
Soc. Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?
Euth. We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.
Soc. We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.
A bit later in the dialogue, Socrates frames the key question as follows:
Soc. And is, then, all which is just pious? or, is that which is pious all just, but that which is just, only in part and not all, pious?
Euthyphro responds by suggesting that piety is just because it honors the gods. Socrates responds that people are pious because they are afraid of the gods, who have the power to destroy their lives, just as oxen or cattle obey a herdsman who weilds a whip:
Soc. I should not say that where there is fear there is also reverence; for I am sure that many persons fear poverty and disease, and the like evils, but I do not perceive that they reverence the objects of their fear.
The discussion between Socrates and Euthyhpro then goes on to explore the relationship between piety and fear.
All of this dialogue establishes what we today call the “Euthyphro Dilemma”: Is what God commands “good” because God commands it, or does God command it because it is “good”?
If the former is true — what God commands is “good” because God commands it — then it is hard to see how the term “good” has any meangingful content. God’s commands could be entirely arbitrary. One day God might command us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and the next day he might command us to slaughter our neighbors. If we obey these arbirary commands, our obedience will arise only from fear of God’s absolute and terrible power.
We might respond, then, that God only commands that which is really “good,” even if we do not always fully understand the goodness of God’s commands. But this response suggests that God is bound by a principle higher than God’s self — some principle of “the good.” The problem here is that the definition of “God” entails absolute perfection. There can be no principle of “the good” that limits God’s commands or compels God to act, because God would then not really be “God.” There would be some principle higher or more authoritative than “God,” which in a sense would itself by “God.”
In both popular and academic literature, sermons, and so-on, you will often hear statements about morality and ethics that impale themselves on one or the other of the horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma. Why did God command the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites? A common response is along these lines: “Who are we to question God’s commands — God can do whatever He wants.” This kind of response makes God’s commands utterly arbitrary and destroys any objective concept of “the good.” Alternatively, we might suggest that the Biblical witness concerning these commands is untrustworthy and perhaps should be edited out of our Bibles: “God would never command His people to do something unjust.” This kind of response seems to suggest a standard of “justice” that sits in judgment over God Himself.
The readings assgined for our first class point towards a way between the horns of the Euthyhpro Dilemma for Christian theological ethics. The key, as we will discuss in class, lies in a robust understanding of the doctrine of God.
This series is a theological / spiritual commentary on Psalm 107. I don’t pretend to have great expertise in critical Biblical studies, which I find incredibly valuable, but this is an exercise in theological and spiritual exegesis.
Good.
Psalm 107 opens with a familiar refrain:
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.
This is the most basic statement of God’s character in scripture. The LORD is “good.” The word “good” in this text is the same word used for the creation in Genesis 1. This tells us much about what it means to say that God is “good.”
Water and sky, land and trees, fish and birds, are “good.” These things nurture and sustain us. They are life. Without them, we shrivel and die, we cease to be. Our human being itself is “very good” (Gen. 1:27-31). God is “good” as life itself is “good.”
The word “as” in this sentence suggests that this is an analogy. When theologians speak about “analogy” we mean that because God is truly God, we can say nothing that fully measures or contains Him. To say God is “good” as trees and water and birds are “good” is not to limit God to the “goodness” of those created things. Rather, it is to say that if we imagine the highest “good” of any of those things, we must try to imagine it infinitely more so when we try to think of God. If water gives quenches our thirst, sustains our bodies, and revives our spirits, how much more does God do the same? If a lack of water causes us to shrivel and die, how much more does a lack of God do the same?
Of course, we cannot truly understand the “infinite,” so to say that God sustains us infinitely more than water is already to admit that the excess of God’s “goodness” over that of creation is itself something our human minds cannot contain. “The LORD is good” therefore is no modest claim. Is it a claim we can truly learn to trust?
In the Christian History class I’m teaching, we recently covered portions of Athanasius, On the Incarnation. I love this text because it provides an “eastern” take on human nature, the fall, and the incarnation. Athanasius presents human fallenness as a sort of conundrum for God. If God created humanity out of love, and provided humanity with the grace of His law of love, what could God do when humanity turned away from love and embraced the dissolution of death? Athanasius’ answer is that the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were a necessary response flowing from God’s character and purposes for creation.
I call this an “eastern” approach because it emphasizes God’s being as prior to God’s will. Of course, Athanasius wasn’t arguing against Divine freedom. Athanasisus was not suggesting that God was compelled to redeem fallen humanity by some power or force that is higher than Godself. But God’s will to redeem us, for Athanasisus, is so intimately connected to God’s character that Athanasisus could present our fall as a Divine dilemma and could speak of the “impossibility” of God not redeeming humanity:
As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created men at all. It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.
Athanasius’ approach is subtly different from “western” approaches that prioritize God’s freedom. The “western” approach emphasizes, correctly, that God was not compelled to create, nor was He compelled to redeem. God’s “reasons” for creating and redeeming are finally inscrutable to us and are grounded in God’s glory. Creation shows God’s glory, redemption shows God’s glory — and reprobation shows God’s glory as well. For thinkers such as Augustine and Calvin, the fact that many or most human beings rebel against God and are finally not redeemed glorifies God by demonstrating God’s holiness and justice. The “why” question — why would God need to demonstrate His glory in a way that results in the damnation of most of the creatures created in His image — is often set aside in these “theologies of glory” as impertinent. The “reason” is that God, precisely because He is God, is utterly free to do as He wills.
Anyone who knows my theological leanings will know that I find full-blown “theologies of glory” repugnant. A God who is pure will is a God who cannot really be “loved” or “trusted.” That is not the God of scripture or of Christian faith. (It is not even, I think, really the God of Augustine or Calvin, even if they can be read to trend in that direction). That is the pantheon of Canaan, the Ba’als and Molechs who consume and must be worshiped because they consume.
A very perceptive student pointed out during our classroom discussion of Athanasius, however, that Athanasius also offers a theology of glory. Notice that Athanasius says it would have been “unfitting” and “unworthy” of Godself for God to allow His created image to ruin itself. For Athanasius, the glory of God is His love, and the love of God is His glory. In the terms of contemporary philosophical theology, for Athanasius, God’s being is ontologically prior to God’s “will,” such that there is finally no separation between God’s love, justice, power, and will. God saves because He is God. If we are reprobate, it is only because we reprobate ourselves.
This, of course, still leaves us with some enormous questions. If God knew we would turn away from created grace and towards decay, and if God knew that some, perhaps most, would persist in the way of decay, why would he have created us at all? The Augustinian dual response of inscrutability and glory must here return: we can’t really know because we are not God, but we can say that in any case God’s glory is demonstrated in the end. Yet, with Athanasius, we can say this in a way that understand God’s “glory” as coextensive with His “love.” Whoever is reprobated, if anyone is finally reprobated, if even many or most are finally reprobated, it is not in any way because God determines even one human person’s reprobation. Impossible as it is to fathom, it is all, finally, love.
My friend Ryan Bell, as part of his “Year Without God” project, recently wrote about the question “What Difference Does God Make?” His answer was that God makes no difference to his daily life.
There may have been some confusion in how Ryan framed the question. If there is a God, then God makes all the difference in the universe, because there would be no universe without God. This is simply a function of the definitions of what theologians mean by the terms “God” and “universe” (or, more accurately, “creation”). If there is no God, then of course “God” makes no difference at all, and indeed the question of what “difference God makes” is nonsensical, a non-question. In other words, the question “what difference does God make” begs the question whether there is a God.
I think what Ryan meant is “what difference does believing in God make?” Even this is a question fraught with definitional problems. For example, what does “difference” mean? Given that most human beings through most of history have had some sort of belief in God or the gods, and given that even evolutionary sociobiologists seek to explain such belief with the language of adaptation, it seems beyond dispute that belief in God / the gods makes a substantial “difference.” Certainly folks like Richard Dawkins like to argue that belief in God makes a pernicious difference by increasing divisions and violence among humans.
Here I think Ryan meant what positive difference does believing in God make? This seems evident in his focus on “hope.” At least some people report that their belief in God gives them “hope.” Ryan feels he can experience hope without belief in God. In fact, Ryan feels that at least some of the sorts of beliefs about God he received from his church experience were less hope-filled than how he feels “without” God.
I can’t blame him for that conclusion. The vision of the “Left Behind” theology so popular in American church culture is hopeless and nihilistic. The spirituality of pop materialism is far more attractive: we are on this Earth for a blip in evolutionary time, but we have the capacity to feel and experience life at least for a moment, and so we can find that moment let go of worries about the future. Don’t think so much; feel, and let go. That is the message of almost every contemporary pop song, romantic comedy, family-oriented animated film, home furnishing commercial, and so-on. It is a compelling message, because entails substantial truth, even though it is incomplete (see, e.g., the Book of Ecclesiastes).
The Decapitator
But this raises another set of questions: Who said belief in God is supposed to make an emotionally positive difference to the believer? Why should a value judgment like positive matter to us? And what, exactly, do we mean by “belief” in God? There have been cultures in which belief in the gods produced fear rather than hope. I can’t imagine that the Moche people, for example, thought of the Decapitator primarily in terms of the category of “hope.”
At this point I think Ryan’s Christian background is already in play. Christians take “belief” in God to mean “trust.” Christians want to “trust” God because we believe He is perfectly good and loves us absolutely, demonstrated in the fact that He created us, gave us life, and gave Himself for us on the cross. We expect that this kind of “belief” will, at least over the long haul, at least in the hard fissures of life, and at least at the end, make all the difference to how we feel and how we live.
Even given these Christian presuppositions, why don’t most non-Christians feel hopeless most of the time? I think there are at least two Christian theological notions at play: the doctrines of creation and grace.
Christians believe every human being is created in God’s image. We differ among ourselves to varying degrees about the extent to which sin affects our ability to function properly as God’s image-bearers without a specific connection to Christ, but we generally agree that simply being human is a precious gift that entails some basic blessings. Christians further agree that all human beings who enjoy the basic goods of life are given at least some measure of grace. In fact, this common humanity and common grace is a cornerstone of Jesus’ ethical teaching:
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matt. 5:43-45.)
It is no surprise that, on any given day, both people who trust in God and people who do not trust in God (and people who struggle to trust in God) wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to work, engage in relationships, and participate in the general goods of life. This is part of the theology of creation as well as the theology of grace. The more penetrating question, then, might be whether we can recognize grace and respond in some way to it.
It is time to start the discipline of writing again. If you have subscribed to my blog in the past, please note that I have transferred the blog to a new domain because Facebook had been blocking my links. I invite you to sign up for email updates from this site.
I’ve been thinking for a while of blogging regularly again. The last time I tried was February 2015. Looking back over this site, there are materials on it dating from 2004! Some of it’s quite good (I think), most of it shows ways in which I’ve both changed and stayed consistent over more than a decade of writing. So, let me try to get it going again. We’ll start with a wonderful new book that you must read, A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies, by the late Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
I’m starting a series on 