tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44599881844253894112024-02-20T09:02:28.339-08:00Thinking AloudExploring evolution, biblical faith, the pursuit of peace and justice, and the environment...Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-35219067661313420852011-02-22T11:52:00.000-08:002011-02-22T11:53:13.361-08:00What I think environmentalism's number one priority should beWe urgently need a radically sustainable alternative development pattern, characterized by low consumption, local production, and cooperative economics. And we need a mass political movement to remove obstacles to it, especially at the municipal level. <br /> <br />Practically speaking, this means mobilizing massive local support for allowing composting toilets, allowing raising of chickens and goats, allowing the construction of radically simple multi-family dwellings using bamboo, rammed earth, cob, and other natural building techniques in the middle of the city, and a thoroughgoing overhaul of antiquated codes and regulations that were implemented at the onset of the age of sprawl, before there was much ecological awareness. If need be, we should take to the streets, and chain ourselves to the doors of the municipal building, and shut down city traffic for days on end, provided our local support base numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The planet must no longer be held hostage to codes and regulations expressing the ideals of the 1950s. <br /> <br />To date this has NOT been a major focus of the environmental movement. As an example, the Rhizome Collective in Austin labored for FOUR years just to get a composting toilet approved, and today this cutting edge community dedicated to demonstrating radically sustainable city living is essentially out of business BECAUSE a mass movement did NOT get behind them to change obstacles in city codes to their projects. <br /> <br />Forty years of environmentalism has failed because it has not focused its energies and resources on the key battles where there is the greatest leverage for positive impact. Instead, too much energy has been absorbed in advocating incremental tweaks to our existing patterns of living, or relatively cosmetic changes such as New Urbanism proposes, which, even if implemented widely, cannot credibly be shown to be sufficient to deflate the war machine, preserve Arctic ice, etc.<br /> <br />But If environmentalists FOCUSED their energies on OVERCOMING REGULATORY OBSTACLES TO RADICALLY SUSTAINABLE LIVING, and on making communities like the Rhizome Collective the norm rather than exception, with the FOCUSED INTENSITY of the Civil Rights movement, then all sorts of problems would be greatly reduced:<br /> <br />1) It would dry up the corporate economy / imperial war machine, because our communities would be locally self-sufficient.<br /> <br />2) GHG emissions which cause global warming would come to a halt. Coal-fired plants and coal mines could be retired, because total energy needs would be 90% less and met by community-scale production using renewable resources.<br /> <br />3) We would no longer need cars, because abundant economic, cultural, and other opportunities would be within walking distance or a short bike ride.<br /> <br />4) Our food would no longer be produced with fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and poisonous pesticides, but would be produced close to home applying sound organic and permaculture design principles.<br /> <br />5) Huge swaths of land would be freed for wildlife and natural habitat restoration.<br /> <br />6) Total human impacts would be a fraction of what they are today, because total material consumption would be reduced by some 90%, people would occupy much less space (living in more compact dwellings and not having redundant built space for living, working, educating, etc.). People would travel much less because lives and relationships would be so rich in the communities where they produce most of what they need within a few feet of their compact multi-family dwellings with shared tools, toys, books, etc., with lives full of nonmaterial satisfactions such as community theater, music, poetry, etc.<br /> <br />The degree of change called for is really scarcely any greater than that which occurred when they built the destructive pattern of oil/cars/sprawl/consumerism in the first place. But in order to mobilize an effective social and political movement to radically transform the physical environment around us, we must overcome a lot of psychological and cultural baggage and come to spiritual awareness within. We must re-define "wealth" to mean not material excess but the richness and resilience of symbiotic relationships in communities of people, plants, animals, etc. And we must ramp up the degree of material simplicity and cooperative lifestyle that we are willing to aim for, way beyond what "mainstream" environmentalism advocates, and way, way beyond anything our own personal experience has prepared us for. We must find the faith to venture out of our comfort zones into uncharted waters, knowing that in this journey all that we will lose was just holding us down anyway, and what we will gain is true riches, true community, and justice and well-being for all. <br /> <br />Considerable educating needs to be done before a massive political movement along these lines can be mobilized. The best one-stop resource I know of for understanding the specs of the new pattern of development we need is Ted Trainer's "The Simpler Way" at http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/12b-The-Alt-Sust-Soc-Lng.html. It prints out as some 25 or so pages. 25 pages, I would venture to submit, that if the environmental movement had read and made their manifesto 25 years ago, we'd be in INCALCULABLY better shape today. Another resource which defines and demonstrates what radical sustainability looks like is the book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It-Ourselves Guide, by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew, co-founders of The Rhizome Collective. There is an abundance of good materials, videos, etc. explaining the planet's plight, but there is precious little like the above that explains and promotes solutions that are sufficiently thoroughgoing and radical to make a significant impact. We urgently need to develop materials and media and political platforms that do an end run past the distraction of incremental tweaks and that define an agenda for radically simple and cooperative ways without which we cannot possibly prevent the worst damage of modern industrial ways.<br /> <br />Let's not wait until 2050 when most of the damage will have already been done! Let's create a new mass movement NOW that is focused on this KEY LEVERAGE POINT of developing radically sustainable communities and living systems and removing legal and regulatory obstacles to them!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-21019853273060001592010-08-11T16:29:00.000-07:002010-08-12T11:28:01.898-07:00What About Paul and Women?A Honduran promoter of cultural change, seeking to address the horrible oppression and abuse of women that permeates Honduran society, took aim in a recent Facebook post at Paul of Tarsus, who penned these infamous words some 2,000 years ago:<br /><br />"Indeed, just as the church is submissive to the Messiah, so wives must be submissive to their husbands in everything." (Ephesians 5:24)<br /><br />"The guy clearly was not married," he goes on to comment, implying, I think, that a married man would not have such boneheadedly unrealistic expectations.<br /><br />Is this a correct reading of Paul, and a judicious assessment of the impact of his legacy on struggles for the rights of women today? Does it take adequate account of the situational context in which Paul wrote in the 1st C.?<br /><br />And are we going to make more practical headway in advancing the rights of women by bashing Paul, and getting people to dismiss him as the chauvinist lout we may imagine he was, or by re-orienting people to the quest for justice, which, as I will argue below, Paul exemplified, however imperfectly, even in this passage in his letter to the Ephesians, in ways conditioned by his times?<br /><br />Modern readers of Paul, I think, are prone to make one of two errors: <br /><br />1) We may judge and condemn his words by 21st C. standards, as if they were written to 21st C. situations and social contexts, failing to see that our 21st C. standards themselves owe their origin and development, at least in part, to a trajectory that Paul himself helped set in motion. Ironically, it is partly Paul himself who has brought us into conflict with Paul. <br /><br />2) We may, if we are fundamentalists, seek to apply the words rigidly today, with a similar disregard for the differences in situation and social context. In practical effect, I think this is the WORST of the two errors to make.<br /><br />Far from lacking an understanding of marriage and women, I rather think that Paul (or whoever wrote Ephesians, whether Paul or someone who deeply respected him), was anything if not astute about social relations, esp. social relations in the 1st C. as bearing on the survival and well-being of a marginalized community of Jesus followers who dared to model alternative values to those of the Roman Empire. While Paul certainly never entertained pretensions of overthrowing social institutions in one fell swoop (e.g., it did not occur to him to invite annihilation of early Christian communities by inciting slave rebellions), he did plant perspectives that would begin eating away at them from the core. <br /><br />First, we can see this, if not so clearly from a 21st C. vantage point, even in the very verse that is quoted, in that Paul roots the woman's "submissive" (however well that word really translates Paul's original thought) response to the husband in her relationship with Christ. This means that her life is not ABOUT the man, as in the Roman scheme of things, it is about a relationship that radically transcends and conditions all other relationships. I highly recommend carefully scrutinizing Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of this passage at <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%205:21-6:9&version=MSG">http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%205:21-6:9&version=MSG</a> -- this is no cheap attempt to sanitize Paul for modern consumption, and don't let its casual tone fool you: it is at least one scholarly attempt to convey the original meaning to today's readers, in the light of a close reading of the 1st C. context, as best as he understands that in the light of the evidence available to us. We may want to go further than Paul did, but from a 1st C. vantage point, this is radical change.<br /><br />Second, it is seen--and even 21st C. readers can see this at once--in the verses which immediately follow, where Paul introduces the radical notion that men, in their day-to-day lives, should sacrifice their own desires and interests for the well-being of their wives, using the self-surrender of Christ for the church as their model. (Read Ephesians 5:25-33 in Peterson's The Message and other versions, at www.biblegateway.com.) It is hard to imagine anything more effective than this in undercutting male oppression, whether in the 1st C. or in today's Honduras or anywhere else. And, in fact, we see very tangible positive results of this in the most vital expressions of the sort of evangelical Christianity that has swept through Latin America in recent decades. (I would imagine that we may also see it in Catholic movements that have a similar emphasis on making spiritual commitment central, vital, personal, and real.) What do we see? We see the miracle of miracles, the miracle of men no longer squandering family resources on booze, women, gambling, and other manifestations of despair, but investing both money and personal energy in the well-being of their families. It is well-documented that movements of "evangelicos" among the poor have often found it difficult to sustain leadership in the neighborhoods where they began because the economic uplift so rapidly experienced by converted families leads them to move to better neighborhoods so quickly. (Would that they would recover the New Testament emphasis on being communities of mutual aid, so that they would advance together and not separately, but that is another matter, addressed below.) I personally have met evangelical Christian men in Mexico who met regularly to encourage one another in serving their families, and all evidence was that this was WORKING in supplanting day-to-day machismo! And I have seen this at work in the U.S. as well. This is what Honduras and the rest of the world desperately needs--men being challenged, by the Bible, by priests, by indigenous elders and grandmothers, by the collective voice of every legacy of trajectories for justice in history, to live for the well-being of their families. <br /><br />Wives, in turn, may be expected in some conservative church circles to affirm "male headship." To the degree that both parties, in their day-to-day lives, are working on actually loving and serving one another, and given that making unilateral decisions without the input of the wife is considered "unloving" (and surely Paul would not say otherwise!), this tends to become something symbolic and titular, almost to the point of evaporation, functionally speaking. Is it safe, then, to retain this symbolic male dominance, even in the highly conditioned and altered form it takes in Paul's letter to the Ephesians and in which it is affirmed by some conservative Christians? No, I think there is a case for saying this is all just scaffolding that must be torn down once the building that was in the making is ready to stand. Indeed, it would be dangerous, in the 21st C., to let this scaffolding stand. Even though in the 1st C. the Pauline stance proposed a radically progressive change from the then-prevailing status quo, it is not so from the standpoint of where we stand on the trajectory in the 21st C. <br /><br />On the other hand, in regard to how this can play out practically, I think it bears mentioning that we cannot simply ignore the fact that in many poor communities, the men who take the momentous step of committing their lives to the service of their families, even in highly disempowered circumstances, often feel the need to retain at least this symbolic affirmation of their manhood, as they feel their self-worth assaulted by the culture of <span style="font-style:italic;">machismo </span>around them, as their macho buddies deride them for settling down and "playing house." Elijah Anderson, in his book Code of the Street, has an enlightening discussion of this phenomenon among the "decent" (as opposed to "street") families in inner city Philadelphia, where women publicly display, even in the manner in which they walk with their husbands and families, a recognition of the man's symbolic rule. Ultimately I think this must be challenged--there should be, instead, expressions of mutual respect--but I suspect that the conditions for effectively making this shift happen will only be in place once a lot of emphasis has been placed, as indeed we find it in Paul, on learning to deny oneself and live a life of practical loving service to others. The practical experience of loving and serving hollows out and finally discards any pretension to actual or symbolic dominance, while enhancing the ineffable wonder of the masculine-feminine dance.<br /><br />A further condition for successfully promoting gender equity and harmony, I believe, is organizing people into societies of practical mutual aid, and nurturing the cooperative values that enable such groups to succeed in promoting the survival and sense of human dignity of each of its members. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what we see Jesus and Paul doing, as opposed to the kind of marketing of superficial disconnected private religious experience that most often characterizes Christianity today. Only this kind of radical re-definition of one's relationship to the community and re-writing of the rules of the community itself can address the despair that feeds the <span style="font-style:italic;">machismo </span>of men who, lacking education and status and capital base to compete in the global economy, find no way to derive a meaningful sense of self-worth from their economic performance and service to their families, and instead seek that in a macho lifestyle, gangs, etc.<br /><br />In sum, I think we will do well to welcome how far Paul got us along a trajectory toward equity and harmony, given the obstacles and limitations he faced, and to keep pressing on from the point where we find ourselves. In some respects this may mean recovering elements of Paul's program which even many "enlightened progressives" have not gotten nearly seriously enough about, such as building tight communities of mutual aid. In other respects this may mean going beyond the letter of Paul's words so as to affirm more robust expressions of gender equality than the exigencies of his particular moment led him to affirm, at least in Ephesians 5. We should seek to do this in faithfulness to the Spirit which animated Paul himself to reach toward the ideal of equality, as expressed in Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-14781634476497091382010-04-21T07:08:00.000-07:002010-04-25T09:27:27.134-07:00The ancient conversation that could cure the Catholic Church...and maybe the rest of us too!Nicholas Kristof, in his New York Times op-ed piece <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opinion/18kristof.html?src=me&ref=general">A Church Mary Can Love</a>, hits crucial nails on the head. The Vatican establishment is completely out of touch, and Christians need to put vital community service at the center of their faith. <br /><br />But I think some tweaking of his understanding of the history involved could strengthen his case. Further to my last post, I think appeal to 2nd and 3rd Century "lost books of the Bible," while these texts may properly be cited as at least plausible <span style="font-weight:bold;">secondary </span>evidence of proto feminist ideals in earliest Christianity, distracts from the power of the canonical and more indisputably primary sources of early Christianity to address the problems of churches today. Not that I pretend to offer anything more original or authoritative than a second-hand regurge of scholars I've read, but I think the school of thought I will seek to summarize, which has eluded most journalists, is at least worth considering.<br /><br />To be sure, I think the transition from house churches to larger public gatherings that Kristof notes was an early contributing factor to making churches what they are today. But there is so much more to the story, and therefore so much more to be consciously recognized and confronted, if we are to find our way again. <br /><br />Kristof nails the oppressive and bungling tendencies of "good ole boy clubs" like the Vatican. But how many other "good ole boy clubs" do you know of get all excited about...celibacy?!?! There is surely a more bizarre and convoluted story that begs to be told in this regard. Not to be ignored is the influence of the anti-material Greek philosophies, e.g. Neoplatonism, that <span style="font-weight:bold;">saturated </span>Greco-Roman culture in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Many expressions of this kind of thinking were deeply anti-woman, saying that the allure of matter (and therefore sex and women) are "the problem." Kristof does not even mention this, even though it is arguably one of the most dominant factors leading to the anti-sexual features of the church he critiques. Concerns over property and inheritance in the medieval period further solidified the drive for a celibate priesthood.<br /><br />As to the "lost books," as mentioned in my last post, I think there is a strong case that many of these were not accepted simply because they came decades to centuries after the New Testament was written, and were thus far removed from Jesus and his earliest followers. Really, the clincher for me is this: If the folks who at various points in church history compiled lists of "accepted" books were willing to consider texts that late, would they not have included late texts that affirmed their anti-feminist views? They would have had plenty to choose from.<br /><br />To be sure, many scholars believe 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, traditionally attributed to Paul, are pretty much that--later pseudonymous texts expressing a more patriarchal and hierarchical view of the church. (And this was the consensus of scholars long before feminist issues really came to the fore.) But even those books don't come nearly as late or as far removed from the original Jesus communities as many of the "lost books" people have in mind. Don't get me wrong. By all means, I'd say, read the "lost books." For that matter, read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Quran. Definitely read Rumi. Include them in the conversation. But due regard should be given to the time and historical circumstance of each. And it's just quite a quite a stretch IMHO to consider the voice of a 1st Century Jesus to be represented equally well by 3rd Century texts.<br /><br />Some scholars also think there are later insertions into parts of the earliest New Testament texts. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, the passage where women are urged to be silent in the church, though appearing in a letter that virtually everybody agrees was written by Paul, may have been inserted later by others as a kind of "damage control" to offset Paul's acknowledgment of female prophets elsewhere in the same letter. (And lest it be thought that these scholars are simply trying to sanitize Paul for modern consumption, let it be noted that they appeal not only to the apparent incongruity of the message of these verses with other parts of 1 Corinthians, but also to the fact that the verses are placed in a different location in some manuscripts.) Or it may have been Paul's own "damage control," reflecting a kind of two steps forward and one step back, to put the brakes on applying his more radical teachings in ways that would have offended social mores to no immediately constructive end. Or, more likely as I see it, there may be a specific context to the forbidden "speaking" that was understood by the original audience but not by us. <br /><br />In any case, just how jarring this whole matter is, and what one feels to be at stake, will depend on how one understands the <span style="font-weight:bold;">nature </span>of the Bible and its intended role in the life of faith. This is one area where I think we've gotten de-railed, and I'd like to say just a little about that....<br /><br />There's no doubt, there are isolated Bible texts that people can use to put down women, exclude gays, justify slavery, insist on not mixing certain kinds of cloth, defend the divine right of kings, and what have you. But all this misses the grander narrative. Biblical authors were motivated by a desire to escape and transcend the oppressive traditions, social structures, and powers that were causing misery in their societies. The fact that their thinking, in part, was also inevitably conditioned by the same should not blind us to where the conversation, as a whole, is headed. There is plenty of dialogue in the process, yet the overall direction is not only discernible, but IMO inescapable: "The Bible bends toward inclusion," as Walter Brueggemann puts it.<br /><br />Fundamentalists treat the Bible as a repository of absolute truth claims, out of which they seize upon a few things, usually out of context, in order to define themselves apart from other people. Many skeptics unwittingly accept this same flawed understanding of the nature and purpose of the biblical conversation, and spend most of their time refuting such claims, motivated by the admirable goal of preventing fundamentalists from imposing their will. But I think both miss the sense in which the Bible is truly a divine word, a divinely animated conversation leading flawed and wounded people on a path to redemption.<br /><br />This conversation, as I read it, finds its climax in a Palestinian prophet who preached radical love for all people, who at one point had the opportunity to lead an armed revolt against the Romans but chose not to, leading to his abandonment and death, and in the story of his disciples who, convinced of his divine vindication in the resurrection, found strength to fight evil and oppression in a much more powerful way--specifically, by organizing communities of shared goods whose definition of "family" transcended blood lines and tore down barriers of language, ethnicity, ritual "cleanness," etc. There's more than enough power in that story to cure what ails the Catholic Church in its current crisis, and much else besides, if only we re-connect with the main drift of it, and stop being absorbed by tangents and accretions, not least those which some old white goons dressed in funny suits have built a whole institution around.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-9575736850488370392010-03-29T16:37:00.000-07:002010-04-07T21:56:00.924-07:00The Bible: Friend or Foe?On another forum someone wrote: "What I cannot comprehend is how this collection of fables and myths [the Bible] has evolved into the infallible word of a creator" and cited Nahum 1 (among others) as an ethically deficient text.<br /><br />What happened, I would submit, is that the biblical documents and the oral traditions and social movements for justice that lay behind them were so powerful, and constituted such a threat to the powers that be, that the powers HAD to reckon with them somehow. So they did all they could do to hijack and subvert the interpretation and application of these texts. From Constantine to Karl Rove this is essentially what we see. This hijacking has been very successful and has become easier to maintain the more temporal and cultural distance separates readers from the original context, and as interpretations alien to the original contexts have been repeated so often for so long that readers no longer follow the original drift of the conversation. Imagine a Victorian era literary critic who has never lived in, say, late 20th C. Detroit, trying to understand rap music. "Oh my, what crazy nonsense...and EVIL!" would likely be the all too hasty and dismissive conclusion. The result is that neither today's fundamentalists nor those dedicated to combatting them--both carrying out an Enlightenment agenda of arriving at true and provable propositions that is alien to the original purposes of most biblical texts--are reading with much sensitivity.<br /><br />But over the last 40 or so years biblical scholarship has made great strides, through historical investigation and the application of social science insights, in shedding light on the social circumstances in which biblical texts were written, edited, and reflected upon. Unfortunately, you won't hear much about this from the journalists, op-ed writers, pastors, priests, etc.--the folks on whom most people depend for their understanding of the Bible--who have yet to catch on. But some of the scholars who have sensitized me to these developments include Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Dominic Crossan, Richard Horsley, Warren Carter, Reta Halteman Finger, and others.<br /><br />The above-named scholars disagree, of course, on many particulars, but they would all affirm the following observation that I think is crucial for reading and applying the Bible responsibly today:<br /><br />The Bible was written in the shadow of empire, as the title of an excellent book on this topic suggests. Most of the Hebrew Bible was redacted in final form at a time when the Jews were living as exiles in Babylon, or not long after. Many of the stories and traditions are the preservation of a culture's distant memory of living under the thumb of Egypt and the oppressive system of tribute it imposed. Norman Gottwald argues that ancient stories of the Exodus and Conquest, for example, are a distillation of centuries of resistance by Hebrews who sought refuge in the highlands of Palestine against the rule of Canaanite and Philistine client states of the Egyptian tributary system. These stories are applied by later redactors and their exilic and postexilic readers to their situations of living under Babylonian, Persian and Greek domination, and they are applied yet again by people of Jesus's generation to the context of Roman imperial oppression.<br /><br />So what do we do with a text like Nahum, in which the prophet pronounces violent divine retribution against Ninevah, home to the throne of the Assyrian Empire? The background is that the prophet and his readers live under the thumb of Assyria, whose leaders boast that its empire and oppressive system are invincible and inevitable. But, as Walter Brueggemann writes:<br /><br />"The prophetic imagination knows that the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God and that this is true even in a world where kings have tried to banish all speech but their own. The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there."<br /><br />Read in this light, this passage speaks hope to the oppressed. It affirms that the Assyrian Empire, contra the claims it is continually making about itself, is NOT the only or final reality. There is a LARGER REALITY that will bring it to an end. To be sure, the passage expresses a people's inevitable rage. And is there really no place for affirming such feelings in the large scheme of things, in the light of the biggest picture analysis?<br /><br />But we must not read a text like this in isolation from the larger ongoing biblical conversation. Balancing the rage of Nahum 1 is the scandalous generosity of the Book of Jonah (one wonders how this book that preaches love toward the oppressor could ever have been written and gained acceptance--maybe there ARE divine miracles!) and the vision of "win-win" universal peace and justice throughout the prophets. Moreover, by the time we get to the New Testament, all the violent imagery is taken over and transformed via poetic irony as a metaphor for the power of faithful nonviolent love and service to overcome the corruption and brute force of oppressive systems like that of the Romans. For example, in the Apocalypse (the word means to reveal the true nature of something), Jesus, understood to be the prophesied "lion of the tribe of Judah" who would come and save God's people from their enemies, is revealed to be a gentle sacrificial lamb. The twelve tribes counted and loved by God are revealed to be an innumerable ethnically diverse multitude. Faithful nonviolent and just living is called "victory" (a word with violent military connotations in the Roman context). And the peaceful Jesus who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and preached peace is portrayed metaphorically as having more power than a Roman emperor, filling a valley with the blood of horses and soldiers. (I wish to thank Brian McLaren for solidifying this insight into the meaning of violent imagery in the Apocalypse.) The overall message is that there is a place for rage but that energy has to be transformed into gentle, persevering loving service that will change the world in the way that quiet yet forceful yeast transforms a lump of dough.<br /><br />So back to Nahum's scorched earth rhetoric against Ninevah.... The Assyrians, like all ancient empires, justified their oppression via religion, with its army of priests and thought police. (Sound familiar?) The oppressed Hebrews fought back, saying Yahweh, the transcendent "I am" who is beyond subordination to any nation's interests or agenda, will not let oppression ultimately prevail. In Nahum, this is expressed as "Yahweh's gonna torch ya!" Beneath all the mythical and poetic dressing, the original bottom-line significance is really, "Hey, this business of establishing equity for all instead of this hierarchical pecking order society that the Assyrians are imposing is important--damned important!" Thousands of years later, some child-abusing leaders in the Catholic church come along, and they may want to give "red-hot" texts like that a different spin: "Don't f*** with us, or God will do this to YOU!" But I hope what I have said shows the perverse absurdity of that. So long as we listen attentively to the original contexts, and keep in touch with the broader biblical conversation, we should stay out of trouble. <br /><br />And we will turn that "troublesome" collection of ancient texts back into the powerful resource for justice that it was originally meant to be. So when we come up against all the evil of corrupt religion, which is a more authentic and effective response? To debunk the biblical texts that corrupt powers have hijacked and ripped out of context to serve their own interests? Or to expose the hijack, and bring the full original anti-imperial force of the biblical conversation to bear? To fail to do the latter, IMO, is to squander an incredibly powerful resource. As we face practical and moral crises greater than any humanity has ever faced--nuclear weapons, corporate domination and global oppression, climate destabilization, etc.--we cannot afford that. We need all hands--atheists, agnostics, Catholics, evangelicals, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.--on deck. My experience is that once you see the anti-imperial thrust of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and a number of pieces start falling into place, you cannot live long with it without caring very deeply about these matters.<br /><br />One more thing. Which "Bible" am I saying needs to be reclaimed and applied to the great struggles of our day? The tendency of many today who want to overthrow corrupt religion is to debunk the biblical texts that church establishments have accepted and used in their own interest, and to play up other "lost books" that were "suppressed." But many scholars believe the latter to be mostly later gnostic texts about Jesus that were farther removed from Jesus and his closest friends. Moreover, some have argued that they lack the anti-imperial narrative of the traditionally accepted texts. But, if that is so, why would an empire-imitating church accept and affirm such texts as the Pauline epistles and the canonical gospels if, properly understood, they indeed undermine the interests of the corrupt religious establishment?[1] I would submit that corrupt religion, like any shrewd mafioso, knows the importance of keeping your most dangerous enemies close. So you gotta accept these books that most people associated with the original Jesus, and then take their claims about the supreme importance of justice and subvert and harness them to support your own claims to absolute authority. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright argues that the later gnostic texts just weren't in that playing field:<br /><br />"We should note, as of some importance in the early history of the Bible-reading church, that those who were being burned alive, thrown to the lions, or otherwise persecuted, tortured and killed were normally those who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and the rest. The kind of spirituality generated by 'Thomas' and similar books would not have worried the Roman imperial authorities, for reasons not unconnected with the fact that 'Thomas' and the similar collections of sayings are non-narratival, deliberately avoiding the option of placing the sayings within the overarching framework of the story of Israel. It is sometimes said or implied that the canonical books, unlike those found in other collections, were written as a way of making early Christianity more socially and culturally respectable. Irenaeus, who returned to Lyons as bishop after his predecessor had been martyred along with several other Christians in 177, and who remained an implacable opponent of the kind of theology found in 'Thomas' and similar writings and an enthusiastic supporter and expositor of scripture, would have found such a proposal grimly amusing. As his writings make abundantly clear, it was the canonical scriptures that sustained the early church in its energetic mission and its commitment, startling to the watching pagan world, to a radical holiness."<br /><br />(N.T. Wright, The Last Word (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 63-64.)<br /><br />Hope this is food for thought, at least, in support of a point of view that is not getting as much airplay in the usual popular channels as I think it deserves. Your comments will be most welcome.<br /><br />[1] I am not suggesting that any particular statement of a church father or council affirming books of what is now considered the "canonical" Bible embodied this hypocrisy. On the contrary, the spirituality of people like Athanasius was on the whole exemplary. I am suggesting that the trajectory of corruption present at all times in the history of the church and coming to flower over the centuries could neither officially expunge the accepted Scriptures nor tolerate their original and authentic force. So long as the people were kept in the darkness of illiteracy, corruption could flourish unchecked by any appeal to Scripture. I think the Reformation, the Enlightenment, aspects of the more moderate expressions of postmodernism, and the relatively recent flowering of historically and anthropologically informed critical scholarship mentioned above, have all contributed in their own ways to unleashing the original power of the Bible in opposing unjust powers.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-46172738657153425662010-02-04T12:45:00.000-08:002010-02-04T13:09:57.584-08:00Suppressed hopes rising"The prophetic imagination knows that the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God and that this is true even in a world where kings have tried to banish all speech but their own. The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there."<br />--Walter Brueggemann, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Prophetic Imagination</span>, quoted in Luke Gascho, <span style="font-style:italic;">Creation Care: Keepers of the Earth</span>. <br /><br />"It's a race to stay alive, baby, it's lawyers tax and steel<br />'Til the life that you are living is the thing you never feel"<br />--Mark Heard, "<a href="http://www.markheard.net/heardtribute/lyrics/long_way_down.html">Long Way Down</a>," Satellite Sky.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-14209553031721911932010-01-22T11:50:00.000-08:002010-01-23T15:19:14.212-08:00Change Cities, Change the WorldThey say you can't beat City Hall and the vested interests that control it. But a growing number of environmental thinkers are saying we had better start winning at the municipal level if we are to stop the current ecological apocalypse in progress and prevent social collapse. <br /><br />How can we transform cities from being the huffing, puffing ecological monstrosity they are into ecologically wholesome havens of human thriving? The question cannot be answered casually, but requires rigorous thinking and debate. And it requires many more people entering that debate and organizing to overcome entrenched powers invested in the status quo. <br /><br />Fortunately we do not have to start this conversation from scratch. New Society Publishers has published several excellent books dedicated to systematically re-thinking how we build cities and organize communities. Among these is <span style="font-style:italic;">Ecocities</span>, by Richard Register, who urges us to seek more thoroughgoing change than we have thus far: <br /><br /><blockquote>It's no mystery to me [why environmentalists are winning many small battles but losing on the big issues of species extinctions, climate change, soil loss, harm to oceans, etc.]. We've never engaged the big battles. We try to make cars better rather than greatly reduce their numbers. We try to slow sprawl development rather than reverse its growth and shrink its footprint. We keep making highways wider and longer, dreaming of "intelligent highways" rather than removing lanes and replacing them with rails, small country roads, and bicycle paths. We continue to provide virtually every subsidy and support policy the oil companies want. It's no wonder we're not winning the war. The objective of this book is to lay out an evolving strategy that faces the big problems head on and gives us at least a chance of winning.[1]</blockquote><br /><br />Another worthy title, with practical blueprints for action, is <span style="font-style:italic;">Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments</span>, by Mark Roseland et al.<br /><br />Lots of serious thinking about ecological city development is on the table. But will enough of us engage with it, and mobilize to make building sustainable cities politically feasible? What's needed, I think, is to form local groups in every city, bringing people together from diverse walks of life to study these issues and take constructive action to influence their city governments.<br /><br />---<br /><br />[1] Richard Register, <span style="font-style:italic;">Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature</span> (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006), pp. 1-2.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-48735193921938294802009-11-26T16:30:00.000-08:002009-11-26T16:42:56.349-08:00Veteran city manager challenges ideas of the "good life""We need courage, another spiritual gift. We need courage to stand up to the sacred cows of Western society--to challenge the idea that everyone has a right to a big car with an internal combustion engine so they can drive whenever or wherever they want, regardless of the environmental consequences. We need to challenge the idea that the best way to live is in a large, isolated home built on one-half an acre of good agricultural soil that we proceed to fill with grass that in turn is maintained with heavy applications of pesticides, herbicides, and a lawnmower with a two-stroke engine that puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an afternoon than a car does in a month."<br /> <br />Gwendolyn Hallsmith, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Key to Sustainable Cities: Meeting Human Needs, Transforming Community Systems</span> (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2003), pp. 246-247.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-74215752307580979642009-10-29T06:21:00.000-07:002009-11-03T14:33:54.104-08:00Monsters in RecoveryRadovan Karadzic was a genocidal mass murderer. But, as Croatian writer <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/28/radovan-karadzic">Slavenka Drakulić</a> chillingly points out, he was also a physician, psychiatrist, and accomplished poet. Which leads me to ask: If being cultured and creative and, to all appearances, an all-around cool guy, is not enough to keep one from murdering 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, what is? Certainly becoming devoutly religious is not the cure - it can make matters worse. So what <span style="font-style:italic;">does</span> it take? <br /><br />"You must be born again," says the Jesus of John 3. This phrase that no doubt hit the original readers with the confounding force of a Zen koan has in our day been reduced to religious marketing, emptied of meaning, and filled with ideological implications and cultural associations that would have felt alien to the original audience. But in an ancient community of slaves and poor peasants, sharing food and possessions, encouraging one another in resisting the spiritual forces they believed animated Roman oppression - as they unfolded the scroll that had just arrived from their beloved teacher and read these words aloud for the first time in their sacred gathering, it must have meant something awfully powerful. <br /><br />What did it mean? I suspect that deep down we all know. We get more in touch with the answer the more we are truly willing to ask the question, and vice versa. We "get it," not so much as individual seekers, but - as the early followers of Jesus knew so well - as a community of resistance seeking strength from the Spirit that we find in one another to swim against the tide.<br /><br />The question of spiritual transformation is not distant or theoretical; it is intensely personal, practical, and urgent. For are we really less "monstrous" than Radovan Karadzic if, faced with ecological perils that jeopardize not only an ethnic group but the living systems of the entire planet, we remain paralyzed into inaction or impotent half-measures by the seduction of special interests, the anesthetic of air conditioning, and the blind darkness of our own apathy? <br /><br />The practical paths love requires in our current circumstances can seem so onerously uncharted, is it any wonder we shy away from looking at the problems of our society and planet honestly? And yet Jesus said his yoke is easy and his burden light. And, note well, the extortionist tax collector we meet in Luke 19, who gave away possessions and resolved to repay his victims four-fold, was not glum but exuberant. In taking what seemed to be the most burdensome step, he found liberating lightness. I'm looking for, longing for that lightness, for practical ways to put my life in alignment with justice and peace. Is that your longing? Write me. Leave a comment below. Maybe we can help one another chart a practical course, and step into a lighter and less monstrous way of life together!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-81074161037020020222009-10-28T13:45:00.000-07:002009-10-29T13:42:32.738-07:00Books Guiding an Urgent JourneyHere are a few books I have found very worthwhile of late....<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Clashing Worlds of Economics and Faith</span>, by James Halteman.</span><br />This book by a veteran professor of economics and Mennonite leader outlines a practical vision of Christian economic lifestyle today, and argues that the best that the world's economic systems offer is none too good.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts</span>, by Reta Halteman Finger.</span><br />This work of historical investigation and biblical interpretation by a noted feminist scholar applies social science insights to uncover the robust lifestyle of economic sharing that the author believes early Christian communities practiced, as well as the socially and historically conditioned biases that she believes have prevented much past scholarship from recognizing this.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth</span>, by Lester R. Brown.<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span><br />This book, published in 2001, details the ecological perils we are facing and outlines practical steps to take. I plan to order his 2009 book <span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">Plan B 4.0</span></span> which covers the same ground in the light of updated research. One chapter subheading in the 2009 work, I think, says it so well: "Our Global Ponzi Economy." Brown is wonderfully specific in his ecological claims and remedies. If you want to take issue, take issue with the specifics. Or perhaps you will, like me, find the facts and arguments Brown presents convincing, realize that the dream of unrestrained economic expansion as usual is neither desirable nor possible, and resolve to join hands with others in forging a more responsible path. <br /><br />These matters are so urgent, I believe we need all hands on deck: Everybody, on your block and mine, should be reading, debating, discussing, and working to implement practical changes to build a sustainable and livable future. "Everybody" includes persons of pro-life convictions, who will be unavoidably disturbed by Brown's advocacy of abortion. However, while Brown himself might consider the point non-negotiable, it is by no means the centerpiece of his agenda, and the otherwise strong case he makes for the urgent necessity of ethically reducing human population should not be thrown out on this account.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Herman Daly</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Robin Hahnel</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Michael Albert</span>, and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Bryant L. Myers<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span> are among other authors who have been part of this conversation for me. I have just begun to dip into <span style="font-weight:bold;">Vandana Shiva</span>, whom I think I will find rewarding, though my initial impression is that her work may be aimed more at rallying troops than winning converts. What can one put in the hands of conservatives and libertarians who are captivated by the promise and compelling internal logic of infinite capitalist expansion, to open their eyes to the larger limiting ecological parameters? Herman Daly and Lester Brown effectively engage the categories of traditional neoclassical economics, and make a case that is hard to refute. At least they worked with me. And, difficult as it may be, I think generating genuine dialog with the unconvinced is the only way we will ever get past current impasses and move the project of saving the planet forward.<br /><br />What readings have helped guide your journey of late?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-48911818737113250532009-09-26T13:51:00.000-07:002009-09-26T15:57:30.912-07:00Community Gardens and SchoolsAre your kids sick of the food in their school cafeteria? Jim Diers has a suggestion for you. This Seattle community developer traveled to Havana to visit some of the 1,700 COMMUNITY GARDENS that have been planted in the city since 1992. All of these gardens are organic to avoid the costs of fertilizers and pesticides. Diers writes:<br /><br /><blockquote>I was especially impressed with the way in which gardens were integrated with schools. A large garden I visited was surrounded by an elementary school, a middle school, a school for the deaf, and a school for swimmers. The students work in the garden for two hours each day to fulfill their community service requirement. Culinary arts classes teach students how to prepare meals from the fresh produce that is then served in the school cafeterias. I may never have eaten better tasting tomatoes, certainly not in my school cafeteria.<br />--Jim Diers, Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), p. 126.</blockquote><br /><br />Cuba certainly isn't the only place where school grounds are being gardened. It's happening in a charter school system right here in south Texas, where VERY fresh and nutrition-packed produce is nourishing kids from low-income families. Do any of you have experience with this where you live? Please post a comment and share how that is going. <br /><br />Why shouldn't this be done everywhere?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-39320284256585957182009-09-23T13:55:00.000-07:002009-11-11T11:02:49.472-08:00Ancient Tactics for Social ChangeAn Internet discussion group has recently been discussing how to avert the spectre of Socialism in an impoverished country. Here are a few thoughts of my own on that topic....<br /><br />Ironically, it seems to me that a fair measure of "socialism" is needed to curb "Socialism," defined very informally, for the purposes of this post, as follows.... <br /><br />socialism (lower case s) -- People taking care of one another, so that nobody falls through the cracks, where people are rewarded for their effort and sacrifice, and not for the sheer lucky fact of having inherited lands and other forms of capital, and where everybody is given education to develop skills that contribute to the well-being of the society. Individual income, perqs, and social recognition are tied to the efforts and sacrifice people make, but not to an extent that it creates a class of people whose families have a permanent advantage over other classes, and who therefore have incentive to do everything in the power to preserve their advantages by means of corruption. Policies such as public education (mentioned in The Communist Manifesto), publicly funded health care, etc. are socialistic policies that most people now accept. Huge disparities of wealth and privilege are discouraged, and an effective social system is nurtured, so that people are no longer motivated to preserve unjust privileges while ignoring the needs of others, but are motivated to preserve and strengthen the life of social cooperation that is providing them basic needs and security and a modest but decent lifestyle. This kind of "socialism" takes various concrete forms, and has been implemented in varying degrees and manners in such places as Canada and Europe, where people are better off in general than in the U.S., which has implemented less of it. On a smaller scale, it is also practiced in successful co-ops, such as the Mennonite colonies in Paraguay that supply most of that country's dairy products. Now people who have a visceral reaction to the word "socialism" may want to choose a different word. But what I am referring to using a lower-case "s" is simply a consistent and thoroughhgoing advocacy of the same sorts of things that most people reading this advocate and consider normal and inevitable, thanks to the combined past successes of socialist and social democratic movements, the New Deal, etc. in shaping the societies we grew up in.[1]<br /><br />"Socialism" (upper case S) -- I think what people have in mind as something to fear and abhor is this...a system in which a group of would-be elitists conspires to cut the old elite out of the game, and establish a dictatorship. Thus a new elite replaces the old elite, by subverting the democratic process which the old elite previously also continually subverted to its purposes, while also clamping down ever tighter on the ability of the rich old elite to air their opposition by means of the media they own. The new regime seeks to control public opinion with somewhat more sophisticated means than the old elite did, to wit: In addition to subsidizing or buying off media organizations, as the old elite did, they also organize the poor (something the old elite were reluctant to do, perhaps because they were afraid of getting lice or smelling bad or somesuch), and entice or compel them to participate in public demonstrations, on pain of missing handouts or losing jobs (if they have a job to lose). An even more sophisticated tool of thought control is to form a network of informants, so that if anybody is spouting less than the orthodox line, the authorities can be alerted, and send that poor soul to a re-education camp. The new media and organized poor are thus trained to parrot a party line. Of course the original intent according to the new elite's professed ideology was to indoctrinate the people and get them to parrot a line that is truly in their interests, but which they're too dumb as ignorant country hicks to advocate of their own accord; in practice, however, the party line morphs into being whatever serves the interests of the new class. In exchange for these services for and on behalf of the poor, the class of professional revolutionaries (the new elite) takes their "cut" in the form of a publicly subsidized life of amenities and privileges that the poor will never enjoy.<br /><br />My basic problem with Socialism (upper case S) is the top-down tactics that are typically employed. Rather than first inculcate the values and lifestyle of practical love and mutual care in the populace, and nurture the movement until it reaches a critical mass that can transform society's institutions, they put all their effort in gaining political power so they can impose change from the top down. They may think that once they get the right PERSON in power, once they quell resistance by stripping the old elite of their wealth, media organs, etc., and the new cadre of revolutionary functionaries are in charge, then everything will be easier to implement and maintain from then on. Invariably, however, the original stated intentions are subverted, as the "new class" takes over and exercises power to the advantage of their own new class interests, and as those among their comrades who insist on remaining true to original principles either defect or are purged.<br /><br />To my knowledge, the top-down approach has never really worked. And its fatal flaw, it seems to me, is that it puts the cart before the horse. The theory says that once the external circumstances are changed--less disparity of income, availability of free education for all, etc.--then the internal mentality of people will change, and the tendency to cling to personal privilege at the expense of social well-being will evaporate. So the tactic is to deploy a dedicated core of revolutionaries to cajole, manipulate, threaten, indoctrinate, propagandize, cultivate and channel mass rage, by telling the truth, telling lies, and doing or saying virtually anything that furthers the goal of coming into power. This is considered necessary and justified, because, of course, once they have the reins of power they will then be in a position to effect the necessary changes of circumstances in order to restructure incentives and balance interests into a social equilibrium. But my question is, will they really? <br /><br />A related flaw is that epistemological chaos often comes to pervade the entire movement top to bottom, leaving various levels of the movement with differing and conflicting understandings of what the movement is really about and where it is headed. This happens whenever a movement decides, practically speaking, that it is appropriate to counter the old elite's program of lies by propagating an equally massive barrage of lies and/or truth, whatever works to further the end of seizing power. As a result, like an Eastern mystical sect, "esoteric gap" inevitably comes to separate the various ranks of the movement, from the peasants at the lowest rung who are fed simple slogans and recruited as cannon fodder, to the mid-level ideologues who at least hope that their principles are really guiding the movement, to a privileged few in the inner sanctum at the top who may be pursuing a game plan very different from what the movement is ostensibly about. <br /><br />How can we put the horse before the cart, and really get somewhere? I think we need to START by changing beliefs, values, ways of life, and the fundamental motivations of our hearts, from the ground up, rather that seek to change external circumstances and conditionings first, from the top down. Then, as people come to internalize values of social concern, we must organize ourselves into voluntary societies in which the principles of hard work, frugal living, mutual aid, and social commitment are lived out and modeled to the next generation. Then, as this countercultural movement grows and a critical mass of society comes to adopt the new mentality and lifestyle, the structures and institutions of the larger society that formerly militated against social cooperation and mutual care and that entrenched oppression by the rich and powerful against the poor masses are replaced by new and transformed structures and institutions. Epistemologically, what you see in such a movement is what you get--"This is what we stand for, come and kill us if that bothers you"--with no staircase chain of esoteric doctrines distinguishing ranks of initiation--and no smoke and mirrors of manipulative strategies. What is said to the public is what is believed by all in the movement. <br /><br />To be sure, it will be objected that this approach cannot work, because it is thought that every attempt to change people's mentality and inculcate a lifestyle of social concern will be undermined and co-opted at every turn by the pervasive influence of contrary institutions that buy people off and dilute their commitment to the alternative culture. Can we really believe in the ability of the human spirit (aided by God, as I see it) to overcome these obstacles, before external institutional inducements have been sufficiently implemented?<br /><br />The truth is that such obstacles were faced before, and to a large degree overcome, by an ancient spiritual-social-political movement whose precedent I think is essential for us to review today. I am referring to the anti-imperial struggles of the Christians of the early centuries of the common era.[2] Now I have to say at the outset that it is difficult to even talk about this precedent, because it is so widely misrepresented and misunderstood today. If you, the reader, are one for whom organized religion raises red flags, rest assured, the ancient social revolutionaries of whom I am speaking would be just as hotly opposed by religious and political leaders today as they were crucified and thrown to lions by the religious and political establishments of their time.[3] <br /><br />To understand the anti-imperial and society-transforming dynamic of this movement, we need to get in touch with the socially and politically charged times of the 1st Century, and to recover the sense of early Christian sayings and symbols in their original context. An imperial slogan of the day was, "Caesar is Lord," and people were required to acknowledge this in a civil ritual, thus affirming the ultimacy and divine origin of the Roman social order that was built on militarism, elitism, and slave labor. In bold defiance, the early Christians proclaimed, "Jesus is Lord." That is to say, it is not Caesar, but an obscure Galilean prophet--who relied on God's power rather than a military machine, who stayed true to his principles of love and justice and compassion even to death, and whom his followers believed God vindicated in resurrection--who will have the final say. They mocked the intimidating power of Rome by holding up the cross--the ultimate symbol of Roman terror--as their central symbol, because they believed Jesus had decisively defeated it. Strangely, the early Christians did not take up arms to overthrow the pax romana. Most of them were slaves, yet they did not organize slave rebellions. Confounding the play books of other revolutionary movements of both their and our day, they renounced violence and subterfuge, but were open about their ultimate allegiances, and, when arrested, went joyfully to their deaths. In all this they steadfastly refused to acknowledge the validity and ultimacy of the Roman system of oppression, but instead proclaimed an alternative "gospel" of him who was slain and conquered death. The original defiant irony in this use of the word "gospel" tends to be lost on us today, until we realize that in the 1st Century the word was used to announce the accession (or birthday) of an emperor who was supposedly going to usher in peace and make all things well. Not Caesar, who imposes injustice by force, but Jesus, who prevails in love and faithfulness, is the true victor. <br /><br />Moreover, the early Christians lived lives that affirmed absolute equality of dignity of every human being, regardless of class or background, sharing with one another according to need, staying behind in plagued cities to care for the sick, and even going to the municipal garbage heaps to rescue exposed infants and raising them as their own children. Such a lifestyle and set of values was unheard of in the Greco-Roman world, which was saturated with a cruel personal hedonism and a rigid hierarchy of privilege based on rank and power.<br /><br />This story reads almost like a fairy tale to us today--were there REALLY such people as this, and really so many of them, living lives of moral rectitude and sacrifice, and being sustained by inner joy even as they were being led away to death in arenas of hungry lions? And yet everything I have mentioned thus far, to the best of my knowledge, is factual--I have purposely left out any detail that historians are not generally agreed really happened. And the result was that greater and greater numbers of people became ATTRACTED to the movement, which became the cultural cutting edge, and came to regard the old values as moribund and empty. Socially just values and lifestyle were reaching further and further across the length and breadth of the cultural landscape. The Christian movement was building toward a critical mass by which the whole structure of the world's kingdoms built on ruthless power and oppression would crumble, and a new rock, cut not out of human hands, would become a mountain filling the whole earth (the imagery comes from Daniel 2, which Jesus and his friends had very much in mind).<br /><br />But then the empire struck back, in the person of Constantine, who legalized Christianity, and then made it the imperial religion. At that point throngs of people swelled the ranks of the church without really understanding what it was really about. Even though the rise of Constantine and subsequently of "Christendom" might have seemed like the fulfillment of Daniel 2, it was in many respects a counterfeit victory that arrested the progress of genuine Christianity. If the reading of Christianity and its politically-relevant origins that I am narrating seems alien to the impressions you may have grown up with, please consider whether that might be because centuries of the Constantinian legacy have clouded our vision. <br /><br />In subsequent history there were various times and places in which the radical social implications of biblical faith made a comeback, not least in the movement of Whitefield, the Wesleys, the "Clapham Sect" aristocrats (e.g., William Wilberforce, whose personality and battle to end the slave trade was depicted with reasonable accuracy in the film "Amazing Grace"), and others. The legacy and achievements of these people were enormous--they ended the slave trade, introduced education for women, reformed prisons, reformed the East India Company, introduced schools that prepared India for modern democracy, etc. In their personal lives, they opened their homes to the poor, practiced an ethic of modest personal consumption that would scandalize most middle class Americans and American expats, and gave liberally of their time, money, and relational energy to help others. <br /><br />In all this their modus operandi was persevering love. But in times and places where reform was rebuffed and corruption entrenched, a vacuum was created for movements that despaired of such means, and resorted to rage, violence, intrigue, and a cold "scientific" manipulation of the masses....<br /><br />Which means that the choice is ours. Either we will change the world in one way, the way of the early Christians, the way of Wilberforce, the way of radical persevering love, the way of personal concern and involvement in the lives of the excluded, the way of personal spiritual transformation to become people motivated and energized by love. Or we will remain complacent in our short-term comforts, until the pot boils over into violence that in the end makes things as bad or worse.<br /><br />Some may say that what I am proposing is too radical and idealistic for the real world. Honestly, my friends, get real! The early Christians were real. Wilberforce was real. Unspeakable injustice and oppression and social and environmental degradation are real. And unless we start living in a new way, there may BE no real world for us or our children or grandchildren to enjoy! <br /><br />---<br /><br />[1] Lumping such diverse social-economic arrangements as these under the one label "socialism," for the informal purposes of this essay, is not meant to color over the differences between them. On the other hand, the term is becoming remarkably broad even in formal academic discourse. My purpose here is to emphasize the commitment to cooperation rather than competition as the guiding principle of social and economic relationships that these diverse arrangements share.<br /><br />[2] The brief historical survey below is written to the best of my knowledge, though I am not an historian myself and would invite anyone who has relevant training to correct any deficiencies in my telling of the story. I am emboldened to do this because I believe the story has such rich meaning for our lives that it deserves to be grabbed ahold of and told and re-told by children, teenagers, and everyday women and men, not just the professional historians. But why should I care whether I have the facts straight? If myth were what we were after - that is, a story that gives meaning to our lives when lived out or enacted ritually but which may or may not be based in historical fact - if we had to settle for such as the only means at our disposal to create a sense of meaning in an otherwise apparently meaningless universe - then this story would serve the purpose well, though not necessarily better than other fabricated tales. The remarkable thing - what gives this story its special power and classes it in my mind as the story of stories - is just how historical AND relevant it really is! C.S. Lewis saw Jesus as the Myth who became Fact. That is why I CARE about whether my understanding of the story is accurate and invite correction of others, because a story that is both historically true and gives meaning to our lives if true, is a priceless treasure. If the conclusion that God has acted in Jesus Christ in time-and-space history can hold up to historical investigation (even though historical investigation by itself cannot draw such a conclusion), then that is extraordinary confirmation that our lives are unspeakably significant and infused with divine meaning. It therefore also loudly proclaims how much acting justly toward our fellow human beings and the life systems of our planet really MATTERS. And it empowers me to resist the lure of rival myths that claim to be rooted in fact, such as the dominant American myth which exalts competition and individual material consumption as the highest values over against the cooperation in love and justice which Jesus modeled and enjoins.<br /><br />[3] It is also important to note, contra some Marxist interpretations that make out the early Christians as supporters of violent revolution, that in fact the early Christians were persecuted in part because they did NOT support violent revolution. They were opposed from all sides, because they believed that neither deification of the Roman social order nor involvement in resistance movements built on human rage and violence was an acceptable way forward. My own historical understandings in this regard are informed by such New Testament scholars as N.T. Wright, John Howard Yoder, and others.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-60074881575328747542009-09-07T10:06:00.001-07:002009-09-07T18:14:06.567-07:00Sowing in Tears...Reflections on Van Jones' ResignationVan Jones, who resigned as Special Advisor on Green Jobs over questions about past political involvements and his choice of vocabulary in describing Republicans, is the latest victim of what <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beau-friedlander/van-jones-the-partisan-po_b_278362.html" target="new">Beau Friedlander</a> calls partison politics' policy of "mutually assured distraction"--where the welfare of the nation takes a back seat to the project of scoring cheap political points at any cost. <br /><br />Jones wrote in his resignation letter: <br /><br /><blockquote>On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.</blockquote><br /><br />If the worst that has been told is to be believed about Jones' background, then he was at one time a "communist" and has made common cause with Maoists. But for several years he has been promoting constructive eco-friendly business initiatives and jobs programs that employ low-income people of various racial backgrounds to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels--arguably a practical step toward defusing one of the greatest factors leading to war and terrorism and instability in our world. So then, if indeed the darkest possible spin on his past is true, then it is a story of transition from ways of fighting injustice that give inordinate place to a natural and inevitable rage, to an older and wiser approach centered around win-win constructive engagement. Precisely if that is the case, then it is a story that should be celebrated, about a person to whom we should be listening. <br /><br />But his assailants in conservative media--straight white males who have never seen life through lenses other than those of a complacent dominant culture--are selling a very different story, a story that contains two morals that could prove exceedingly poisonous for our nation and planet: <br /><br />1) Nothing ever justified the rage, because everything is really OK. <br /><br />2) Overcoming evil through persevering love is a strategy that doesn't work. <br /><br />The same message lay at the root of conservative outrage over Sonia Sotomayor's having dared suggest that life experience as a Latina woman might make her more sensitive to the reality of injustice--an observation that I think has obvious validity. I think it is important to stress at this time that, while they may have won one battle (toppling Jones) and lost another (blocking Sotomayor), the venom of the underlying narrative must not be allowed to seep into hearts and minds and kill the spirit of those who would seek justice in love. <br /><br />Conservative media organizations are after ratings, as conservative politicians seek to win the next elections--neither seem to care about the dangerous long-term backlash their actions could provoke, as they seek these short-term goals through cheap shots, instead of promoting healthy and substantive national dialogue over policies. Let us hope that defeats of worthy opportunities for constructive change in the Obama era do not lead people to give up on nonviolent win-win strategies, and turn to the despair and futility of violence. <br /><br />And here is where I believe that Jesus and his death and resurrection--if understood in the <a href="http://thinkingaloud99.blogspot.com/2009/04/politics-of-jesus.html" target="new">context of the remarkably similar 1st Century political and social conflicts in which the story was originally told</a>, and not in the moulded-to-white-suburban-ideology way it gets told today--give hope and strength to carry on.... <br /><br />"Human anger does not produce the kind of justice that God is after." (James 1:20) <br /><br />"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with love." (Romans 12:21) <br /><br />"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)<br /><br />"Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart." (Hebrews 12:3)<br /><br />"Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy." (Psalm 126:5)<br /><br />The grace Jones demonstrated in his resignation letter, and his willingness to put personal political advancement aside, suggest that he has no intention of giving up fighting the good fight of love.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-19228143716160350542009-09-05T11:39:00.000-07:002009-12-07T11:36:54.346-08:00Anti-Environmentalism as "Christian heresy"I have occasionally heard opponents of the environmentalist movement accusing environmentalists of being modern-day "Gnostics," and, indeed, there are varieties of environmentally-minded people today who consciously identify with that label.[1] It is arresting, then, to read ecological economist Herman Daly turning the tables on anti-environmentalists, by exposing their resistance to taking environmental constraints into account in policy-making as a functional current-day expression of that ancient "heresy."<br /><br />Daly concludes a highly critical review of Peter Huber, <span style="font-style:italic;">Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists</span> (A Conservative Manifesto), as follows:<br /><br />"What I personally learned from reading Huber is that the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism (salvation by esoteric knowledge that allows transcendance of matter) is still a perversion to be reckoned with. The salvific knowledge is now less spiritual and more technical, but the heresy of human transcendence of the material Creation by esoteric knowledge is the foundation of Huber's book, and that, unfortunately, will appeal to many readers."<br />--Herman E. Daly, Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development, Selected Essays of Herman Daly<span style="font-style:italic;"></span> (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2007), p. 183.<br /><br />At issue here is whether there are any hard limits imposed by our natural environment that constrain healthy human economic and population growth, or whether we can assume that the application of human knowledge and ingenuity will always overcome such limits so as to justify perpetual unfettered economic activity and reproduction. Daly believes that the ability of humans to use ingenuity to alter the carrying capacity of our environment to sustain healthy and happy human beings, while far greater than, say, a snail's, is nevertheless finite. Daly's position, then, is really a common-sense middle position between two impossible extremes--one extreme denying our unique capacities as human beings to comprehend and work intelligently within environmental parameters, and the other extreme saying we are like gods (cf. Genesis 3:5; 11:1-9) who are not subject to such limits of creaturely finitude. This reminds me of the late Francis Schaeffer's thesis in his book <span style="font-style:italic;">Pollution and the Death of Man</span> that fundamental to any authentically Christian approach to environmental questions is the need to recognize that humans, who are created by God in his image, are at once a part of the creation as well as, in a very limited and qualified sense, above the creation. (Schaeffer understood this hybrid position of human beings in contrast to God, who is entirely above creation, and to animals, which are entirely a part of the creation. I do not know whether Daly himself would share Schaeffer's rendering of the biblical metaphors, but that is beside the point I am making.) It follows from Schaeffer's point that human beings are capable of reflecting upon and taking into account in their decision-making the fact of their own creatureliness and the properties inhering in that creatureliness, and taking rational action as stewards under God. Thus, unlike snails, humans are capable of conceiving the very notion of "carrying capacity" and can seek to assess (imperfectly, of course) the extent to which that can be tweaked in the case of humans and other creatures via human action, as well as the limits to that ability. And I for one certainly can see no biblical reason to suppose that humans, who have been blessed to "fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28) are not endowed with the capacity to assess what "fill" means and therefore when "fullness" has been reached, and to "subdue" by means of rational constraint and technology their own creaturely instinct to reproduce and thus avert calamity by means of "Malthus's preventive checks (lowering the birth rate) rather than the positive checks (high death rate)" (Daly, 117).[2][3]<br /><br />Daly says that Huber, on the other hand, like many liberatarians I have read, believes that "the natural environment is entirely unnecessary" (Daly, 180), and quotes Huber as follows: <br /><br /><blockquote>Cut down the last redwood for chopsticks, harpoon the last blue whale for sushi, and the additional mouths fed will nourish additional human brains, which will soon invent ways to replace blubber with olestra and pine with plastic. Humanity can survive just fine in a planet-covering crypt of concrete and computers... There is not the slightest scientific reason to suppose that such a world must collapse under its own weight or that it will be any less stable than the one we now inhabit.<br /> </blockquote><br />Daly understands Huber as arguing for Teddy Roosevelt style conservationism purely for aesthetic reasons, and not because it is necessary for human survival and well-being. "All we need is knowledge," Daly says Huber believes, "and that is unlimited." <br /><br />Daly, as he argues in all of his books, believes that the multiplication of human beings and artifacts has already exceeded a point beyond which additional growth yields diminished rather than enhanced well-being for humanity and the rest of creation as a whole. We therefore need, Daly insists, to replace long-prevailing "empty-world" assumptions in our economic models and policy-making with "full-world" assumptions. The problem is that the ongoing quest for unfettered growth continues to bring CERTAIN human beings comforts and advantages in the short run, at the expense of the long-term well-being of humans and other species in the long run. And since it is these particular people who have the most money and political clout, we are faced with the "conflict of a physical impossibility (continual growth) and a political impossibility (limiting growth). But in the long run the physically impossible is more impossible than the merely politically impossible. One hopes that growth will not prove politically impossible to limit, once we come to accept that growth can be uneconomic. But we may have to suffer a bit before that becomes clear." (Daly, 11)<br /><br />The application of the concept of "Christian heresy" in this context is interesting, and perhaps a bit daring of Daly to invoke given currently prevailing misconceptions of what that means. Historically, when Christians have labeled a given belief "heresy," what they meant was that an essentially un-Christian idea had taken root within the Christian community and was threatening to re-define Christian faith in ways that were irreconcilably opposed to the intentions of Jesus and the apostles. But the legacy of Constantinianism and the resulting practice that eventually took over the church of <span style="font-style:italic;">executing</span> (or otherwise suppressing by means of the power of the state) rather than <span style="font-style:italic;">debating</span> alleged heretics has associated the very notion of identifying "heresies" with oppression in the public mindset. Yet when it is realized that that very same Constantinianism and resulting state repression is itself one of the greatest heresies from which the church has yet to fully extricate itself, then we can see that Daly's intended use of the concept is a salutary one, concerned with opposing the subversion of faith to serve narrow selfish interests. Such corruption is surely lethal to healthy spirituality and human well-being.<br /><br />So then, when the hard limits kick in and ecological catastrophes that could have been prevented alter life on the planet as we now know it, and a future generation bitterly recalls the rapacious consumption and missed opportunities of our day, is there any doubt that those 20th/21st C. "Christians" who opposed taking environmental constraints into account will be seen as having been guilty of a perversion of the faith they espoused? And will it not be evident that environmentalists (be they Christians, atheistic humanists a la Carl Sagan, pantheists, panentheists, gnostics, Wiccans, or however else they sought to articulate their vision of ultimate reality) who took practical steps to preserve the well-being of humanity and the rest of creation in the light of environmental constraints were acting more Christianly, and thus better embodied the biblical notion of God's intent that we reflect his image by stewarding his creation for the benefit of all?[4]<br /><br />And is it really too late for those of us who operate consciously within the biblical and Christian conversation to recover the univocal testimony of Scripture and ancient Christian tradition on matters material--namely, to be content with food and clothing (1 Timothy 6:8), to eschew the love of money (1 Timothy 6:10; Hebrews 13:5), to pursue equity of burden (2 Corinthians 8:13-15)--and face the facts of our ecological circumstances squarely, unfiltered by the wishful thinking by which we imagine that we can maintain our present lifestyles of consumption without degrading the prospects of future generations? <br /><br />Can we not rise up and take appropriate action, drawing inspiration from the story of Esther, who made common cause with the oppressed against the self-serving interests of elite schemers bent on genocidal extermination, and seized the opportunities God gave her to act "in such a time as this"? (Esther 4:13)<br /><br />-----------------------------------------<br /><br />[1] The Gnostics of old sought to transcend matter by uniting with pure spirit, an idea that seems to clash, at least formally, with biblical conceptions. And Vishal Mangalwadi has pointed out--revealingly, I think--that, historically, similar anti-material ideas in the East have emphatically <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> led to care for the material creation or for social justice (cf. Heinrich Zimmer, <span style="font-style:italic;">Philosophies of India</span>). Moreover, as the renowned New Testament historian N.T. Wright has pointed out, it was not the gnostics but the readers of Paul and the canonical gospels whom the Romans considered a threat and threw to lions, precisely because the latter understood Jesus Christ as the climax of the socially-concerned, anti-imperial, politically-relevant telling of Israel's story in the Jewish Scriptures, while the former's philosophy was abstracted from any such narrative of a divinely-influenced quest for <span style="font-style:italic;">shalom</span> and justice in time and space. <br /><br />The irony is that disaffected Westerners of our day who search far and wide for spiritual nourishment, after having been abandoned to starve by expressions of Christianity that have abetted environmental and social degradation, and Christians who seek to recover the social-creational concern that pervades the biblical conversation beginning to end (cf. Genesis 6:11; Revelation 11:18), may have far more in common with one another, on a practical if not formal conceptual level, than is commonly supposed, even as other Christians, whether through ignorance of our present circumstances and/or the recent influence of unbiblical notions of unlimited expansion of material wealth, deny the reality of that degradation and oppose steps to reverse it.<br /><br />[2] Just as I am concerned in this essay to show that certain recent and localized expressions of Christianity have lost touch with the general drift of the whole of that ancient conversation as touching economic matters, Daly is concerned, in this chapter entitled "The steady-state economy and peak oil," to show where sound thinking in a centuries-long conversation among economists went off the rails, as neoclassical economics favoring perpetual growth replaced the view of classical economics that a steady-state economy was inevitable, and, in the case of John Stuart Mill, desirable. Writes Daly:<br /><br /><blockquote>In classical economics (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill) the steady-state, or as they called it the "stationary state" economy was a real condition toward which the economy was tending as increasing population, diminishing returns, and increasing land rents squeezed profits to zero. Population would be held constant by subsistence wages and a high death rate. Capital stock would be held constant by a lack of inducement to invest resulting from zero profits thanks to rent absorbing the entire surplus which was itself limited by diminishing returns. Not a happy future--something to be postponed for as long as possible in the opinion of most classical economists. Mill, however, saw it differently. Population must indeed stabilize, but that could be attained by Malthus' preventive checks (lowering the birth rate) rather than the positive checks (high death rate). A constant capital stock is not static, but continuously renewed by depreciation and replacement, opening the way for continual technical and qualitative improvement in the physically non-growing capital stock. By limiting the birth rate, and by technical improvement in the capital stock, a surplus above subsistence could be maintained. Mill also believed that the surplus could be equitably redistributed. Unlike the growing economy, the stationary state economy would not have to continually expand into the biosphere and therefore could leave most of the world in its natural state. The stationary state is both necessary and desirable, but neither static nor eternal--it is a system in dynamic equilibrium with its containing, sustaining, and entropic biosphere. The path of progress would shift from bigger and more, toward better and longer lived. (Daly, 117)</blockquote><br /><br />The neoclassical economists, Daly says, re-employed the term "steady state" to refer to a theoretical benchmark where capital stock keeps up with population in potentially infinite growth, a notion foreign to the classical economists.<br /><br /><blockquote>It is not too much of an oversimplification to say that the classical economists were concerned with adapting the economy to the dictates of the economy. In an empty world the dictates of physical reality are not immediately binding on growth; in a full world they are. Consequently, and paradoxically, it is the older classical view of the steady state, Mill's version, that is more relevant today, even though the neoclassical view dominates the thinking of empty-world economists. (Daly, 118)</blockquote><br /><br />Daly offers his own updated definition of the steady-state economy as "one that maintains itself with a constant throughput that is within regenerative and absorptive capacities of the biosphere." (Daly, 118)<br /><br />[3] It may be well to note, as well, that Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish Presbyterian preacher in Industrial Revolution Scotland whom many conservative Christians today revere for his work in mobilizing churches to help the urban poor get on their feet economically and off of government welfare, was a staunch Malthusian, and succeeded in his project in part by consciously applying the Malthusian remedy of limiting births, by means of encouraging sexual restraint and delayed marriages among the impoverished classes (an approach that I suspect was scarcely less counterintuitive, culturally out of sync, and "doomed to fail" in his day as it would be if it were attempted in American inner city ghettos of our day). The irony here is that many of the voices today who laud Chalmers' accomplishments are precisely those who downplay environmental constraints and would excoriate such thinking as Daly's as "neo-Malthusian."<br /><br />[4] It is not the point of this essay to consider the overall or relative merits of various worldviews in promoting practical environmental concern. I do wish to argue, however, that the common notion today that such concern does not find a ready and natural home in a biblically-informed worldview is patently false. In footnote 1 above I alluded to the observation that has been made by many scholars of religion that Christianity is particularly activistic in seeking social change in the theater of history. It would go beyond the scope of this article to consider the particular objections of the Roman Catholic Church to the use of contraception, which I think are an unjustified and tragic misstep. But I think it is beyond credible doubt that each of the major world religions, in their predominant tendencies, are united in being skeptical of recent Western notions of unrestrained economic growth, though that would be a topic deserving separate treatment of its own.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-64343720051802228612009-08-28T17:04:00.000-07:002009-08-28T17:11:54.374-07:00The Honduran crisis, seen from the ground....We hear in the media that there is a crisis in Honduras. That's interesting, because FOR YEARS, long before the events of June 28, 2009 that put Honduras on the world's radar screen, organizations like the Association for a More Just Society have sought to bring attention to the Honduran crisis--the crisis of hunger, malnutrition, poor education, a justice system that doesn't deliver justice, corruption, selectively enforced laws, and violent land disputes that keep the great majority of the population in abject poverty--which people in Honduras tell me neither ousted president Manuel Zelaya nor his predecessors ever did much about, notwithstanding their promises and rhetoric. <br /><br />"Conservative" and "liberal" news organizations in the U.S. have been dishing out remarkably conflicting information and assumptions concerning the Honduran crisis. But have either of them even been asking the most important questions? Both kinds of media seem to be selling the news their listeners want to hear, filtering highly complex realities to fit rigidly polarized ideological configurations and narrow interests. And yet, ironically, they both whisper the exact same subliminal underlying message that many Americans of all political bents seem to desperately want to believe: <br /><br />"You can change the world without much personal sacrifice, just by lining up with the appropriate political movements and ideologies, without personally caring for anybody in particular, or getting into the nitty gritty of specific people's struggles."<br /><br />The inspiring videos at the link below reflect a refreshingly different point of view....<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/AJSjusticevideos#play/uploads/10/XOQ1limIq_8">http://www.youtube.com/user/AJSjusticevideos#play/uploads/10/XOQ1limIq_8</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-11281061028400319892009-05-01T15:08:00.000-07:002009-05-14T19:11:36.497-07:00A gradual "fall"?RJS, a working scientist whose posts at the Jesus Creed blog I've found very helpful, wrote in a post entitled <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/04/science-and-the-sacred-rjs.html" target="new">Science and the Sacred</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>...although I waver at times on the importance of the Fall as an historical event.</blockquote><br /><br />I'm leaning these days toward seeing "the fall" as a genuinely historical but gradual and not necessarily unidirectional development, an accumulation of choices and their results. Finding themselves conscious of God and of right and wrong and experiencing a more robust capacity than we enjoy today to choose the way of cooperation, and, indeed, having an innate sense that the way of cooperation and justice was God's intent, various among our distant ancestors suppressed their sense of God and chose the way of grasping at advantage at the expense of others. The accumulation of such choices--and the "microscopic" view of this, if it were accessible to us, might actually reveal trends and countertrends over many thousands of years--has resulted in a kind of watershed in cultural and genetic coevolution which makes it more difficult for us today to choose God's way, even though something deep down still tells us it is our truest intended destiny. <br /><br />Fastforwarding countless millenia, the author of Genesis finds humanity trapped in this conflicted situation, inclined to evil, but knowing there is a better way. We observe the battle to reverse this state of affairs at full pitch as we read Genesis, the Ten Commandments, and the rest of the law and the prophets of the ancient Hebrews. The author/redactor of Genesis, perhaps an exile living under the oppressive shadow of Babylon and its imperial ideology, and bathed in stories such as that of Abraham who fled the corruption and idolatry of his homeland in Ur of the Chaldees and who shunned the allures of Sodom, of Moses who spurned the pleasures of Egypt, etc., was keenly aware that our conflicted condition had ORIGINS. And he (or she or they) need not have had any awareness of evolution to grasp and communicate these origins with genuine and relevant insight. <br /><br />And who shall deliver us from this body of death? In the fullness of time Jesus the incarnate Son of God lived the way of love and faithfulness, even unto death. In the resurrection, Death--with its imperious dicate that we grasp at what we can at the expense of the honor of God and the well-being of others--was decisively defeated. <br /><br />The view that Gen. 3 is recapituted in our lives is not at all incompatible with this view. I would just suggest that the choices of some among our ancestors may have been more scandalous, relatively speaking, than those of people who have inherited the results of post-"watershed" cultural and genetic coevolution. <br /><br />And because this "watershed" is really quite a relative affair, there is no need in this view to posit scientific details that may someday be disproven. The science underlying this view is scarcely in dispute. Few would disagree that belief in God or gods is nigh universal in humans in most environments, as is a moral sense. What is disputed is the meaning of it all, the question of whether these perceptions, evolved by means of selective pressures having to do with survival and reproduction, have taken on a teleological "life of meaning" of their own, so as to enable us to perceive a REAL Creator and REAL moral law (cf. Justin Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?), the philosophical question of "choice," etc. And these are questions scientific observation simply CANNOT speak to, while the Scriptures and the testimony of our own hearts speak to them very clearly. <br /><br />And I find this view satisfying on the biblical end, because it avoids positing a significance to Gen. 3 that is alien to the purview of the author, as Hugh Ross and others do in the case of the "days" of Gen. 1. Whether things happened as the view I am expressing states above, or whether they happened some other way, writing from the standpoint of a people called to reverse the state of corruption in the world, to stand against the great contrary tide of historical and cultural precedent, Genesis, employing a nonliteral mode of communication that nevertheless speaks truly to our situation, and in a way that neither assumes nor requires any particular view of science, could not have been written in any better way. <br /><br />I explore this view further in an "evolving" post called <a href="http://thinkingaloud99.blogspot.com/2009/04/on-evolutionary-chisel-divine-sculptor.html">On the Evolutionary "Chisel," the Divinely Intended "Sculpture," and the Glorious Meaning and Destiny of our Lives in Christ</a>, which addresses a number of key issues concerning this thesis not addressed here. In that essay I think I have many of the needed concepts in place, though future revisions may state some of them better.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-80265398725428264962009-04-20T18:16:00.000-07:002009-04-20T20:30:38.629-07:00The Politics of JesusHave you ever had a nagging suspicion that the story of Jesus you may have grown up hearing was not quite the story that was originally meant? If so, read on, because what follows may confirm your suspicions. It may also surprise you in a number of ways. Over the last several months I've been looking at a view of early Christian origins that turns a good bit of what I thought I knew on its head.<br /><br />I'm not talking about any of the spate of flaky popular revisionist books that have been published over the last few decades saying Jesus was a Marxist, or Jesus was a new age guru, or Jesus was whatever one's hobby horse happens to be. I'm talking about a particular scholarly point of view that is rooted in very, very serious historical research. To be sure, it's not the only view out there. But I find it compelling. If true, it has enormous implications, for politics and all areas of life. <br /><br />As best I understand it, the story these scholars tell goes like this....<br /><br />Jesus lived in a time of super-charged political tension. Many people today are concerned to prevent some kind of Juggernaut from taking over. Globalism, Communism, the New World Order, what have you, depending on your point of view. But in Jesus' day the Juggernaut was already in charge. The Roman Empire ruled with an iron fist. In Palestine, some responded to this by sucking up to the Romans, like the Herodians and the hated extortionist tax collectors--the complicit bottom-feeders. Others were fierce nationalists who plotted and patiently awaited the day when they would throw off the evil Romans, with God on their side. An earlier movement, the Maccabees, had successfully thrown off the Greeks, and so people were expecting the long-awaited "Messiah"--that is, the anointed national deliverer whom God would send--to do that again. (Does any of this ring a bell in modern times?) The masses generally sided with the nationalists, and there was a whole class of religious leaders of these sympathies that the masses looked up to, referred to in the bilbical gospels as the Pharisees (even if not all Pharisees were like those Jesus contended with). They were like the 1st Century equivalent of the Muslim mullahs today who advocate sharia law, decry America as the Great Satan and so forth. Then there were the Sadducees of the aristocratic priestly class, who had made a kind of delicate peace with the Romans, and were officially in charge of the Temple. The common people distrusted them, and questioned their legitimacy, but it was a dangerous thing to cross them. <br /><br />There were a number of supposed "Messiahs," both before and after Jesus, who sought to rally the people around them and take on Rome. Each of these movements were crushed by the Romans. <br /><br />But Jesus came along, and did something radically different. He took a handful of the fierce nationalists, along with a guy who had been one of the despised extortionist tax collectors, and brought them together into the very same group, as his closest disciples. In essence, he took the 1st Century equivalent of Democrats and Republicans, Islamicists and Zionists, somehow inspired them to all come together, and taught them a completely different notion of God's program. He taught them that Caesar was king in only a very limited, earthly, transitory sense. He also made the outlandish claim that he himself was the true King and that his kingdom of love would never end. And he told the nationalists that they were all so wrapped up in their ideological program, and congratulating themselves for being such righteous and pious patriots, that they were overlooking the things that really counted, like reaching out in practical compassion to the marginalized of society, and being a community of God marked by forgiveness and justice and mercy and love. Further, he predicted that before the people who were then living had died out, the Romans would come and put down the Jewish rebellion permanently, and destroy the Temple, the most treasured symbol of the nationalist movement. Further, he went into that very Temple, where the people in charge had a neat little financial scam operation that took advantage of poor religious pilgrims, carefully made a whip, and drove out all the crooks and their wares. <br /><br />Now this managed to upset all the powerful elements of the time. The Romans were made to feel queasy about the rumors floating around about this "king." The Pharisees were infuriated at his telling the masses that their nationalist ideology was a recipe for disaster. And the aristocrats didn't take kindly to his affront to the Temple establishment. Essentially, Jesus was telling the people that the Roman agenda, the religious nationalist agenda, and the more secular-like "civil religion" of the aristocrats were all empty and corrupt and not the way of God at all. Loving God and loving one's neighbor were what really mattered. Now we have to understand that Jesus' message was NOT one that people easily understood; in fact, his own disciples repeatedly missed the point, as they later shared in the recollections that have been passed down to us. It was way easier for people to get wrapped up in one of the competing ideologies of the different classes that were competing against one another. Nevertheless, though few if any understood him yet, Jesus was winning the sympathies of the people, not least by performing miraculous healings of the blind, deaf, lame, leprous, etc. on a massive scale over a period of about three years. He even raised Lazarus, one of his friends, from the dead. At least the people were convinced, and so great masses were hailing him as the anointed king who was to come. All this bothered the Romans, the nationalist "mullah" types, the aristocrats, every power of the age. All these groups of powerful people despised one another, but there was one thing they all came to agree on: Jesus had to go. <br /><br />It is at this point that Jesus made some amazing choices. After one point, he had so much popular support, he could have rallied the people around him and fulfilled every other Messiah's dream, to lead a violent revolt against the unclean foreign occupiers. Indeed, his action of clearing out the Temple likely signaled to the people that this is what he intended to do, because the celebrated Maccabean nationalists of a previous era had likewise liberated the Temple when they threw off the Greek occupation. Cleansing the temple and throwing out the foreign occupier went hand in hand in the people's expectation of what the Messiah, the anointed deliverer, was going to do. This is the sort of thing the people had in mind when they had seen the celebrated miracle worker entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and they laid a trail of palm branches in his path, welcoming the king who was coming to take power. And Jesus had the perfect opportunity at that moment. People from all over the country were in Jerusalem to celebrate the annual Passover feast, had just seen him cleanse the Temple, and were awaiting the next step.... <br /><br />But he didn't. And this choice, it is argued, changed the course of history.<br /><br />He refused to seize that moment, and so the masses, eager for a national deliverer, quickly abandoned him. What a fool! He claimed to be "king" yet didn't take the opportunity that was presented to him to establish his throne! He claimed to be the anointed one that God would send to deliver his people from oppression, but refused to take up arms against the oppressors! He aroused the suspicion and anger of every powerful group in the land, but blew his best chance of beating them to the top! Instead, he said, "...the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mark 10:45) No doubt the masses who abandoned him considered him irrelevant at best, and faithless at worst, for failing to put their expected program in motion. <br /><br />But if he had taken the option of leading a national rebellion, only calling down legions of angels would have prevented the Romans from massacreing him and all of the masses that would have followed him into the battle. Now he had already shown people the divine power to miraculously heal diseases. Could he not use that same power to successfully throw off the Romans, like many a hero of old? But he did not go that route. There was another kind of divine power he wanted to show to the world. He allowed himself to be arrested, and said nary a word during the illegal trial the local "good ole boys" of the Sanhedrin gave him. He died the inglorious death of a common criminal, on a Roman cross. While hanging on the cross he cried out to God for the forgiveness of the people who put him there. He maintained the way of love and forgiveness and peace to the end. And he died. <br /><br />His movement came to a crashing halt. The masses, of course, had no interest in a dead national deliverer. One MORE messiah had bitten the dust. Would God's people EVER be freed? His death proved to all that he was not the one God had promised. His closest disciples, who had traveled with him for three years, were in despair, utterly disillusioned. Some who had been fishermen before were already heading back to their old business. <br /><br />But on the third day something amazing happened that completely changed everything. Jesus appeared alive to his disciples, after he had been dead and buried. They didn't see a ghost. They saw and felt a physical body, a body with unusual powers, a body that seemed to belong to a new order of being, but a body that could eat and be touched nonetheless. Of course historians today debate whether this really happened.[1] The telling fact is that few historians deny that this is was what Peter and the other disciples themselves thought they were witnessing. Whatever it is that happened, it transformed the disciples' fear to boldness, and made them willing to live and die in defense of their testimony. <br /><br />The resurrection confirmed to them that Jesus truly was the King, the anointed deliverer sent by God. It was this remarkable divine stamp of approval on Jesus that finally opened their eyes to understand the radically alien nature of Jesus' message, and his radical redefinition of what it means to be "king" and "deliverer." These same disciples were hiding in fear after Jesus' arrest and crucifixion. But after a series of what they claimed were resurrection appearances, they began to proclaim Jesus as the true King. The movement spread rapidly, far beyond Palestine, and came to include people from every ethnic group in the empire. And the point to highlight here is that they acted in ways just as puzzling to the society around them as Jesus had among his fellow Jews in Palestine. The apostles performed miraculous healings, which gave evidence that they were no ordinary movement. And they dared to mock Roman power by celebrating the cross. They took the very symbol of the terror by which Rome kept many nations subjugated and made it the symbol of their movement. To add insult to injury, these same early Christians refused to perform what others considered a perfunctory ritual of allegiance to Rome--to burn incense to Caesar and call him "Lord." Instead, they went around declaring "Jesus is Lord." In addition, they preached a "gospel" of Jesus as king. The word "gospel" was typically used to announce a king's military victory, the news of his rule that was going to bring peace and prosperity to all, or somesuch. So even the early Christians' use of the word "gospel" was a mockery of Roman power. We don't quite get all this today, but the political implications were not lost on the Romans. And so at various times they launched persecutions, putting Christians to death. Macabre crowds cheered in the arena as Christians were fed to hungry lions. And all they had to do to avoid this fate was recite what considered as harmless as Americans consider their "Pledge of Allegiance." <br /><br />The puzzling thing is that, for all their mockery of Rome, they never took up arms against Rome in the name of their "king." Most of the new Christians were slaves, but they never even started a slave rebellion. Instead they preached an ethic of radical service, humility, forgiveness, and love. There were early Christians who went to municipal garbage heaps, rescued abandoned infants, and raised them as their own. In times of plague, Christians stayed behind in the city to care for the ill, often dying themselves. As Jesus had said, his kingdom was not of this world. And yet it was a kingdom of divine love that was very much IN this world. It truly was political, by radically undermining the validity of the pretentious claims of the political agendas of their time. And, in a sense, it really was about conquering the world, but without using the weapons of the world. <br /><br />So what was the point of this movement, and its strange behavior? The message of all this, as best as I understand it, as best as I understand what these scholars are saying, was this: Our deliverer Jesus has defeated death. So we no longer live in fear. We will no longer be slaves to corruption. We will no longer consider any oppressive ideology to have true legitimacy. Nor will we put our hope in any "new boss" who claims to deliver us from the "old boss." We have power that transcends all that. And nothing, not even death, the threat of death, or any kind of earthly deprivation, will keep us from living lives of faithfulness, mercy, and love.<br /><br />The early Christians believed Jesus really was the deliverer whom the prophets had foretold, in passages such as these: <br /><br />"Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever." (Isaiah 9:7)<br /><br />"Here is my servant, whom I uphold, <br /> my chosen one in whom I delight; <br /> I will put my Spirit on him <br /> and he will bring justice to the nations.<br />He will not shout or cry out, <br /> or raise his voice in the streets.<br />A bruised reed he will not break, <br /> and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. <br /> In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;<br />he will not falter or be discouraged <br /> till he establishes justice on earth." <br />(Isaiah 42:1-4)<br /><br />Even as this movement was spreading throughout the Greco-Roman world, back in Palestine the nationalist movement had grown and come to a head. In A.D. 70 the Romans crushed the rebellion, and destroyed the Temple, as Jesus had warned. Meanwhile, the apostles continued to proclaim Jesus as the true King of the world. Most of the apostles and other original eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus were put to death. Not one of them ever recanted their testimony, even though we have reports of many others, who did not have this singular experience of seeing the resurrected Jesus, who renounced their faith to avoid being put to death.<br /><br />You can read this story in greater detail in such books as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0281052867/ref=s9_sims_gw_s1_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=02223081WB5DW28W1JRV&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846">The Challenge of Jesus</a>, by New Testament scholar and historian N.T. Wright, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Jesus-John-Howard-Yoder/dp/0802807348/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240276863&sr=1-1">The Politics of Jesus</a>, by John Howard Yoder. For me, this is quite a different story than the one I grew up with. Certainly, it has very different emphases. Personally, I find the historical arguments of these scholars compelling, and this perspective makes sense of a lot of biblical passages that previously seemed enigmatic. Not that I'm sold on everything they say, but it's compelling food for thought.<br /><br />So let me close with some questions that are on my mind. I'd love to hear what you think.<br /><br />1. In what sense was the movement of Jesus genuinely "political"?<br /><br />2. Is the politics of Jesus the same as today's Christian Right"?<br /><br />3. Is it the same as today's Christian or secular Left?<br /><br />4. What are the practical implications of all this for our lives? <br /><br />5. What do I live for? What am I willing to die for?<br /><br />---------<br /><br />Notes:<br /><br />[1] For the view that the origin of Christianity is just awfully hard to account for historically if the resurrection did not really occur, see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Christian-Origins-Question-Vol/dp/0800626796/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240283153&sr=1-1"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Resurrection of the Son of God</span></a>, by N.T. Wright, or a condensed presentation of the same arguments in Wright's lecture/article "<a href="http://www.jamesgregory.org/tom_wright.php">Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?</a>" Wright goes head to head with John Dominic Crossan, another major New Testament scholar, in the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-Dominic-Crossan-Dialogue/dp/0800637852/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240282822&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan And N.T. Wright in Dialogue</span></a>, edited by Robert B. Stewart. Crossan, if I recall, admits that the main reason he doesn't believe it happened is because such things simply do not occur, and proposes alternatives. The exchange is good-natured, at times humorous, and in my opinion very worthwhile. Both agree that something extraordinary happened, and that it should motivate and inspire us to combat injustice in our world. I hope in a future post to explain why I believe the resurrection really did happen and why I think this question is absolutely crucial.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-63944375810399988102009-04-16T11:36:00.000-07:002009-05-25T11:27:03.936-07:00Finding company on the journeyAs any reader of this blog knows, over the past year I have come to believe in evolution, and in a way that fits quite comfortably with belief in God and in the Bible as divine revelation. To my surprise and relief, a fog of questions that for years had seemed impenetrable has been clearing before the bright rays of the sun. And I can say that the end result is no watering down of vital faith, but a new unleashing of passion for the kingdom of God. I documented the main points of this journey in a post of Dec. 20, 2008 (re-posted to this blog earlier today).<br /><br />By way of update, let me heartily recommend a book that I have read since then, and mentioned in <a href="http://thinkingaloud99.blogspot.com/2009/04/on-evolutionary-chisel-divine-sculptor.html">another post today</a>--<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Genesis-heritage-Biblical-Israel/dp/0805202536/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239913799&sr=8-1">Understanding Genesis</a>, by Nahum M. Sarna. Sarna makes me feel like I've got my Bible back, finally, after it had been long held hostage to forced interpretations motivated by extraneous agenda arising out of Darwinian controversy of the last century and a half. This feeling of "getting my Bible back" is similar to what I felt years ago when the "biblical-theological" tradition of Westminster Theological Seminary and related Dutch Reformed currents liberated my understanding of the Bible from the extraneous agenda and assumptions that the dispensationalism in which I had been raised had imposed upon the text, and which had turned biblical faith into a private, other-worldly affair that had little direct impact on the suffering and injustice of our world. I believe that both these developments constitute advances toward reading the Bible on its own terms. <br /><br />Sarna, a Jewish scholar who wrote in the 1970s, strongly confirms what I had long suspected (from at least the time I read I Believe in the Creator, by James Houston, who evidently also benefitted from the stream of biblical and ANE research to which Sarna contributed), namely, that Genesis is best understood as using a shared regional literary idiom (that is not literal history in any sense in which we moderns understand that) to deliver a pointed polemic against debased views of humanity and society and the gods held to by the Babylonian imperial ideology and other prevailing belief systems of the region, and to school the people of Israel in divine call to reverse the state of corruption that had come to dominate the world. Combined with a spate of readings of N.T. Wright on early Christian origins and the mission of Christ, all this makes for, not a weak and vitiated faith, but a vital, passionate, fighting vision of the meaning of our lives and the glorious end to which God is bringing us in Christ.<br /><br />Also, shortly after reading Sarna, I stumbled onto an excellent resource, which I highly recommend for those who wish to discuss and reflect on these matters, together with others who have been seeking to make sense of things. It is the <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/">Jesus Creed blog</a> of Scot McKnight. Anybody interested in these issues can visit the site and search for posts by "RJS," who is a working scientist who I think has read Sarna and, together with readers who contribute responses to his posts, is processing the work of authors like Kenton Sparks, John Walton, and a number of others who get to the heart of these matters. Finding others who have come to nearly identical conclusions in light of the same sorts of evidence reassures me that it is not some rare form of insanity that has not gripped me to make me believe that evolution and biblical faith actually go quite well together! Finding this blog was like finding "home." <br /><br />Peter Enns and his <a href="http://peterennsonline.com/">website</a> is another valuable resource. I think it was via Internet searches prompted by book reviews on Enns' site that I came across the Jesus Creed blog, which also links back to Enns. I came to know of Enns by virtue of the fact that I graduated from a sister seminary to Westminster Theological Seminary, the institution that fired him. I am not surprised at the firing, but I do think Enns' thinking is in many ways a natural development of conversation that had long been in the making in such WTS scholars as the late Ray Dillard and the late Harvie Conn. Nor am I surprised that the OT professor Tremper Longman, formerly of WTS, recommends reading Enns' book Incarnation and Inspiration. Perhaps if these scholars were still at WTS, Enns would not have been fired. Not at all to suggest that these scholars' views are the same as Enns', but they all make for productive dialog in the community of faith. As I read Enns and interaction with other scholars, something gnaws at me making me wonder if he has really got discussion off onto quite the right foot on a number of things. But I think he is to be commended for prodding more explicit discussion of the issues he addresses among evangelical biblical scholars. <br /><br />All these developments in the intellectual realm of faith have paved the way for clearer, more urgent yearnings in the realm of practical application. Years ago my exposure to the "biblical theology" movement of biblical scholars like M.G. Kline, G. Vos, Edmund P. Clowney, and Graeme Goldsworthy led me to see that the <span style="font-weight:bold;">whole Bible points us to Jesus Christ.</span> (See Goldsworthy's According to Plan for the most accessible eye-opener along these lines that I have read.) A more recent but complementary sea change in my understanding--to which the whole evolutionary question contributed in odd and unexpected ways but which does not depend on any particular stance in evolutionary debates, and to which reading N.T. Wright contributed very substantially--has led me to see that <span style="font-weight:bold;">everything about Jesus is aimed at motivating and empowering us to seek justice and mercy and harmony and universal well-being in this world.</span> Of course I've always really known that, and the theology of WTS circles (esp., e.g., Harvie Conn) certainly pointed toward it and affirmed it, but the tendency of elements of my religious background to cast the Christian religion in terms of getting people onto a ship that will someday take us to a place that is out of and unrelated to this world obscured that knowledge and sent it off into a corner. Some forms of evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity seem like those pyramid schemes where everybody is busy signing everybody up to sell the product but precious little time is spent actually selling the product. The only "product" moved was a bit of personal cleaning up in private morals without paying attention to the wider and pervasive social implications of the Bible. The result is that compassionate practical ministry among the poor and excluded took a perpetual back seat to this recruitment game--which suits the interests of religious empire-builders rather than the priorities of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus and his friends. The great need I see is to put justice, mercy, and practical love back in the very center of our lives.<br /><br />The question of doing that, practically speaking, is claiming the bulk of my prayers and energies these days. I'm still wanting for face-to-face company on that path--it's anything but the kind of path one can walk alone. Some new acquaintances and I hope budding friendships seem promising in that regard.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-42491019921122129752009-04-16T10:49:00.001-07:002009-05-01T12:19:04.633-07:00On the Evolutionary "Chisel," the Divinely Intended "Sculpture," and the Glorious Meaning and Destiny of our Lives in ChristIn this post I'd like to expand upon some matters that were at least implicitly touched upon in my <a href="http://thinkingaloud99.blogspot.com/2009/04/coming-to-peace-with-science.html">post</a> of Dec. 20, 2008 (re-posted to this blog earlier today), in regard to the matter of justifying normative ethics in the light of evolutionary orgins. This is an area that has not received much close attention in the popular theistic evolutionary works that I have come across so far, yet I think it lies at the heart of much that troubles many non-Christians about Christianity, even on a theistic evolutionary understanding of it, and that troubles many Christians about evolution. <br /><br />The question is this: If we have been evolved by processes concerned with increasing the chances of survival and reproduction, does human life have anything like the significance that the Bible, and indeed our own hearts as we perceive them, tell us it has? Do our actions have ultimate moral significance? Do the feelings and concerns and aspirations we experience in our lives have "meaning" whose content is not defined by, and whose validity does not depend on, the nature of the evolutionary means that contributed to bringing these about? <br /><br />I think that one of the most important things that needs to be said in addressing that question is to insist that we must refrain from reading "meaning" into behavior and evolutionary processes that apparently occurred in pre-humans based on conceptions of meaning that are derived from our existential experience in the present, and from assuming that the evolutionary means which brought about the circumstances of our present experience necessarily determine the "meaning" or "purpose," or lack thereof, of that present experience. The use of a chisel and the size and shape of the orginal block out of which a sculpture is made does not determine the "meaning" of the sculpture. Likewise, there is compelling evolutionary logic that seems to account for HOW such things as the temptation to adultery, the phenomenon of jealousy, and many other things arose in the first place, but which has no ultimate bearing on the moral significance we should ascribe to those behaviors today. <br /><br />For example, in species of birds that until recently were considered more "monogamous" than they really are, scientists have observed females engaging in remarkably sly rendezvous with other males, even as males have developed mate-guarding instincts. Both tendencies appear to have co-evolved in a kind of arms race. Selection pressures have favored developments in females that make them adept at seeking covert inseminations by more sexually attractive and fit males (which helps ensure that her progeny will have heightened chances of surviving and reproducing), while still availing themselves of the resources provided by the cuckolded male. Selection pressures favor changes in the males that make them more adept at guarding their mates. Whether such understandings in exactly their current form will survive ongoing investigation I cannot say, but they certainly seem coherent and highly plausible, and I see no warrant for rejecting them on any biblical or theological grounds. But what does this say about the morality of human behavior?<br /><br />One might be tempted, for example, to conclude from such observations that adultery in humans is a matter of no moral significance. Or that jealousy and mate-guarding tendencies are pointless in any ultimate sense, because these all evolved as part of a pointless game with no meaningful direction. But all of this would be a huge philosophical leap that is not at all warranted by the facts. The scientific observations in themselves cannot speak one way or the other concerning the current moral significance, or lack thereof, or of the "meaning," of human behaviors. What I think can be said, with which I think most evolutionary biologists could agree, is that the vast bulk of human genes and traits have been spreading and co-evolving in the human species for so long that a degree of equilibrium has been reached. This is not to say that there is not ongoing variation in these traits. Some are more tempted to adultery than others. Some are more jealous than others. And insofar as there are genetic factors contributing to that, there is indeed a measure of variation on that level. But this variation is not so great as to rule out universal or near universal statements about what makes current human beings happy and well, and concerning the range of behaviors of which most people are capable. Women want their progeny to be provided for. They want their husbands to value their fidelity because a complete abandonment of "mate guarding" would in fact make them very unhappy and unloved. And they do not want their husbands to take their loyalty so for granted that they slack off on the job of providing for the family.<br /><br />Likewise, the spread and co-evolution of genes and traits and culture is such that no human being HAS to behave, as did Genghis Khan, killing and conquering and mating as many women as possible, because a) multiple strategies of sufficient "evolutionary advantage," generally speaking, are available to virtually every human being, and b) we are capable of consciously choosing behaviors even when they conform to the goal of human happiness over against the dictates of the maximization of genetic legacy. Genghis Khan, in other words, COULD have been a saint, given other influences and choices, because there is that degree of flexibility and range of possibility in humans. And if God guided the development of our ancestors into this current configuration (and science cannot really speak to that question) and purposes that we experience harmony and fellowship with one another, then there is a basis for morality to which the facts of the current configuration are more relevant than the evolutionary processes that led to it.<br /><br />Or take another example of an evolutionary observation that might tempt us into unwarranted moral conclusions. Men on average are bigger and stronger than women. And there is little doubt that this is because males among our biological ancestors fought over mates. But this does not mean that it is OK for males today to fight and kill each other over mates. There is a tendency for all evolved features to take on different functions, or even a multiplicity of possible functions, once they are brought into being. And in the current configuration that evolution has produced in humans, the passions and muscles of men are susceptible of different applications and "meanings." We are now CAPABLE of opting for cooperative rather than competitive behaviors. We are capable of channeling our passions and strengths and abilities in ways that love God and others, just as we are capable of employing these in ways that may in many cases more closely resemble the behavior of our very distant ancestors who did not share the "meaning" complex in which we live. Nor does this fact of sexual dimorphism and its origins mean that the feelings a woman may have when she thinks of her husband have no meaning apart from the evolutionary processes that shaped these features as well as feelings. For example, if a woman feels that her husband, who is taller and stronger than she is, is her "knight in shining armor," we cannot debunk the "validity" of these feelings on account of evolutionary origins. A very complex series of interactions between genetics and culture and individual circumstances can lead to such feelings, and they take on a "life of meaning" of their own the validity of which is not at all affected by the fact that the fighting of distant male ancestors was part of the series of events that led to their development. Nor, of course, can we force-fit all women's feelings into a stereotype, though sometimes our cultures want to do that, because there is diversity within that which is shared by all humans. <br /><br />It is this "life of meaning" that is the end of creation, the purpose with which <span style="font-weight:bold;">we</span> are concerned, at any rate; the long business of selection pressures which tend toward survival and reproduction belong to the mere mechanics and means of creation.<br /><br />To take another example, scientist of cognition Justin Barrett, in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Believe-Cognitive-Science-Religion/dp/0759106673/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240088072&sr=1-1">Why Would Anyone Believe in God?</a>, has much to say about how the tendency of most humans in most environments to "naturally" believe in a god or gods may have come about. But Barrett, a Christian, goes on to argue that if we deny the validity of belief in God based on the evolutionary nature of the processes that developed our capacity to believe in God, then on the same grounds we might as well also reject our perception of the passage of time, our belief in the existence of other minds, and other things we take for granted. None of this is really warranted if there really is a God who has guided the development of the universe with purpose. And, again, science, in itself, can only be silent on that question, while the resurrection and the testimony of the Spirit in our hearts speak very clearly and gloriously on the matter.<br /><br />And what of the common human perception that death is "unnatural"? I would contend that, just as selection pressures concerned with survival and reproduction led to cognitive faculties that are now capable of being employed in perceiving the God who truly exists, similar processes may have produced an entirely valid perception that death is not our intended or ultimate destiny. Once again, the question hinges entirely on whether there is divine intent underlying the creation, a question science cannot answer, but which other evidence abundantly speaks to.<br /><br />It is necessary, then, to distinguish between the chisel of evolutionary processes, and the sculpture of humans created in the image of God and having the capacity to live a rich life of fellowship with God and with one another. Somewhere in the development of our highly advanced brains and of our capacity for culture, there arose the capacity for choice (a highly debated topic, but I don't think science can ever conclusively rule against the existence of all meaningful choice, even if it encourages a healthy awareness, which I think the Bible also acknowledges, of the relative and limited nature of this capacity), for love, for fellowship with God, and for all sorts of things that have taken on a "life of meaning" of their own. Again, the meaning is determined by the purpose of God and not by the evolutionary processes and selection pressures that were used to bring about the current complex and glorious configuration. <br /><br />It is also a mistake to read the "meaningful time" derived from the complex of meaning that belongs to our experience in this sliver of evolutionary time that we inhabit--this sliver which is in fact the end and purpose of creation, at least the end and purpose of creation with which we need be concerned--back into the long stretches of evolutionary time, and thus conclude that our lives are insignificant. That is a category mistake. Because in the context of our lives, we attribute significance to "long time" as having been the context in which wisdom has been shaped, hard but important lessons have been learned, relationships have been deepened, enmities have become entrenched, etc. And in the context of the roll of centuries, we attribute significance to the "long time" over which civilizations have developed, and cultural wisdom has been shared, and the leaven of the gospel has transformed the world and clarified the possibilities open to us, etc. These meanings of "long time" that derive from our life experience and from a shared cultural conversation over a number of centuries cannot justly be transferred and applied to the long stretches of evolutionary eons that preceded us. To do so is to make the same kind of error as to conclude that we are insignificant, that God cannot be interested in us or in the choices we make, because we occupy an infinitesimal part of the universe in terms of space. The sliver of space we inhabit is meaningful to us, and is made so by virtue of the fact that the very Creator of all things has honored us with the privilege of relating to him in that time and space.<br /><br />When we correct the above kind of error, when we make the proper distinctions, and keep the "meaning" of time back in the realm of "human-scale" time where it belongs, we are in a better position to understand the resurrection and the life of the eternal kingdom to come. The continuity that bears with our present existence pertains to the purposed end result of meaning that God intended, even it is radically discontinuous, in ways we cannot imagine or comprehend, with the mechanics of how the world and our bodies as we know them came to be what they presently are. The future kingdom will indeed be "here" in "this world" from the point of view of our existential experience; the question of future "mechanics" is irrelevant. God and his purposes are what is ultimate in all of this. Perhaps our having providentially discovered the evolutionary mechanics of our origins will only serve to heighten the glory of it all when the resurrection of the saints and renewal of the world (that is, the world as we experience it) prove that the meaning which God declares indeed was the real point of it all.<br /><br />It is also a mistake, I would contend, to read the meaning of human pain and injustice into what we observe in other creatures, and then conclude that human pain and injustice are of no moral significance, or that there is therefore no such thing as moral significance. We may be disturbed when we observe certain behaviors of other creatures, such as the male of a primate species killing the small offspring of a female that was sired by a rival male, the evolutionary logic of which may be to prepare the female to be fertile to mate with him, and to ensure greater resources for his own rather than his rival male's offspring. But such creatures are acting within the limited range of possibilities open to their species, whose capacities and options are untold times more restricted than our own. Disturbing as these things may be, we do not ascribe moral significance to these behaviors or call them "evil." But the fact that seeing these things in other species tends to jar us is evidence of the very different behavior of which <span style="font-weight:bold;">we</span> are capable. Hence the Hebrew prophet speaks of a time when "the lion will lie down with the lamb," which in the context I think is best read as not speaking literally of animals, but of a day when ruthless empires like Assyria and Babylon will give way to a peaceful and cooperative human social order. We are capable of a cooperative approach that can bring happiness and prosperity to all. And not only are we capable of it, something deep within us tells us, however much we may at times try to deny it, that this is really what we are meant for, that this is the way of true peace and happiness. Because of this, the way we live becomes a genuinely moral issue. <br /><br />Now let me briefly turn to a related question that a number of Christians have concerning Romans 5, which constitutes the greatest hindrance that many Christians to accepting our evolutionary origins. (I hope to address these concerns in light of a more detailed examination of the text in a separate post, or in a revised and expanded version of this post. What follows can be considered prolegomena to that discussion.) It has been contended that Adam must be literal and a single individual for what Paul says in Romans 5 to make sense. In a previous essay I mentioned the views of Henri Blocher, who believes a pre-human evolutionary history is possible, but who shares this belief that Adam, who acted as our covenant representative, plunging the human race into sin and ruin, must be literally one single individual, the first male of our species. Yet apparently the best current scientific thinking is that the human race is not descended from a single human pair. Is the Bible irreconcilably opposed to that conclusion? I don't think so. The important thing on which Paul's argument hinges is that we are in a predicament that we have inherited and that we perpetuate. And while Paul may have had no reason to imagine that Adam was anything other than a single individual, he is not concerned to address that issue--indeed, the issue would not have occurred to him. It is not the point he is making, and the point he IS making does not hinge on that. <br /><br />In light of ancient Near Eastern parallels, I think there is strong reason to believe that Genesis is something other than what people today define as "literal history." A detailed and I think convincing account of this matter is found in Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis. Sarna makes a strong case that Genesis is using a shared literary idiom of the ancient Near East to deliver a pointed polemic against debased views of God and human beings and human societies that were held to by the Babylonian imperial ideology and other cultures of the region. Further, with Henri Blocher, I believe that the narratives of Genesis tell our story truly and effectively, albeit nonliterally, for the purpose of schooling the people of Israel in their divine call to reverse the corruption into which the world had fallen. The very name "Adam" means "humanity," so I think it is entirely possible that Adam and other figures in the early chapters of Genesis tell us the origins of the human predicament in a condensed and archetypical, rather than a literal manner.<br /><br />How, then, might we conceive how this inherited predicament came about, if we do not take Genesis as literal history? I would submit that at some point in the development of our species, even though the "chisel" was made up of selection pressures driven by the logic of survival and reproduction, we developed as the "end" (divinely purposed) result the capacity to sense the reality of the God who had made us and all things, and to relate to him, and to sense our calling into cooperative and harmonious ways of living which, when lived out by enough of us, creates a bigger pie for all to share, and in which we find the truest sense of meaning to our existence. There was developed in us, in other words, the capacity to consciously choose the way of "win-win," in contrast to the way of "I win, you lose," which dominates in many other species who lack the capacity to choose any other way, and that fights over the slivers of a very small pie while making nobody truly happy. But at some point, deep in our pre-history, this genuine capacity to opt for "win-win" strategies was not acted upon; intead, people suppressed their innate sense that we are special creatures under God, meant to relate harmoniously and cooperatively with one another, and opted instead to seize immediate privilege and advantage at the expense of the long-term good of all. We do not necessarily have to conceive of this as having occurred in a decisive once-for-all fashion, much less in a one-time decision by a single person. <br /><br />Indeed, the "genuine capacity" to choose the way of cooperation surely did not arrive in us suddenly, so it is conceivable that the actions of pre-humans, with pre-fully-developed versions of our capacities which may mark out both these pre-human species and us from all other living primates, may have contributed tributaries to the stream of our inherited corruption. Jesus affirmed the principle of varying degrees of culpability for human actions. (Luke 12:47-48 is so important to thinking about these issues of ethics and moral responsibility, let's review it in full: "That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.") Who is to say, then, that there cannot have been varying degrees or qualities of moral responsibility among pre-human species? God knows.<br /><br />In any case it may be supposed that over a period of unknown length the net effect of the bulk of choices by our ancestors created a kind of watershed in human culture and history. Though the sense of God and our truest calling as human beings was still somewhere deep within us, the organization of societies and dominant expressions of human behavior came to reflect the contrary approach to living which emphasized immediate perceived advantage over against trust in God who calls us to work harmoniously with one another for the common good. And indeed the weight of precedents and the pressures of societies built upon corrupt principles militated fiercely against any given individual breaking out and living according to the call that was sensed deeper within. Is such a construction of affairs as I have outlined contrived? I don't believe it is. In fact, I think that even the most skeptical atheist knows deep down that somehow or another we have arrived at a point where we are capable of realizing a destiny that is contrary to the "way of the world" around us but that fulfills our deepest aspirations.<br /><br />Certainly by the time Genesis was written this state of corruption had dominated human societies for longer than the collective human memory could know. The story of Adam and Eve tells the story of this watershed, and the fact that it is told in condensed, mythological idiom does not make the story any less true or effective for preparing a people that is called to reverse this state of affairs in the world. Nor does its non-literal form make it any less suited to prepare us for Christ, who delivers us from the obvious mess we have inherited. <br /><br />To reverse the corrupt state of the world requires sacrifice. The first honest cop will be subject to the constant threats of death at the hands of those who are on the take. The first to refrain from littering will be going to trouble while seeing no visible difference in the landscape. The first to take steps toward just human cooperation does so at great immediate cost. It is like walking into a meatgrinder. But Christ walked into that meatgrinder for us, and before us, and came out the other end unscathed. United with him by faith in his resurrection, our hearts are thus freed from the false lures and threats of the prevailing corrupt system to reconnect with the fundamental truth of our existence that in varying degrees we have been suppressing, namely, that we are meant to live lives of love toward God and toward others. And so with truly joyful hearts, powerless in ourselves yet invincible in the Spirit (who, in ancient Near Eastern idiom, is hovering over the waters to bring order out of chaos), we follow Jesus, and share in his sufferings, that we may share in his glory. As the Hebrew prophet foretold, "he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth" (Isaiah 42:4).<br /><br />To fully treat the perceived problems of reconciling this understanding of "Adam" and the origin of the human predicament with the text and mindset of the apostle Paul in Romans 5 will require further attention. In my opinion this matter is not nearly as difficult as we imagine, but to arrive at that conclusion requires backing up and retracing our interpretive steps in a detailed fashion. I believe we will find, as we have in the case of Genesis, that the biblical text is apt in making a point of profound significance, which we best understand as we understand the context of the original author and his readers. My thoughts on that are in draft text that I hope to finish and publish soon (that is to say, sometime within the next 10 years--a mere blip on the screen of worldview-shaping time :-).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-50311609151099466332009-04-16T10:34:00.000-07:002009-04-16T13:58:23.836-07:00Coming to Peace with ScienceI am re-posting here thoughts I originally posted elsewhere on Dec. 20, 2008, concerning theistic evolution and the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Peace-Science-Bridging-Between/dp/0830827420/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239914843&sr=8-1/">Coming to Peace with Science</a>, by Darrell R. Falk, a book that got a huge ball rolling in my thinking about faith and science and life.<br /><br />---<br /><br />Falk's book did three things for me.<br /><br />1) It disabused me of the notion that the typical biologist's acceptance of evolution is based on either blindly following tradition in their field or a desire to escape God. On the contrary, biologists believe in evolution because the more deeply they engage in their pursuits, the more the explanatory power of evolution shines through and the more it appears inescapably the only credible explanation.<br /><br />2) It removed for me the objections I previously had that evolution, in spite of its great explanatory power concerning the things we observe, is "impossible," e.g. at the level of species change or the development of something so complex as the human eye.<br /><br />3) It showed that a more tranquil path is possible in dealing with matters of faith and science than my own turbulent experience has been. My faith was severely challenged when I left a Christian school and landed in a public school in 10th grade, and was hit by the double whammy of the biology class and the discovery that people weren't nearly as evil and prejudiced against truth as the Christian school had indoctrinated me to believe. Francis Schaeffer's work helped me recover a sense of the intellectual basis for Christianity, and yet I'm afraid there were aspects of his teaching which helped set me up for hard falls whenever I would come into contact again with evolutionary biology. His very insistence on a literal understanding of Genesis, as well as his casting of the whole history of Western intellectual discussion as a tendentious revolt against the authority of the Bible at the cost of despair, I think, led me to follow a kind of "script" when confrontation with evolution seemed to force me to make drastic choices. At times in my life it has appeared that I was completely given over to agnosticism and despair. At somewhat less severe times I could one day be basking in the warm presence of God, meditating on a sweet truth from Scripture, and the next day, while taking my kids to the zoo, feel all that dissipate and wonder whether any of it was really real. Falk's narrative of his own pilgrimage shows that another outcome is possible besides either being a head-stuck-in-sand fundamentalist or a spiritually and morally unhinged skeptic suffering suicidal despair. Thanks to Falk, I am no longer afraid of taking a trip to the zoo! If you ever read Falk, let me know whether you found it as convincing as I did.<br /><br />Another book I found very helpful, and a good preliminary to deeper reading, was Evolution for Everyone, by David Sloan Wilson. In reading Wilson, one has to make allowance for the fact that this secular-minded writer is less adept at dealing with the religious side of these questions than he is at explaining biology. The irony is that to read his reflections and observations and heartfelt care for the created world is to witness an exuberant demonstration of what the Bible means when it says we are made in the image of God.<br /><br />I think there are a number of factors that have conspired to prevent productive dialog about this issue in our society, especially among Christians. First, evolution really is counterintuitive initially, before one gets immersed in some fairly complex and detailed observations of the biological world. This opens the door for people to suspect that belief in evolution may be the result of people trying really, really hard to escape God. Second, the Enlightenment era set a genuine precedent of people who truly were about throwing off divine authority. So when Darwin came along, there were people who had long since been reveling in what they thought was a newfound freedom from God via Enlightenment philosophies, who found what they thought was scientific vindication in Darwin's theories. Christians reacted against this, rightly seeing the matter in terms of spiritual conflict, but mistakenly identifying the Darwinian biological conversation as the enemy. Many Christians retreated from intellectual engagement in general, and have even come to see faith as demanding that they close themselves off to honest exploration of these issues. Evolutionary writers, for their part, respond with curt dismissals and ridicule, failing to take adequate account of the counterintuitivity of evolution for people who have not pursued their own areas of specialized study. In all this folks on both sides of the biological knowledge divide have proven all too human slaves to the categories and patterns of reaction that have been set, not by the facts themselves, but by the unfortunate history and sequence of past intellectual and cultural conversation.<br /><br />[It seems the effects of such all too human factors may be observed even in the biological conversation among convinced evolutionists. As we know, to leave a genetic legacy one must both stay alive and find a mate to successfully reproduce with. Evolution thus speaks about two kinds of "selection": selection for survival, and sexual selection. Yet for over a century after Darwin, the great bulk of attention was devoted to survival selection, even though Darwin himself made sexual selection his primary research interest, and was reviled on that account by his contemporaries. Geoffrey Miller, in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mating-Mind-Sexual-Choice-Evolution/dp/038549517X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239915308&sr=8-1/">The Mating Mind</a>, argues that the relative neglect of sexual selection research until the revival of interest in Darwin's favorite topic exploded in very recent decades was due to an antipathy in the Victorian mindset against the notion that sexual selection is driven primarily by the woman's sexual choices in most species.]<br /><br />We fear exploring evolution because we feel that something vital is at stake. But if our faith is built upon what really turns out to be very creaturely "props," don't be surprised if God in his providence allows those props to be knocked out from under you. Should you find yourself in that position (as I suspect most people will as they dig deeper into evolutionary biology), my advice would be: 1) don't panic; 2) explore freely and honestly, acknowledging that a fear of doing so cannot possibly be the fruit of faith that comes from God; and 3) trust that a sovereign God will catch you and establish you on more solid footing, even if some of your current understandings are changed.<br /><br />There really aren't many options when confronted with the evidence for evolution: You can ignore it, in which case you will have little of any use to say to others who don't take this path. You can live with tension, maintaining apparently contradictory beliefs. Or you can seek to resolve the tension from the scientific and/or biblical ends. I am finding that the scientific end doesn't really budge, rumors to the contrary from the creation science and ID camps notwithstanding. Reading Falk and Wilson will show you why I've come to that conclusion. But I think there is a lot more room to move on the biblical end than either liberals or conservatives have acknowledged, and one can explore this without doing injustice to Scripture and without having to surrender a very high view of its divine origin and authority. (I'm afraid there are people on both sides who have a vested interest in maintaining the notion that this is not possible, such as the atheist Richard Dawkins who presumes to batter faith out of people with the cudgel of evolution, and certain Christians whose careers have built around calling an increasingly marginalized Christian community to hold the fort against the conspiratorial forces of godless evolutionary science.)<br /><br />The two main issues that arise are the historical intent of biblical texts, and the theological question of the origin and nature of human sin and culpability. On the question of the historical intent of biblical narratives, I think the first thing that needs to be said about understanding biblical literature, especially the Old Testament, is that ANY pronouncements about genre and intent are to be entertained with a grain of salt, as coming from competent scholars who disagree with one another and who are all separated from the texts by a great deal of temporal and cultural distance. To stand against the solid consensus of the overwhelming majority of scientists concerning evolution just seems to me to be hanging an awful lot on one minority opinion (the literalist reading of Genesis) among scholars in a field where tentative conclusions are the norm and there is relatively little consensus.<br /><br />Further, I think it is far from obvious that literal readings of biblical narratives are always the most in accord with the authors' original intent. In regard to the "days" of Genesis, the writings of the late Meredith Kline, Henri Blocher, and Rowland Ward long ago convinced me that the literal 24-7 view is not the most defensible interpretation on exegetical grounds. Kline, however, was a literalist concerning Genesis 2:4 and thereafter. He believed that details such as the instantaneous special creation of Adam from the dust of the earth, the fashioning of Eve from Adam's rib, a literal forbidden fruit, and temptation by Satan taking the form of a serpent, were all intended as literal history. I must say, I've read Kline, Longman, Dillard, Waltke, etc., and while they all admirably defend the point that highly stylized and even lately written texts can conceivably be historical in intent and result, they seem to assume that literal historical intent is the default position in reading biblical narratives, an assumption I think they fail to establish. The parallels with ancient Middle Eastern creation and flood stories demands some kind of accounting, and the answer that Kline, Longman, etc. give is that the non-biblical stories are pagan corruptions of a true history that was faithfully preserved in the biblical accounts. Again, I agree this is possible, but is it established? To my mind (and apparently to that of innumerable scholars) it seems at least equally likely that all these cultures used a shared mythological idiom to express (and debate) such matters as the meaning of life, the basis for a king's rule, and the basis for the social order (Genesis's contribution being that Yahweh alone is the rightful king, and so we had therefore better respect one another as his fellow subjects). Such a nonliteral understanding, if it accords with the original author's intent, in no way impinges on divine inspiration and authority--God is free to use any genre he pleases, and he generally uses those which are common currency in the cultural milieu of the audiences he is addressing. So what keeps conservative scholars, who are intimately acquainted with all the surviving ancient Near Eastern literature, from affirming the general consensus of their colleagues? From what I can gather, they insist that a nonhistorical interpretation cannot be squared with the divine inspiration of NT authors who seem, in those scholars' minds, to be referring to the events of Genesis as historical. To that I would respond that it is far from obvious that Jesus or Paul or any of the NT writers even care about the question of literal historical intent of the older narratives they have in mind. The most that I think can be established with certainty is that they believed the Old Testament speaks truly and reliably (whether literally or metaphorically) to the human predicament, and that the literally crucified, buried, and risen Christ is the solution to that very real predicament.<br /><br />But even though I affirm the strong likelihood of nonhistorical intent in regard to SOME biblical narratives, I am not convinced of the view of the most extreme critics that practically EVERY narrative in the Bible, including those about the death and resurrection of Christ, are nonhistorical. Now I have to admit that all of these scholars, liberal and conservative, are way, way out of my league. I simply lack their expertise. Yet when I read stories in the Bible, I cannot avoid the fact that one alarmingly simple criterion seems to handle this whole question of historicity quite nicely--the criterion of whether the events being written about are contemporary with the human author, or not. That is to say, when a biblical author is writing about the distant and mysterious past, or the distant and mysterious future, metaphor or myth or something other than literal history is reasonably to be expected. When a biblical author is writing about events that have occurred in his own lifetime, it is reasonable to expect literal history. Applying this criterion to a variety of texts, the conclusions I draw are confirmed by the overall feel and particular characteristics of the texts themselves. For example, when I read John's post-resurrection narratives, with Jesus's threefold restoration of Peter, the count of 153 fish, and the clearing up of what Jesus really said about how long John might live, it has the feel of matter-of-fact stories based on eyewitness testimony, shared among a community of dearly loved friends who were very close to the original events. But when I read of a tree of life, whether in Genesis, Ezekiel, or Revelation, I get the sense that something very important and real is being discussed by means of metaphor.<br /><br />To sum up this matter, there are those who, like Bultmann, deny ANY historical moorings to the Christian faith, and there are the conservative evangelical scholars like Waltke, Pratt, etc. who see virtually all biblical narratives as literal history. Finally, there are those like C.S. Lewis who discern varied genres with varying degrees of historical intent in the biblical narratives, and who see the incarnation, death, and resurrection as the historical linchpin of the Christian faith. Not that my amateur opinion counts for much, but just to report where I am personally, my gut sense very strongly inclines to the latter. And it must be insisted that all the reasons for this point of view--the ancient Near Eastern parallels, the evident differences of genre among various biblical texts--were no creation of Charles Darwin; it may just be that many have been moved to pay more attention to these realities in the wake of the Darwinian controversy.<br /><br />Now let me share a few thoughts about the second major issue that exposure to the evidence for evolution raises for Christians: the origin of human sin and the validity of ascribing culpability to it. If we have come to be what we are by means of a process of physical evolution, how can we be blamed for moral failings? Indeed, what is the basis for believing in the reality of "right" and "wrong"? Now I have to say that atheistic evolutionists have a lot harder problem speaking of "ought" than theistic evolutionists. But one thing that kept me from finding theistic evolution a satisfying solution for many years was my difficulty in reconciling, e.g., how murder or adultery could be "wrong" given the abundant behavioral analogs in other species and our supposed ancestors.<br /><br />For some time the best solution that I could come up with was to posit a fall with retroactive consequences. That is to say, I proposed that while Adam and Eve may have been biologically descended from nonhuman ancestors, the special environment in which they were placed and/or the strength of their relationship with God prevented whatever force inherited traits exerted upon Adam and Eve from being experienced by them as temptation to violate God's standards. When they chose to disobey, the whole history of death and pain and suffering became their past, as a fitting consequence of their sin. The fall, on this understanding, had retroactive consequences for all creation, just as the work of Christ had retroactive saving consequences for the saints who came before his advent. So now, ejected from the garden of Eden, and with their relationship with God severed, the tempting force of biologically inherited traits became operative, confirming them in the sad direction they had freely chosen. Some years ago I wrote up this thesis in a few pieces that I sent out to a handful of professors and cyber contacts who regularly discuss faith and science issues. Years later, I found that none other than William Dembski of ID fame is espousing the same view in his article at http://www.designinference.com/documents/2006.05.christian_theodicy.pdf. An Orthodox priest also seems to be arguing the same or a similar thesis in his article at http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/kalormiros-on-the-6-days-of-creation-part-1-and-part-2.<br /><br />But despite such credentialed and venerable confirmation, I've come to reject my former hypothesis as nearly hopelessly convoluted. Even when I first wrote it up, I put it forth as a possible though admittedly awkward solution. Of course it would never have satisfied a literalist concerning Genesis 2 and 3. But it was intended to address the concerns of those who, like Henri Blocher, interpret Genesis 2 and 3 nonliterally but as nevertheless describing a real historical break with God on the part of the first human pair. (Blocher believes Paul's discussion of the sin of the first and last Adam in Romans 5 necessitates attributing a decisive historical fall from grace to the first male human, but he believes the narrative in Genesis 2 and 3 is not a strictly literal genre.)<br /><br />I now very tentatively favor what to my mind is a much simpler solution. Simply put, culpable moral failure represents the discrepancy between the ethical behavior of which we are capable, and the behavior which we actually do. The origins and nature of this culpable moral failure, of this break with God and man, may be shrouded in mystery, but they are adequately described in accommodated mythological language for our benefit. Christ is the answer, the basis for our pardon for real culpability, and the means by which we come into greater conformity with God's will for our lives.<br /><br />On this understanding, somewhere in the evolution of humanity it became possible to act for the common good, and God has declared that such behavior befits a species that reflects his own character. For example, rather than kill the infant offspring of a rival sire, which the males in some primate species do because it gives his own progeny with the same female a greater share of maternal attention and resources, and thus increases the likelihood of leaving a genetic legacy through that lineage, it is possible and desirable and now mandatory for humans to organize themselves and cooperate to mutual advantage. The happiness of God's creatures assumes greater importance than the maximization of genetic legacy at any cost. The last 6 of the Ten Commandments each address this matter, and enjoin win-win rather than I-win-you-lose behaviors among all humans. But our failures in that area are due to a broken relationship with God, which the first 4 of the Ten Commandments address. When we put ourselves and our own interests above God and the stipulations of our creator for how we should relate to our fellow creatures, we tend to be blind servants of the principle of the maximization of genetic legacy at any cost. We raid neighboring tribes so that our progeny will flourish and multiply, rather than theirs. We kill, lie, commit adultery, etc., and all of these things have rationales and cross-species analogs in regard to "evolutionary strategy." The females of many species (including in many species of birds which until recently were thought to be monogamous) pretend to be "faithful," as it were, to the male that is providing resources, but seek covert insemination by stronger or more attractive males, so as to procure resources and ensure traits in their progeny that will best equip them to survive and successfully mate and reproduce. (Now none of this is "consciously" motivated, though the whole concept of "consciousness" is a very complex and debated topic among evolutionary biologists.) But men and women are called to the more cooperative relationships that are summed up in biblical ethics, which, if practiced consistently, would provide plenty enough resources for everybody, and which maximize human happiness rather than the pointless unconscious "goal" of leaving the largest possible genetic legacy.<br /><br />An exhaustive accounting of the evolutionary means by which God created us, and the reasons for his choosing those means, may be forever inaccessible to us, even though the reality of those means has become accessible to scientific investigation. But the MEANING of our lives is made clear to us both by the innate sense of God that he has somehow instilled in us, and by the special revelation he has given concerning his Son that comprises the entire Bible. It is perhaps no surprise that God would refrain from including a complex and detailed discussion of our evolutionary origins, but would instead adopt the mythological idiom of the cultural milieu of the people through whom he chose to bring forth the Messiah, to communicate what we need to know about our predicament, and to prepare us to receive the revelation of the answer to that predicament in Christ. It is certainly God's prerrogative to choose the languages and cultural idioms though which to reveal himself, and, if evolution is true, it is hard to imagine a clearer or more effective communication to achieve the ends for which Genesis was intended than what we in fact read in Genesis.<br /><br />It is God, rather than our biological history, that defines the purpose and meaning of our lives. And who is to say that our lives are not so meaningful that audiences of spiritual creatures, angels and demons, cannot be anxiously following the story? Certainly science cannot say this cannot be so. Science cannot make any comment whatsoever on the meaning or ultimate significance of anything. Nor can it be expected to be of much help in understanding spiritual beings whose actions are closely wrapped up in matters of human meaning. And who can say that miracles, that is, marked departures from the way things usually work, cannot occur? Certainly scientists cannot say such things cannot occur. But historical investigation coupled with literary sensitivity can discern credible eyewitness reports that such things have indeed occurred.<br /><br />Some evolutionary thinkers, and some opponents of the theory of evolution, may object that universal moral standards cannot be validated given the VARIATION in human genes and circumstances. But practically all evolutionary biologists, to my knowledge, are agreed that a number of very signicant traits are universally shared among all individuals in our species, in spite of variation in the degree to which those traits are present and in spite of uncertainty as to the long-term future of those traits' incidence in our distant progeny. And it must be kept in mind that the Bible was written to people occupying only a minute fraction of history. I don't believe there is sufficient reason to doubt that all human beings over the past few thousand years are sufficiently like one another, in constitution, in cultural circumstances, etc. for certain ethical norms to be able to be universally applied. There is certainly a pattern to be discerned in the ethical norms of the Bible--they all favor win-win as opposed to I-win-you-lose strategies of life. As to exceptions, or variations in individual culpability due to varitions in genetic or cultural or other circumstances, the Bible itself gives sufficient scope to that, simply by informing us that it is God alone who knows our hearts and is able to judge, and that judgment will vary according to circumstances that an all-knowing God knows completely.<br /><br />The Bible gives God's pronouncement concerning the meaning of our lifes for us right now. The last few thousand years may be only a sliver of time out of all the time that has occurred, but it is the sliver that matters to us, and it is a sliver that matters to our angelic observers and to God himself. Science is incapable of saying this cannot be so, and, again, I believe our innate awareness of God and the revelation of Scripture tell us clearly that it IS so. And if our lives have a meaning that God has declared to us, and that our biological history cannot really make much comment on, who is to say that we are not destined for a future physical reality that has some sort of inscrutable continuity with our present lives but which is also radically different and beyond our ability to conceive, a window to which has been given us in the resurrection of Christ? Science cannot say it cannot be so, yet Christ, as proclaimed by his apostles, and foretold by the prophets who prepared the way for him, has declared and demonstrated that it IS so.<br /><br />Perhaps the tentative solutions I have arrived at satisfy you, or intrigue you, or leave you scratching your head, or disappoint you. (Sherry, I'm particularly interested in what you might have to say, given that you actually have a background in the scientific end of the subject matter.) I suspect that in any case these matters that have exercised us so greatly over the past century and a half will sooner or later become the subject of a settled consensus, and our agonized wrestlings will become a distant memory to future generations, just as we find it difficult to relate to the agonies of those who quarreled and groped for answers in the time of Copernicus.<br /><br />In the meantime, I'm afraid our generation of Christians will be judged as among the lowest and most decadent in the history of the church, on account of our having broken faith with God and our fellow human beings in the intellectual as well as social realms. We have not faced up to the evidence that has been presented us, choosing instead to take refuge in an obstinate intellectual ghetto. How can we prove them wrong if we do not even read? David N. Stamos, in his book Evolution and the Big Questions: Sex, Race, Religion, and Other Matters writes: "Ask [anyone who thinks evolution is just a theory] what books by evolutionary biologists they have read.... Invariably the answers are lame." I think it's way past time that we rise to Stamos's challenge. All the while we have thought people believed evolution because they wanted to escape God's authority, we have just ignored the evidence presented in God's book of nature, showing that we are among the most close-minded and tendentious people currently inhabiting the planet. And we have turned a blind eye to the pressing needs of our fellow human beings in an age of pervasive injustice, economic dislocation, and environmental peril.<br /><br />SteveUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-89866810481797941382008-10-05T16:59:00.000-07:002008-10-21T05:23:11.381-07:00As we approach the Nov 2008 elections...."The Left mocks the Right. The Right knows it's right. Two ugly traits. How far should we go to try to understand each other's point of view? Maybe the distance grace covered on the cross is a clue."<br />—Bono Vox of the band U2<br /><br />Blogs often take on the tone of radio talk shows. It seems their purpose is to showcase how witty one is, and just how awfully good he or she is at <span style="font-style:italic;">being right</span>. If my blog ever takes on that tone, please take a bucket of ice water and pour it over my head, so I'll come back to my senses and remember what it is I'm really after here. The reason I write about the things I do is not because I have all the answers, but because I'm convinced of the importance of the questions, and in expressing views I hope to provoke conversation that might help shed further light. The blog is named "Thinking Aloud" to underscore its provisional, exploratory nature. <br /><br />Perhaps there is no area more provisional in my thinking than politics. But as we prepare for November and I listen to the opinions of friends and loved ones and others, I thought I'd share a few comments of my own that I hope will serve as food for thought. <br /><br />First I will discuss what I feel is a highly distorted and harmful way in which religion and politics are interacting in our society. Then I will propose what I feel is the vital contribution religion can and should make. Then, as a test case to see whether people of widely varying opinions can really listen to one another, I will reveal some of the specific thoughts about presidential candidates that are weighing on my mind as I prepare to go the polls this November, and ask you, the readers of this post, to send me your thoughts. Finally, I'll suggest <span style="font-style:italic;">one thing each of us can do to bring about real positive change in America and in the world. </span><br /><br />Politics is undeniably important, and politics in the U.S. is especially important, because the actions our government takes affect everyone on the planet. <br /><br />That said, I wonder if some of us don't tend to greatly exaggerate that importance…. <br /><br />I have to remind myself not to make an idol of politics perhaps more often than most people, due to the peculiar circumstances in which I was raised. Politics was considered <span style="font-style:italic;">extremely</span> important in the family I grew up in. It was the measure of what you <span style="font-style:italic;">stood for</span> ultimately, of <span style="font-style:italic;">which side you were on</span> in the great cosmic battle of good and evil. <br /><br />At least that is the message that got instilled in me as a child when, six to nine years younger than my older adolescent siblings, I had to take cover night after night amid the heated dinner table crossfire of warring family members of Left and Right. There was my oldest brother, in the thick of the 60s and the new values of a rising generation. And there were my parents who were stalwart Goldwater conservatives. Actually my dad was more moderate than he sometimes sounded. To be sure, in a given moment in the fall of '68 I could hear him making a favorable comment or two about George Wallace, but I'm almost certain he voted for Nixon. There I was, just seven years old, taking all that in. How many other families do you know where the atmosphere would lead a small child to pick up so much on the importance of politics? It seems every family has its share of weirdnesses, and this was one of our many! Forty years later, though we all love each other, whenever the political discussion gets going, to some extent it <span style="font-style:italic;">still</span> seems like our family is a microcosm of the fierce culture wars that are ravaging our land. <br /><br />Religion also got enlisted in this role of determining which side you are on, but, as I recall it, it came second both in time and in importance to politics. To my recollection, religion only came to the fore in my family's culture war after my parents left their mainline church because of its membership in the National Council of Churches which was supporting Marxist UCLA professor Angela Davis, and after my mom found herself at home in a fundamentalist church that also happened to espouse her conservative politics. Now people today sometimes forget such a time existed, but the bulk of fundamentalist Christians in America at this time were remarkably apolitical—Baptists, it was said, were potentially the most powerful political block in our state, but they only actually went to the polls to vote against legalized gambling and liquor by the drink. Some years later the Christian Right would emerge, awakened by the alarm of Roe v. Wade and finding expression in the Reagan Revolution, with my mom in the thick of it all. Much as I loved my late mom, in retrospect I think this kind of tagalong adjunct role of religion in bolstering a set of political convictions is hugely distortive of religion, and makes it hard for people on either side of the ideological wars of our cultural moment to really consider religious matters in their own right. Christians of most times and places would recognize the idiosyncracy of this moment in American Christianity much more readily than either believers or skeptics who are stuck in the middle of it all.<br /><br />But does voting Democratic or Republican in the U.S. really merit being elevated to such a level of ultimate, almost religious importance? It's amazing, as I reflect on it, just how much Democrats and Republicans really agree on fundamental matters. Practically all of us favor, whether we admit it or not, some combination of socialism and free market capitalism. On the one side you have Republicans who emphasize the importance of keeping the engines of wealth creation greased. Raise taxes too much, and you'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, they say. Democrats respond asking who benefits from the golden eggs? Are they getting shared around enough to keep people warm and fed? Few if any Republicans or Democrats take these emphases to the possible extremes, whether libertarian laissez faire on the one hand, or Marxist-Leninist state control of the means of production on the other. I think all but the likes of Ron Paul realize that such positions, though they may seem more airtight philosophically, produce the horrible results of having either a whole lot of golden eggs for too few, or hardly any golden eggs for anybody. Republicans sometimes wax libertarian in their rhetoric, arguing it is morally wrong to rob the industrious haves to help the lazy have nots, but few would argue for abolishing, say, public schools, without which the middle classes would never have emerged from grinding poverty. And even "tax and spend" Democrats are concerned to see industry flourish; they hardly take Cuban socialism as their model.<br /><br />Now religion <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span>, by its very nature, about matters of ultimate good and evil. And that makes it all the more a colossal and dangerous error to elevate political stances, generally speaking, to this kind of plane. Politics too often and easily boils down to advocating whatever policies favor the interest of one's class or interest group, rationalized by highly tendentious appeals to "principle." To elevate such "principles" to a religious level of ultimate good and evil is not only extremely dangerous, it impedes religion from doing the kind of healing work in the heart for which it is most properly intended. <br /><br />It is important to understand that the battle between good and evil takes place primarily in the human heart; religion at its best speaks prophetically to the motivations of our hearts. It challenges, often painfully, the false idols (e.g. money, others' approval, power, and innumerable other addictions) on which we are depending for our sense of wellbeing, and places us on more solid ground. It does not, I believe, speak in any comprehensive way to the content of our policy positions, at least not with respect to the relatively moderate positions that generally prevail in our democratic society. <br /><br />It is interesting to note along these lines that the apostle Paul, faced with the reality of a long-entrenched system of slavery in the Greco-Roman world of his time, did not advocate its violent overthrow. The thought probably never even occurred to his mind, because it would have been obviously foolish and doomed the fledgling Christian movement to extinction. [It perhaps helps to remember that, in spite of occasional brutality, many slaves in the context to which he wrote enjoyed high social prestige, in some cases rivaling that of high level managers today. Today's CEOs have the freedom to retire, but considering the high percentage of them who die shortly after they retire, after losing the thing they lived for, can it really be said that they are less enslaved?] Instead, Paul did something far more powerful and subversive. He told slave-owning Philemon to welcome back the runaway slave Onesimus as "no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother." This is how what Jesus calls the "yeast" of his kingdom works to "leaven the lump of dough." It works on this level of our deepest attitudes, prying our hearts loose from slavish dependence on the things of this world that give us temporal advantage and comforts, and redirecting our deepest trust to God for our well-being, and thereby redefining our relationships. Not violence, but undermining their very basis, is the way God works to overthrow the dark powers of this world. Cf. the unstable "feet of iron mixed with clay" in the statue of the world's kingdoms in the book of Daniel, chapter two.<br /><br />And <span style="font-style:italic;">on this level</span> I think religion can legitimately suggest some worthwhile questions we should ask of ourselves as we go to the polls. To those on the Right it can ask: Are you truly concerned about your poor neighbors in the world, or are you just voting your pocketbook? To those on the Left it can ask: Are you truly concerned about what will keep the system running for everybody in the long run, or just what will benefit your class in the short run? <br /><br />Some of you may think I'm being trite in talking about examining the motives of the heart. You may think you have much more important things to do than engage in this sort of reflection, maybe things like going out and getting more votes for your candidate. But this kind of reflection really <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span> the important matter! This kind of "heart work" really is the hard work, and the work that matters the most. It requires regular investments of time, over a lifetime. Political action is easy by comparison. It is more important than political action because our natural selfishness is the creeping rot that brings <span style="font-style:italic;">any</span> political-economic order to ruin, however socialistic or market-oriented it may be in its approaches. A rich capitalist can be compassionate or brutal in the use of wealth and power, just as a government worker can serve the public or be a lazy and self-serving apparatchik that drains the system of its effectiveness. If more people challenged their own sure sense of rightness long enough to took an honest look inside with the help of God, we might eventually see more balance and harmony in our society that has been ideologically ripped down the middle. I can't speak for other religions, but Christian religion, at its healthiest and truest to itself, has never been so much about doing the right thing as becoming the kind of person who does the right thing. <br /><br />Of course our natural tendency is to say, yeah, those folks on "the other side" really need to look within! Let me just ask you this right now: <span style="font-style:italic;">Are you willing to let God really get to you?</span> No matter how you understand God—whether you believe you have some idea of who and what God is, or whether you're not even sure "he" exists, are you willing to let him ask you questions that could challenge and reorient the deepest assumptions and attachments of your heart? Not to suggest I'm doing any better in this department than you, but Jesus clearly said to worry more about the log in our own eyes than the speck in our neighbor's. How many people, Christians or others, really take that seriously? Too often, I'm afraid, squabbling over things like politics (and religion!) is just one of the many smokescreens we use to convince ourselves we are healthy and better than others, and avoid lying down on God's operating table.<br /><br />Certainly I think there are some issues in politics that cross into a clearly moral realm and invite a direct response from religion. Religion certainly can and must speak to the moral tragedy of the genocide that took place in Rwanda, for example, even if it does not spell out exactly how other nations should go about resolving such problems. Personally I feel that it also speaks to the moral failings of the Republican Party as it was taken over a couple of years or so ago by people with extreme positions on immigration. In my home state ideology and fear trumped human compassion when they passed a law in the fall of 2007 making it a crime to rent housing or otherwise "assist" illegal immigrants. My home city went one up on that, training police officers to do the work of border patrol agents. Literally thousands of families, including many who for years had been stably employed and whose children had graduated from or were close to graduating from public schools, made the decision to leave the state. There are a variety of positions on this issue that I think are morally acceptable, and there are genuinely difficult issues posed by the reality of illegal immigration such as its impact on schools and hospitals. But I believe this wave of furor that has taken ahold of Republicans in my home state and elsewhere imbibes the spirit of ethnic cleansing, and my religion, as I understand it, speaks directly and forcefully to that. <br /><br />If you ask me to "weigh in" on the current candidates on the ballots, I must confess, I don't have the strongest of opinions this time round. But it might be informative for some of you who find yourselves lined up clearly on one side or the other to hear some of the things that trouble one who is less committed—for the sake of understanding one another, at the very least. Maybe you can share some perspectives that will inform my thinking as well.<br /><br />But before I go there, I'd just like to warn that if we venture to share our specific opinions with one another like this, we will be taking an important test, a test which too many in our hotly divided nation are failing. The test is whether we can listen to another's point of view, striving (because it takes concerted effort to do this) to put oneself in the other's shoes, and not fly off the handle or write off the other person everytime something he or she says violates our entrenched opinions. Are you ready to take that test? If so, here are my current opinions, and feel free to email me yours….<br /><br />Honestly, the choices being served up are not making this decision easy for me. Neither an inexperienced yet highly intelligent Barak Obama, nor a highly capable yet aging John McCain, would be my preferred choice for president. Sarah Palin's soccer mom cheer may be winsome to many, and her capabilities may have been underestimated by some in the media, but at the end of the day, I'd rather see a more experienced driver in the driver's seat should McCain die in office. <br /><br />Now here is where the test could get especially difficult for some, because I have to talk about a very controversial issue that impacts how I feel about the candidates. That issue is abortion. Now we know going into this that whether I'm "pro-life" or "pro-choice," I'm going to offend the strong feelings of roughly one half or the other of the population. Those who share my views may tend to accept what I say more or less uncritically, and include me in the category of "correct-thinking" people they like to surround themselves with. Those who take a view contrary to mine will be tempted to write me off and shy away from ever discussing anything with me again. But, you see, this is the very problem we have in America right now. We are divided into two huge camps, each of which only talks with its own members, usually with the purpose of confirming their existing opinions and prejudices and assuring one another that they are wiser and more with it than all those people in the other camp who are crazy or evil or otherwise not worth listening to. Over time, the walls get thicker and thicker, and we do less and less listening, and so we become extremely and bitterly divided without even gaining a true understanding of the other side's point of view. If you agree that we need to get beyond that, and you're willing to try to listen empathetically to views you have strong feelings about, then, congratulations, you are already doing well in this test! Brace yourself, and read on…. <br /><br />No...wait a minute.... What I have just said does not really do justice to the difficult thing I am asking you to do. Because some of you, when you hear my views on this issue that so divides our country, will be greatly pained. You will feel aghast. You will cry. You will feel a disheartened sinking feeling. You will be sincerely troubled as to how anybody could think the way I do and still be human, unless I am just atrociously ignorant of essential facts of the matter or of the incredible hurt or injustice my views, if carried out, would inflict on so many human beings. You will feel that the dearest principles you stand for are being trampled. All this will be the case to one group or another, no matter which position on this issue I take. I want you to know, that in mentioning my views on this issue, I am not asking those of you who disagree with me to weaken your moral will, to give in out of weakness, to care any less than you do. I am asking you to do something far more costly, far more sacrificial. I am asking you to remain strong in your moral resolve, and yet willingly and humbly submit to this painful process of mutual listening that all of us on both sides of the cultural divide of our day will have to go through if there is to be healing in our land. To listen with genuine empathy to views that run counter to core values involves pain. Bono mentioned the cross of Christ, and that is very much to the point. The easy thing would have been for Christ to go to the cross in anger, in bitterness, in violent resistance. Another easy approach would have been to cower in moral weakness, to surrender to the Romans' base values, to accept and tolerate and legitimize the abuse of the oppressor. But such a response to abuse is <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> the costly and sacrificial way of love. What Christ did was infinitely more painful and loving. And what I am asking you to do, simply by listening to views that seem to trample what you hold dear, also requires sacrifice, also requires a willing taking on of pain, out of love. And yet, even knowing the pain this is going to cause one group or the other of you, I still ask you to do it, because it is the very thing we all are going to have to learn to do if we are to break down the walls of division in this country. Of course it is my hope that, as we listen to one another, even on topics on which we are hotly divided, that one or the other or both of us will change our minds in regard to some practical policy issues, not by giving up core values, but by discovering that there is another approach to the matter that upholds all the essential values that all sides are seeking to uphold. But even if that does not happen, and we fail to find common ground on a given issue--like the issue of abortion I am about to discuss--the pain of mutual listening is still the way to mutual love and respect. There is no real love if we do not go to the cross for one another. And without that there will be no resurrection, no healing and new life in our land. Are you convinced that is so? If so, and if you are willing and ready, let us proceed.... <br /><br />I believe unborn babies have a greater claim to legal protection than the pro-choice view of the Democratic Party recognizes. Just to say this is to offend many people's strong feelings. Yet, again, if I expressed any other opinion on this, it would offend others' strong feelings, and the honest truth is, I respect and love you all! Just for the record, my position would call for legal sanctions far, far short of what we apply to those who kill adults, because I don't think abortion is premeditated intentional murder, and I don't think the rights and nature of the fetus at a given stage can be established one way or another beyond all reasonable doubt, though the case for their rights is plenty strong enough at the point of conception, and harder to deny with every passing day of development. Precisely due to this uncertainty, I think abortion constitutes a reckless endangerment of human life, so that abortionists should be sanctioned sufficiently to move them to seek alternatives means of making a living. I also think legalized abortion, far from elevating the rights of women, ultimately sends a cheapening and dehumanizing message to the distressed women who are often pressured by boyfriends and parents and oppressive social and family systems into seeking this desperate "solution." There are many women who have had or contemplated abortions in the past who agree with me, even as there are many others who do not. By the way, literally millions of Catholics and others of otherwise Democratic leanings would agree with my policy position, even if they are more dogmatic than I am about the status of the fetus, but these people are given no real voice on the matter in the Democratic Party. There is much more to be said than I can say in this article in defending my position, in exploring how appropriate or effective legal sanctions may be, in exploring what other actions on the part of government and civil society are necessary to really tackle the problem effectively, etc. But in regard to the current candidates, suffice it to say that I found Obama's comments that the Supreme Court's upholding of a law banning "partial birth" abortion was a setback to women's rights to be no less than chilling. What other voiceless constituencies will have their rights trampled on by an Obama administration? Newborn infants? To be sure, cultural circumstances won't let that happen anytime in the foreseeable future, but I'm left wondering what there is in Obama's philosophy that would otherwise prevent it. By being more extreme and intolerant of diversity on the abortion issue than Republicans ever have been, Democrats make it very hard for millions of people to vote for them with a clear conscience. They have that in very large part to thank for their not being in the White House for the last 8 years.<br /><br />Though abortion is one important issue bearing on my thinking about the current candidates, there are many other important matters weighing on my mind, most of which will occasion less heated controversy. Most readers, I think, will be able to breathe at least a little bit easier in what follows....<br /><br />Earlier I referred to "voiceless constituencies." But I have to wonder, for all the Republicans' talk about the rights of the unborn, if they really are paying attention to millions of other human beings on the planet whose voices are not being heard. Which Republicans, for example, are lobbying hard to permanently remove all punitive trade barriers against Central American exports, and to pressure the E.U. to lift similar barriers against manufactured goods in Africa, so as to enable producing economies in those countries to get off the ground? Never mind that such policies that stifle development in those countries could lead to future terrorist threats closer to home (and in fact already are fueling illegal immigration and the spread of violent criminal gangs all over the continent)—keeping domestic producers sufficiently appeased is what wins elections now. And who is pushing a concept of "free trade" that recognizes that it can only work for the benefit of all concerned if there is relatively free (albeit screened and regulated) movement of labor as well as goods? <br /><br />Add to all this the sheer complexity of the issue of the war in Iraq and the world situation, and the difficulty I have personally in keeping up with enough information to be able to form solid opinions of which candidate's proposed policies make the most sense. I know all this may be crystal clear in the minds of some of you, great military and geopolitical strategists that you may be. I see enormous downsides to every conceivable possible option. Push come to shove, though I'm not the least bit competent to make this kind of decision myself, I'd place my bets on doing whatever can be safely done to free up military resources for areas other than where they are currently deployed. Sadly, it's not really a question of avoiding all disasters, it's a matter of deciding which disasters are most important and possible to prevent or contain. For all the rhetoric of the candidates concerning the war, I'm not even entirely sure either of them would really act that much differently in office, once the votes are cast and they are free to adjust their positions to changing circumstances. The question then becomes who has the most sober head. Again, I might have preferred a younger John McCain or an older Barak Obama at the helm….<br /><br />In sum, there is much I admire, and much I am concerned about, in both major candidates. For the moment, count me undecided…. I could go on, but I think I will stop there in regard to my views of the candidates.<br /><br />The more I ponder these candidates, the more I'm drawn back to the observation that candidates are only as good as the state of awareness and discussion in the general public concerning policy issues. As we engage in the work of thinking and talking important issues through, we will have even better McCains and Obamas to choose among. And listening empathetically to one another, keeping dialog open, are the habits a society needs to make democracy work. <br /><br />I would urge that <span style="font-style:italic;">learning to listen empathetically to others, especially those with whom we disagree, is the singlemost important thing we can do to bring about positive change in our country and world. And it all starts with you and me, one interaction at a time…. </span><br /><br />There are three specific challenges I think we need to overcome if we are to improve our listening skills and raise political dialog in our country to a more civil and productive plane. First, we need to work hard at truly listening even when it offends our strong feelings, without instinctively dismissing the other person as stupid or ignorant or evil. Abortion is a case in point, and if people of pro-choice conviction email me their views, I will face the same challenge of truly listening that I gave them in the discussion above. <br /><br />Second, I think we need to develop a stomach for greater complexity and nuance in discussions, in what we're willing to read, in the kinds of conversations we're willing to have. Are you frustrated that the media only give us sound bites without substance? Why complain? All they are doing is giving people what they want. Simplistic thinking is really what works best if the goal is to massage one another's prejudices in our own group while putting down and deriding all the "wrong-thinking" people in the other group. Meanwhile, certain media pundits see their ratings and personal incomes soar by catering to the prejudices of one group or the other, being sure to keep things as simplistic and heated as possible. But reaching across the divide with meaningful discussion will require contemplating more complex models of reality. Embracing greater complexity will also reduce the power of special interests, by making it more difficult to manipulate the public with slogans and rallying cries. <br /><br />To give an example of this need to embrace greater complexity, often the disagreements I have with people on the "Left" boil down to differences in our understandings of how the economy works. The frustrating thing is that most such people I talk to don't have any interest in contemplating policy outcomes in the light of economic theories. The truth is, my understanding of economics may be way off base, but policies will obviously fail to achieve their intended outcomes if they run afoul of economic reality, and the only way anybody is going to be able to lead me to a more realistic understanding of economics is if they are willing to enter the discussion at some level of complexity and show how their understanding better accounts for things. As another example, often the disagreements I have with people on the "Right" concern the environment. And the frustrating thing is that most such people I talk to do not seem to have any interest in really engaging with what people in the mainstream scientific community are saying. They arrive at their foregone conclusions, bolstered by secondhand accounts of minority view scientific studies funded by organizations with a vested interest. <br /><br />It may be objected that it is impossible for everybody to gain an understanding of such complex matters. But this brings us to the crucial dilemma of democracy, does it not? There is no denying that the amount and kinds of knowledge required by voters to make intelligent decisions is formidable. Yet the alternative of ceding all power to an elite intelligentsia is not an acceptable one. Though their decisions may be better informed, they will not serve the interests of the society at large, they will serve the interests of their own elite! There is no perfect solution to this, only a relative one—the better informed the public is, the better government we will get, and the more power the people truly will have. <br /><br />We all see through a glass darkly, and can only do the best we can in this regard. We all have limited time and mental space for pursuing the knowledge we need for our careers, for our relationships, for our roles as citizens in a democracy. But if we at least <span style="font-style:italic;">remain open</span> to having our current thinking challenged by the insights and perspectives of others, we can at least grow and arrive at much more balanced approaches than if we remain locked inside entrenched opposing camps that do not even seek to understand one another. And we may then become more willing to engage with <span style="font-style:italic;">others'</span> concerns at the same level of complexity with which we routinely tackle the concerns that are closest to our hearts (e.g. re our careers, or the particular angles of policy issues we're naturally most prone to dwell on). <br /><br />Third, if we find that the only voices we routinely hear are those within "our camp" which merely confirm our current thinking, we need to proactively seek opportunities to listen to people whose thinking is different from ours. Five steps: 1. Let's each have a conversation with ourself and challenge our own tendency to be "wise in our own eyes" (Proverbs 26:12). What factors may be contributing to my own biases, such as socioeconomic status, personal history, my self-centered focus, etc.? In what ways have my life circumstances and prejudices narrowed the field of voices that can speak meaningfully to me? 2. Let's read some articles from a point of view very different from ours, and ask ourselves, What are the valid driving concerns that are important to the author and others who share his or her views? Why have those concerns never been as important to me as they are to them? Is there any good reason I should not consider those concerns important? Third, find one or two people who typically hold a different viewpoint to have a conversation with, and resolve to do nothing more than listen. At some point be sure to ask the person, "You know, in the past I have not thought the way you do on these matters, and I'm just wondering if there are some blind spots, some things about my circumstances or background that I'm not consciously aware of, that have been influencing me and causing me to be biased. What do you think some of those things might be?" 5. If and only if the other person asks to hear your opinions, schedule a time to meet again. But tell the person, "I would really like at least a day or two to process what you have just told me before I share my views. Thanks for helping me think things through from angles I had not considered." If you can, do this before November 4, 2008. More importantly, <span style="font-style:italic;">keep</span> doing it, as a regular habit, over the next four years! Can you think of anything more <span style="font-style:italic;">powerful</span> that we can do to make our society healthier and happier?<br /><br />Back to the role of religion, I can't help but wonder.... Might our ability to humbly listen to others be an "acid test" of how well religion is functioning in our lives? On the other hand, if our religion makes us proud and arrogant and stuck in our prejudices, might we be missing the whole point? God help us!<br /><br />As we prepare to go to the polls, I'd just like to leave all my loved ones and fellow citizens on each side of the great divide with one final thought: If you vote differently than I do, you will still have my respect. I will not conclude that you are ignorant or an idiot, just because you think differently from me. You are <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> in "my group." Nor will I suspect you of being in league with the dark forces of the universe. I hope you will treat me the same way. In the end I hope we can all try to better understand and extend a bit of charity to one another. <br /><br />When the elections are over, we should all give each other a tearful hug and spend some time on the lighter side of life. Rumor has it that George W. Bush has taken up dancing. (See <a href="http://www.miniclip.com/games/dancing-bush/en" target="new">http://www.miniclip.com/games/dancing-bush/en</a>.) Maybe we should do the same.<br /><br />[Now listening to: "Hands," by Jewel.]Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-760761221006029412008-08-30T16:34:00.000-07:002008-08-30T16:51:18.303-07:00Sound science and sound biblical interpretation are the means and the endI am refreshed, as I reflect on these matters, by a growing sense that answers to these questions of biological origins in relation to understanding the Bible and its teachings concerning moral culpability and redemption are not only solvable, the solutions are likely right under our nose, even if we have not consciously clarified them in our own minds or agreed upon them! Of course I can't prove this to the satisfaction of skeptics, short of actually arriving at solutions and clearly articulating them. But my intuition that solutions will be found is nevertheless compelling to me personally in the light of historical precedent and the pattern of my experience with God. I suspect a later generation of Christians will see the solutions with such greater clarity that they will have to struggle to put themselves in our shoes in our moment of history to even understand what the fuss was all about, just as we puzzle over the difficulties Christians had in an earlier era in seeing that the Bible is completely compatible with a Copernican understanding of the universe. No doubt the role of extra-biblical assumptions, smuggled in from a relatively recent intellectual milieu that is very foreign to that of the biblical writers, will be identified as the culprit, just as we see very clearly today how the entrenched dominance of Ptolemaic astronomy clouded people's understanding of biblical texts that we see today as obviously poetic.<br /><br />But even if I have high hopes that a day of greater clarity will surely come, this does not mean there is no reason to strive to hasten that day by means of serious inquiry and reflection. What drives me in this regard is my growing awareness that the Bible has something rich and essential to say to people right now, and this perceived disconnect between the Bible and science, based largely on misconceptions that Christains themselves have been perpetuating, is preventing many people from exploring that. <br /><br />Genuine clarity will only come as a result of greater sensitivity to the biblical text; genuine solutions must help us read the Bible more on its own terms. And skeptics and Christians alike would do well to note that this is exactly what happened in the case of the Copernican controversy. At that time some people were hung up on Psalm 93:1b ("The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved"), a verse that people today understand as poetic imagery that cannot reasonably be pressed into the service of defending a geocentric universe. But the metaphorical interpretation is not accepted today merely because it is more compatible with science; it is accepted in the light of the nature of the text itself. The whole psalm is saturated with metaphor, as is obvious from phrases before and after such as "the LORD is robed in majesty" and "holiness adorns yours house...." "The world...cannot be moved" is no more to be taken literally than we are to understand the LORD as wearing literal clothes or living in a literal house. Employing such a text to support a particular view of astronomy actually detracts from the intended force of the text in inspiring a sense of awe and wonder concerning the God of the universe! If we had grown up hearing constant appeals to this verse to support Ptolemaic astronomy, we might have more difficulty seeing this. But once the metaphorical reading has had a chance to grip us, there's no turning back, it speaks more authentically and with greater power, and it becomes easy for us to see how the concerns to defend a geocentric universe were imposed agenda alien to the concerns of the biblical writer. <br /><br />Skeptics should note that the Bible was exonerated in that case. Certain interpretations of the Bible were laid aside, but the Bible itself came through unscathed. Science prompted a revisiting of the biblical text, and that reflection led to a more natural and sensitive reading of the biblical text. There may be much about commmunities of biblical faith that turn skeptics off; but does not the Copernican episode at least raise the possibility that the real problem is not the Bible itself? And if the problem is not the Bible itself, might a more sensitive reading of it tell us something very much worth hearing today?<br /><br />Christians should note the rabbit trails that Christians of an earlier era spent enormous energy in pursuing. The more invested they were in defending long-reigning Ptolemaic astronomy against Copernicus, the longer their misreading of the holy text was allowed to persist. But lest we proudly upbraid them for not seeing the obvious, might not a future generation reprove us for extrabiblical assumptions and agenda that have muddled our own reading of other biblical texts? And might there be people--whom we deem the "enemy," from whom we are mutually alienated on account of the battle over Darwinism and other issues in our current cultural divide-- who we really NEED to interact with in order to arrive at sounder understandings of the Bible?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-23745211098201650482008-08-30T15:21:00.000-07:002008-08-30T16:34:15.168-07:00What about a "retroactive fall"?I can bask in vain self-congratulation now that one as noteworthy (or notorious, depending on your point of view) as William Dembski has articulated the same understanding of humanity's fall into sin as I once conceived and tentatively put forth in a short paper some years ago, to wit, the idea of a first sin that had retroactive consequences on the creation. See http://www.designinference.com/documents/2006.05.christian_theodicy.pdf. (An Orthodox priest advocates essentially the same view, if I understand him correctly, at http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/kalormiros-on-the-6-days-of-creation-part-1-and-part-2.) Thanks go to Kirk Jordan and his web page http://startledbyexistence.squarespace.com/beyond-nature for the trail of links that led me to Dembski's article. <br /><br />Dembski's paper and mine both posited a special environment in which no temptation could be felt, thus allowing a free decision of the first humans to sin or not sin. Since God is beyond time and knows the future, it is possible that the world of death and cruelty that we live in could have flowed causally from the first humans' sin, even though its emergence preceded that event in time. Dembski argues that such a preemptive action of God is an appropriate response to human sin, in order to demonstrate sin's gravity so that we might come to our senses and seek salvation from it.<br /><br />But is the idea of a retroactive fall really satisfying? To my limited mind, I find it plausible, and see no insuperable difficulties in establishing its consonance with biblical exegesis and science. (And it does NOT require acceptance of other ideas that Demski has advanced elsewhere concerning design and irreducible complexity; the solution works with theistic evolutionary understandings that do not require special interventions of divine creative energy other than that which underlies and sustains the entire process.) And, even though it's just one possible solution, the very existence of "one possible solution" has enormous implications. By disarming the common casual assumption that science has "ruled out" the Bible and its ability to speak healing truth into our modern context, people may perhaps consider the Bible and its claims with less negative bias. Still, I can't help but wonder if there may be simpler and more compelling solutions than this one that Dembski and others and I have proposed, and that is something I hope to explore in future posts, if God lets me live long enough and grants me sufficient clarity to articulate them. <br /><br />Dembski's article is in any case well worth reading, because in surveying options he considers inadequate and in articulating his own views, he puts the reader in touch with what the important questions really are concerning science and the Bible, whether or not one is happy with his answer. The real issue that needs attention is not the question of the "days" of the creation narrative in Genesis, which no more require a literal interpretation than the "throne" on which God "sits" in similar passages portraying the declaration and execution of the divine will upon the earth. A matter that needs more attention, and that not only has bearing on the Bible's reception in the world today, but also has sweeping watershed implications for the future of ethics and law and self-understanding and culture in the decades to come, is the question of accounting for moral culpability, and the need to be delivered from it, given an evolutionary understanding of our biological history.<br /><br />One very wonderful thing that I take away from reading Dembski's article is the sweet REALIZATION that life in this world of sin and death and disease as we now experience it is not our ultimate destiny or purpose. I experience this realization as a wave of divine refreshment sweeping over me, as the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead works through even Scriptures that we do not fully understand.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-80062135309060943262008-07-15T11:10:00.000-07:002008-07-22T07:36:29.348-07:00Who is the "fool"?Following up on the last post, this statement in the Psalms comes to mind:<br /><br />"The fool says in his heart,'There is no God.' "<br />(Psalm 14 and 53)<br /><br />People today might tend to read this as saying that atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew (before he became a deist), etc. believe what they believe because they're stupid or morally deficient. Many a preacher will quote this verse to that effect, but no biblical scholar I know of would see that as the intent of the verse. <br /><br />Psalm 53 goes on to say: "Will the evildoers never learn—those who devour my people as men eat bread and who do not call on God?" Psalm 14, another version of the same psalm, adds: "You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor, but the LORD is their refuge." <br /><br />The psalm, then, is not a word to philosophical atheists, per se. It is a word to people who DEVOUR others. At issue in this psalm is the relationship between what we put our ultimate hope in and how we treat other people. What does the rich oppressor take refuge in? In his agenda, in his clever schemes of oppression, in his retinue of advisers and co-conspirators, not in God. The poor have nothing to depend on but God, thanks to the injustice inflicted on them by the powerful. But because the one on whom they depend is in fact the God of the universe, these psalms are saying, the poor really have the better end of the stick in the end. Jesus, with this pervasive Old Testament theme in mind, makes this same point about misplaced confidence in the temporal advantages we can procure for ourselves through cunning scheming in this life: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep." (Luke 6:24-25) <br /><br />What's being said, I think, is that all of us really know deep down that we live our lives before a divine audience, as it were. We all know there are consequences to our actions. To repress this knowledge with our self-talk, to throw ethical caution to the wind, thinking it doesn't really matter if we expropriate some poor bloke's land, is the height of folly.<br /><br />Now I think it's very ironic that power mongers who exploit religious sentiment to their ends, the very people that modern philosophical atheists like Dawkins and Harris decry, are really saying the same thing as the "fool" in this psalm. They're saying to themselves and everybody else, "There's a God all right, but surely he backs my agenda. There is no God who is really beyond me, who is truly outside of me, who is capable of weighing my thoughts and actions in the balance and finding them wanting." How is that any different from saying, "There is no God to whom I'm accountable"? <br /><br />And I would submit that it is just this sort of formally religious but practically atheistic leader that the psalmist has in mind. Don't think for a minute that evil, oppressive kings in the psalmist's day did not make a show of religious adherence. Bob Dylan's song "With God on our Side" is not about some new phenomenon. The oppressors didn't go around preaching philosophical atheism to people as a justification for their actions. No, they formally adhered to the conglomeration of the worship of Baal and Yahweh that was popular in their time, just as Hitler's PR machine tried to make him out as a religious man but launched a campaign of stealth to subvert the churches' doctrines and imprisoned those who resolutely opposed him. The oppressor's atheism is not public, philosophical talk, it's practical self-talk. He says it "in his heart." So the psalmist is really talking about the same sort of people Richard Dawkins and others are talking about: People who claim to believe in God and do horrible things.<br /><br />But the psalmist and today's atheist writers take quite a different approach in dealing with this phenomenon. The atheist writers are essentially saying, "These people say they believe in God, and they enlist masses of followers who believe in God to support them. Therefore, belief in God is the problem. Let's get rid of that."<br /><br />The psalmist, and all the biblical prophets, and Jesus himself, tell the oppressor, "Actually, there really IS a God, and he's a whole lot bigger, he is far more beyond you, than you ever thought. He is not blinded by your self-serving interests, and he is scrutinizing your actions. Maybe you should do the same." <br /><br />I think the latter approach is more reasonable and certainly more effective for combating evil. For all the times power mongers have misappropriated religious sentiment to serve their interests, I have to wonder how many times people in power have at least been given momentary pause by the thought that there might really be a God, a God who really acts like God and not like some politician's servile publicist speaking from the clouds. And how many times has conviction of the reality of God in the public led to pressure being brought to bear in the halls of power? It seems exactly that is what led the British Parliament to finally abolish the slave trade, after years of William Wilberforce being a voice in the wilderness, even though abolition had significant economic ramifications that every citizen felt the brunt of for a time. It's not often that good triumphs that clearly. But I wonder how much more bad might have triumphed throughout history if atheism had prevailed. I can't help but wonder, if Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins succeed in convincing everybody that God does not exist, if they might get more than they bargained for, by reducing that residual level of restraint in society that we take for granted and that comes from belief in the One Who Weighs our Actions who, on some level, I think we all really know is there.<br /><br />So who is the fool the Psalms are talking about? I think he's all of us, whenever and to whatever extent we put ourselves, our ideologies, our interests, rather than God, at the center of the universe, and so fail to love our neighbor.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-61375920066208956272008-07-15T10:21:00.000-07:002008-07-15T10:22:54.090-07:00Hi e. peevie,<br /><br /> Great to hear from you!<br /><br /> If I may chime in with what you wrote, it seems to me that atheists like Josef Stalin have done their share of terrible things too! Not to suggest that atheism MAKES people into Stalins. Rather, I think the darkness in the heart of a Stalin is left quite unrestrained by a belief that no one is watching who will call to account.<br /><br /> Yet, there's no escaping it, religious beliefs can easily become a tool of POWER of some people over others. "You're going to hell, unless you tap into God, by means of the way that my fellow priests and I have been exclusively entrusted by God to show you."<br /><br /> But if there really is a God, do you think he would author a religion that would put that kind of power in the hands of people?<br /><br /> The biblical approach, I think, is to relativize the human role by exalting the ultimate power and importance of God. The Bible says, yes, Israel is God's chosen people, for the purpose of blessing the world (Genesis 12, 17; cf. Romans 11), but, look what a bunch of schmucks they are, their status surely isn't due to their own merits, and this promised blessing is only going to work if God himself brings it about through and in spite of them. Likewise, Peter and the apostles hold, in some sense, the keys to the kingdom, and yet Peter is portrayed in the New Testament as having said all sorts of stupid things and denied his master three times, so this role that God is assigning him can only work in spite of the man himself as God works through him.<br /><br /> The potential for religious leaders to abuse the power of religious beliefs is certainly there. And yet, if God is also really there, is it not those religious leaders themselves who ought to fear the most (yet really believe the least), because they will have to answer to God for their abuse?<br /><br /> Much depends, I think, on what kind of God you believe in, and on what level you really believe. I think the worst kind of God you can possibly believe in is one that you think you can control or make subservient to your earthly interests. That is indeed the God of much of what passes for Christianity and many other religions, and I think it is our natural tendency to convert biblical religion into this by means of a highly selective reading of the Bible. Such a person thinks of himself as pretty OK, and certainly not in need of being delivered from any dire predicament like "sin," even if he holds himself out to be a necessary instrument of deliverance to all the poor blokes around him who hang on his every word. Such people have indeed committed every kind of atrocity.<br /><br /> But how about belief in a God who is the high and majestic King, and yet humbled himself to serve his unworthy subjects, and paid an incomprehensible price to deliver them from their sins? What kind of behavior does that belief engender? Can anyone who deep down really believes in that kind of God maintain pride and arrogance and act mercilessly to fellow human creatures? When I say "believe" I don't mean the beliefs you formally profess, but the ones that really drive your actions. What this means is that, whenever we fail to "act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8), it is evidence that, at that moment and to that degree, our professed belief in the biblical God is not really driving us.<br /><br /> Does Dawkins explore the distinctions between varieties of God concepts, and the kinds of behavior they motivate? For example, one of the most moving examples of Christian compassion I have ever read about was that of Charles Wesley, who visited condemned criminals on death row. In his day it was a popular pastime to gather around and jeer at prisoners as they were being led in procession to the gallows. Charles ran up behind a cart that was carrying a condemned African slave whom he had visited in the prison, and hopped on the cart to comfort this new believer as he was led to his death. What I would want to ask Richard Dawkins is what kind of belief in what kind of God motivated that behavior? Is it the same idea of God that lay behind the actions of religious people that he decries? And would an atheist be likely to do what Charles Wesley did? In actual fact, skepticism and ridicule of religious "enthusiasts" was very much in vogue among the aristocratic classes of the 18th and 19th Centuries, who opposed the efforts of Evangelicals like William Wilberforce and Hannah Moore to abolish the slave trade, educate the poor, etc. Wilberforce et al did what they did because they really believed that all people were "created in God's image" and that all people would in the end have to give an account of their actions before a just and holy God. The rich fashionable atheists who routinely oppressed others had no such belief in their hearts.<br /><br /> Both atheists and believers in controllable gods have left tremendous misery and oppression in their wakes. But I would invite people like Richard Dawkins to open their minds just a crack and take a careful look at Jesus as he is presented in the New Testament, and ask what kinds of behavior does a deep and genuine belief in him really lead to.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4459988184425389411.post-61073481323986756282008-07-15T10:11:00.000-07:002008-07-15T10:20:18.178-07:00Response from e. peevieThought I'd move this exchange from the comments section to the main blog page....SJ<br /><br /> E. Peevie said...<br /><br /> Interesting post. I'm slowly making my way through The God Delusion by Richard Dawson. In the first few chapters, I agreed with almost everything he said, but as I kept reading, what was most striking to me was his his hostility toward belief in God.<br /><br /> It seems to me that a scientist making a case for or against something should make a solid effort to put his emotions out of the picture.<br /><br /> Obviously, bad things are done in the name of religion, and it's right to be angry about those things, and at those people. But it's a little telling, don't you think, that he lumps all people of faith together in one ignorant, hateful lump.<br /><br /> I haven't finished the book, so I don't know if he has anything to say about people motivated by faith to do great works of compassion, not to mention art.<br /><br /> June 29, 2008 8:06 PMUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0