Category Archives: God

#74 After the “Death of God,” new gods?

24 Wednesday May 2017

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Image Credit: AllOfUsAreLost / flickr creative commons.

Many in the West associate the “Death of God” with the 19th Century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Some are also aware of the 1960s death-of-God movement (more accurately called the wish-God-was-dead movement?) led by theologians like Thomas J. J. Altizer. The death of God, though it may seem recent, is an ancient phenomenon. Humankind has, in fact, killed God many times.

The 20th Century historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, describes the age of Nietzsche as a time when Western scholars were obsessed with the “origin and development” of almost everything. Biologists dreamt of finding the origin of life, geologists wanted to find the beginning of the earth; astronomers looked for the starting-point of the universe, etc.

In line with this search, author Andrew Lang wrote The Making of Religion in 1898. In his monograph, Lang debunked the view of his contemporary, the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, that animism was the first stage of religion.

Lang based on his conclusion on the religions of ancient, indigenous peoples living in Australia and in the Andaman Islands. Among them, Lang found neither ancestor-worship nor nature cults as Tylor would have expected. Instead, those peoples worshipped a single, powerful and creative High God leading Lang to postulate that a belief in a High God pre-dated animism.

Lang also discovered that belief in high Gods is rare among indigenous people and that the religious practices that develop around those Gods are “rather poor.” Indeed, he wrote, the role of the High Gods in the religious lives of their followers is “very modest.”

In addition, Lang noticed that, among some peoples, the High God became, in Eliade’s words, deus otiosus, or “Unemployed.” Because God seemed indifferent to human affairs, his followers decided that God had left for the highest heaven.

Cut off from daily life and thus, for all practical purposes, irrelevant, the High God was eventually forgotten. In other words, God died. God faded away, and Lang found, disappeared from religious practice, and eventually from myths.

When Nietzsche announced the end of religion, he prophesied that Westerners, having killed God through disinterest and neglect would, henceforth, live in an immanent, godless world. Had Lang read Nietzsche who, twenty years earlier, had proclaimed, through his mouthpiece of Zarathustra, the death of God? Eliade did not think so. Though Lang did not understand the significance of his discovery, according to Eliade, he detected the deaths of High Gods.

Today’s liberal religionists are often half-hearted believers. Their High Gods play a “very modest” role in their lives; they are mostly relegated to a heaven far far away. Worship around those Gods is “rather poor;” sometimes limited to Thoreau-like nature-walks, sometimes nonexistent.

There is tension in such worship.

On the one hand, lightly-held High Gods ought to be applauded if not embraced; those who believe in them never kill or wound or maim or willfully cause suffering in their name. They are often people who lead good, humane lives.

On the other hand, lightly-held high Gods, according to Lang, are ever on the cusp of slipping into oblivion, pushed into realms so distant from the concerns of peoples and people that they disappear from human memory forever.

In other words, these High Gods sit on the razor’s edge of existence. Their precarious nature may explain a puzzling reaction by those with High Gods who play stronger roles in the lives of their worshippers.

Many liberal religionists with nearly-unemployed high Gods are the targets of derision and mockery—for example, Lutheran Garrison Keillor’s frequent jokes on “Prairie Home Companion” about Unitarian Universalists known for welcoming agnostics, atheists, non-theists, and religious skeptics into their congregations.

Why should atheists or agnostics—still relatively rare—turn thin-skinned Theists like Keillor into head-shakers and finger-waggers? More problematic, of course—in some countries atheists and agnostics, though generally harmless and of reasonable moral caliber, are singled out for special punishment or execution. Perhaps because the logical step after agnosticism and skepticism is deus otiosus. Behind the jokes and killing lies fear of the death of God.

This fear is quite understandable. Because, it’s true, agnostics and skeptics sometimes have little comfort to offer to victims of tragedy and suffering. They may advance this bit of advice: your “community” will stand with you. Hmm. Really?

Will “community” be there after the death of your beloved child? “Community” is made up of people with problems and demands and children of their own. The High God, even if nearly unemployed, has no distractions and may walk with you through the months and years of weeping and sorrow. Will “community” be there in the wee hours of the night when cancer is chewing on your bones? The High God, unlike “community,” may be available any time, anywhere.

Among non-Western peoples, the retirement of the High God to the highest heaven, ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt noted, usually gives rise to a more vivid, more dramatic pantheon of what Eliade called “inferior gods.” According to Schmidt, when human beings forgot their High God, they became involved, on Eliade’s retelling, “in more and more complicated beliefs in a multitude of gods and goddesses, ghosts, mystical ancestors, and so on.” [3]

In the post-God world imagined by Nietzsche, individuals are left alone to fend for themselves as they shoulder life’s soul-breaking tragedies and unavoidable suffering. No wonder most people seek replacement objects of devotion after their High God fades into oblivion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th Century Unitarian whose writings were greatly loved by Nietzsche [4], issued this warning: “A person will worship something—have no doubt that that.” Emerson also wrote, “We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts—but it will out.”

Still, fear of believers in “very modest” high Gods does not justify cynicism, shunning, oppression, or murder. Even when agnostics and skeptics justify this fear by breaking the pattern described by Schmitt and Emerson and, resisting the urge to find new gods to worship, they simply let God die.

 

#68 Suffering on Trial

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by in God, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

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Image Credit: Neil Moralee / flickr creative commons

Image: Neil Moralee / flickr creative commons

In my latest article for the UU World magazine, “Suffering on Trial,” I explore how suffering plays a key role in the thought of three theologians—Rebecca Parker (sexual abuse as a child), Theodore Parker (the deaths of most of his loved ones), and Anthony Pinn (African-American slavery). Though each is influenced by suffering, each develops a distinct theology.

Click here to read the article. And let me know what you think!

#67 Which family comes first?

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religions, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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Credit : Marilyn Barbone / Dreamstine Stock Photos

Credit : Marilyn Barbone / Dreamstime Stock Photos

Theistic religions ask us to put God’s law—a higher, universal law that applies to the human family—above the needs of our immediate family. We feel the tug to care for our families more piquantly than we do the tug to care for strangers. Religions ask us to give the same or higher priority to non-family members or to some abstract “humanity.”

This non-natural demand calls on us to take into account the happiness and well-being of people we don’t personally know. We may be called upon to make sacrifices for the sake of these strangers. Many of us resist giving up something we cherish for the sake of some “Other,” even when we understand the logic of doing so. Truth be told, we are much more likely to comply if such a demand is bound up with the power and authority of religion.

Take, for example, Christianity. In the book of Matthew (10:34), Jesus tells his followers: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”

The author of the book of Luke (14:26) echoes the passage above. (This is not surprising since Matthew is a source for Luke, along with the book of Mark.) In Luke, Jesus says: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus tells those who wish to follow him that they must leave their families and make him (God) more important than parents and siblings. Disciples must be ready to take the Cross—meaning that they must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice to do his will. Doing God’s good work, and heeding God’s moral demands must be given highest priority at all times.

Islam also requires attention to the stranger. According to scholar Reza Aslan, author of No god but God, a focus on higher laws was true of Islam from its earliest beginnings. Muhammad, the messenger of God, was a member of the leading tribes of Mecca called the Quraysh. Breaking custom, he rebuked his tribe (his family) because of its unethical practices.

What were these practices? During Muhammad’s childhood, the Ka’ba housed the many gods of Mecca and the many gods of surrounding areas. Members of the Quraysh family controlled access to this site of pilgrimage. During the pilgrimage cycle, people came from near and far to pay homage to their gods. Vendors from the region capitalized on the influx of visitors by bringing merchandise to commercial fairs. A “modest but lucrative trade zone” formed around Mecca. Eventually, the Quraysh realized that they could charge a tax on all goods brought into Mecca. As a result of this tax, they became yet more prosperous and powerful.

The problem, which Muhammad saw clearly, was that this extreme concentration of wealth altered the social and economic balance of the city and destroyed the tribal ethic regulating the interactions between tribes. The rapid rise in revenues collected by a few Meccan families led to rigid social stratification and “swept away [the] tribal ideas” of egalitarianism that previously existed: “No longer was there any concern for the poor and marginalized… The Shayks of Quraysh had become far more interested in maintaining the apparatus of trade than in caring for the dispossessed.”

More interested in wealth and in the affairs of trade than in the lives of their kinsmen, the Quraysh offered no formal protection to the masses. Since neither orphans or widows had “access to any kind of inheritance,” their only means of survival was to “borrow money from the rich at exorbitant interest rates.” This usually led to enormous debt, which “in turn led to crushing poverty, and ultimately, to slavery.” Muhammad, himself an orphan, was all too aware of this possibility. He was spared this fate solely because an uncle, a member of a clan within the tribe of Quraysh, became his guardian.

When Muhammad revealed God’s messages to the Meccans, he “decried the mistreatment and exploitation of the weak and unprotected.” He also demanded help for the underprivileged and the oppressed and argued that “it was the duty of the rich and powerful to take care of them.” God, he said, “had seen the greed and wickedness of the Quraysh, and would tolerate it no longer.”

As Muhammad’s message spread, those who joined his movement not only changed their religious faith to the worship of Allah, they also cut themselves off from their families and their tribes. In essence, they left their homes, the people they loved, the tribe that gave them protection and identity, in order to join a self-created community without standing—Muhammad’s growing group of Companions.

Like Jesus’ followers, the Meccans who adopted Muhammad’s ideas had to choose: remain with their families even though they could no longer abide their loved ones’ religious or moral tenets, or leave their families of origin and give priority to their adopted family and to Allah’s moral demands.

The costs of leaving one’s tribe to adopt Allah’s laws were exceedingly high because the tribe was the basic, and only community unit. Each tribe had a Hakam, a trusted, neutral party who acted as arbiter during disputes. His rulings set precedent and, collected together, became the “foundation of a normative legal tradition, or Sunna, that served as the tribe’s legal code.” Each tribe had its own Sunna. Indeed, one tribe’s Sunna did not necessarily match another tribe’s. Because each tribe operated as something of a stand-alone community, outside of his or her own tribe, an individual had “no legal protection, no rights, and no social identity.”

Today, the standard objection against higher moral laws is that such laws fail to account for the special bonds we have with loved ones. But, in the story of Muhammad, we see the impact of focusing uniquely on one’s family members and considering “non-family” members as existing outside of the circle of care.

Muhammad demanded that his followers loosen, if not abandon, their special bonds to loved ones if these loved ones hampered them from attending to individuals with “no legal protection, no rights, and no social identity.” Jesus underscored that becoming his disciple required putting service to God ahead of family ties and required sacrifice—taking up the Cross.

Who constitutes the “neighbor” is contested, both in Christianity and in Islam, though it is easier for Christianity to make a case for a universal notion of neighbor than it is for Islam, which includes only fellow Muslims under the rubric of neighbor.

Stories tied to Jesus and Muhammad highlight the tension between doing what is right and good for those we know and love, and doing what is right and good for those we don’t know or don’t love. These religions call into question our “natural” drive to care for our simple family-unit and demand that we broaden our perspective to include care for those who are not like ourselves.

Because balancing the two sorts of moral demands that make claims on us can be confusing under the best of circumstances, religions like Christianity and Islam (as well as other religions) remind us of the importance of remaining—in spite of obstacles—attentive to our “neighbors.” They also offer, as a result of centuries of reflection, argumentation, and refinement, guidance for how best to navigate unclear situations and negotiate complex and intertwined dilemmas.

Most of the religions (in their best instantiations) remind us unequivocally of the rights that others have on our time, finances, and skills even although we will never meet them and never know their names. The religions remind us that first priority is to be given to the support and care of the poor and oppressed even if this means we must shirk the needs of close family members. Yes, guilt and disappointment and frustration will surely follow such decisions, but this is the kind of sacrifice Jesus and Muhammad asked of their disciples.

Whether we are disciples or Jesus or Muhammad or not, do our world views ask as much from us? If not, they warrant a second look.

Resource: Reza Aslan. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. Updated edition. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011.

#65 “Duck Dynasty” Phil Robertson’s Theology: Dead or Alive?

03 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality, Theological Ethics, Theology

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Originally posted January 2, 2014, in Sightings, a publication of the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion.

Phil Robertson, patriarch of A&E's "Duck Dynasty" Image: screen shot

Phil Robertson, patriarch of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” (Image credit: screen shot)

Since a recent GQ Magazine article outed his homophobic and pro-Jim-crow views, left-wing commentators have declared open season on Phil Robertson, the patriarch of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty.” Robertson, based on his reading of Christian scriptures, considers homosexuality a sin and predicts that homosexuals will be excluded from the Kingdom of God.

In Salon, Joan Walsh pronounced Robertson a “bigoted pseudo-Christian.” Another Salon author, Brittney Cooper, a self-professed “reluctant Evangelical,” took aim at Robertson’s “conservative theology,” denouncing the “violence” that it “does to gay people in the name of God.”

Cooper’s Bible and Robertson’s Bible are the same. However, Cooper’s practice of “hermeneutic [interpretive] consistency” differentiates her from Robertson who likely reads scripture literally (as if a literal reading were possible). Those of us who treasure scripture would do well to emulate a thoughtful and compelling approach like Cooper’s. Hers is a living theology.

For Cooper, the “first and foremost” truth disclosed by the Bible is that “God is love.” Intent on making scripture consistent with this fundamental truth, she rejects passages that contradict it. Cooper acknowledges that the Bible sanctions slavery. But since she is certain that a loving “God is not a racist,” she rejects racist scriptural passages. She agrees with Robertson that the Bible “declares sex between men to be an abomination.” But since she is certain that a loving “God is not a homophobe,” she rejects homophobic scriptural passages.

Robertson would find Cooper’s approach anathema. Literalist Christians consider scripture to be the verbatim transcript of God’s revealed laws, beliefs, and commandments.

Contra Robertson, a living theology, according to Jewish theologian, Michael Fishbane, treats ancient, sacred writings as more than simple and fixed storehouses of information. A living theology, Fishbane writes in Sacred Attunement, includes an intentional, ongoing effort of “adaptation and clarification” of religious texts. This effort helps us remain alert to the traces of transcendence that break through our everyday consciousness and to “sustain (and even revive)” them “in the normal course of life.”

Readers of the Bible who eschew the effort of adapting and clarifying scripture cut themselves off from traces of transcendence. Their theologies are dead.

Also, the unquestioning acceptance touted by such as Robertson is neither coherent nor honest. Though literalist Christians believe that they take scripture at face value, they necessarily, at some level, interpret it.

On some issues the Bible is inconsistent or opaque. Martin Luther, who advocated relying on scripture to decide all issues, discovered that, at times, it is silent on important questions—for example, child baptism. As a result, each of us, whether we are aware of it or not, constructs meta-Bibles out of passages we select from the actual Bible. We assemble proof-texts that make sense to us or align with our commitments and values. We downplay Biblical proscriptions that inconveniently conflict with our favored mores—for example, the indifference of many contemporary Protestants to Jesus’ prohibition on divorce. Contradictory passages are set aside (Cooper does this with admirable transparency and clarity of purpose) or hyper-interpreted until they harmonize.

Consider in this regard, Robertson’s likely view that God so loved us that he sent his only Son to die for us on the cross. This is an interpretation of the crucifixion to which St. Paul hints in the New Testament but which did not enter the arc of Christian thought as a fully rendered doctrine until Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) developed the satisfaction theory of Christ’s atonement.

Proof-texting and interpreting the Bible is unavoidable.

In addition, as Fishbane notes, the books of the Bible were spliced together. Varying worldviews and theological commitments are interwoven, sometimes within a single passage. Thus, scripture itself is an example of the work of interpretation and revision; its internal disagreements invite us—nay, prod us—to follow its lead and adapt and clarify. By doing so, we keep scripture and our theology alive.

Fishbane helpfully recommends reading events in the Bible as “theological expressions of primordial truth. The narratives of scripture thus become paradigms of perennial matters bearing on divine presence (both transcendence and immanence), as well as the human response to them.” More generally, “the old words of scripture are spaces for ever-new moments of spiritual consciousness and self-transformation.”

Christians like Robertson resist looking for such spaces and maintain their (imagined) literal grip on scripture. Joan Walsh calls Robertson a “bigoted pseudo-Christian” but she’s wrong about the “pseudo-Christian” part. Robertson is a Christian; his beliefs rest on interpretations at odds with those she prefers. There’s no doubt, though, Walsh is right about the “bigoted” part. Let’s be clear: Robertson’s dead theology is downright ugly.

References and Further Reading:

Magary, Drew. “What the Duck?” GQ, January 2014.

Cooper, Brittney. “Evangelical church’s ugly truth: ‘Duck Dynasty’ and Christian racists.” Salon, December 24, 2013.

Walsh, Joan. “2013: The year in whiteness. From Phil Robertson to Megyn Kelly, peddling white grievance became a bigger, crazier, more lucrative racket.” Salon, December 30, 2013.

Fishbane, Michael. Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008.

Axelrod, Jim. “A&E can’t win on ‘Duck Dynasty’ flap.” CBS News, December 28, 2013.

Fixmer, Andy. “A&E Ends ‘Duck Dynasty’ Patriarch Suspension.” Bloomberg, December 28, 2013.

Photo Credit: Screenshot of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty”

#64 Season of In-breaking Light and Love

19 Thursday Dec 2013

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Heading toward the final days of the year, the weather turning resolutely nasty, temperatures dipping into the single digits, snow threatening to clog side streets and motorways, ice making commuting a dangerous sport, the sun setting earlier every afternoon, adding the burden of ever shorter and drearier days—Christmas lights suddenly pop up everywhere.

The long autumn darkness that weighed on our spirits becomes the backdrop for bright lights in every shade on the color wheel.

In December, lights blink and twinkle and shimmer, bringing us cheer when the work day ends and we are released into the night. No more mood-dampening darkness; we are bedazzled by trees and bushes festooned with tiny electric stars, street poles decorated with shiny rows of candy-cane red and white, edges of balconies and eaves of houses dripping with brilliant icicles.

When these Christmas lights are taken down in January and placed in storage for another year, the solstice will have passed. The worst will be over and the loveliness of spring will feel within reach. The sky will be lighter when we leave work, and though the winter-weather will worsen, snow will fall more often, temperatures will stay in single digits, the early months of the year, with their gradually lengthening days, will be bearable.

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Credit: Martin Beek / CreativeCommons.org

For Christians, the birth of Jesus symbolizes the in-breaking of God’s love, just as it did among an ancient people who, too long trapped in the harshness of Roman domination and the nightmare of the tyrant Herod’s oppression, despaired of goodness and hope.

Many of the Israelites, when love broke into their midst, knew only the life of the subjugated, under the battering ram of a colonial power determined to control them physically and to mould their thoughts, their beliefs, and their ideals. Spirit-crushing poverty was the order of the day, unrelenting misery that we, Westerners, can try to imagine today but which we must fail to understand.

An ethos of meaningless brutality ruled from birth to death. And yet love could not be stopped.

Love that, in the narrative of Jesus’ birth, came in the form of a child, a child who appeared, not at an expected or convenient time, not to a middle-class or settled family.

Love broke through the sordid and violent times of domination in the form of a mother’s love for her child—a love beyond the reach of the most powerful empire the world had yet known.

Love, this story reminds us, can come any time, unbidden, unexpected, and without regard for whether we are ready.

Love this pure, this selfless, this strong, is rare. It is surely the most prized gift in anyone’s life.

Love, in this story, also appears in the more-complex love of a stepfather for his child. Because Joseph’s eyes, like Mary’s, shine with love as he gazes at the newborn Jesus.

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Credit: laszlo-photo / CreativeCommons.org

Just as light breaks into and brightens the ever-earlier nights of December, love breaks into and makes bearable the most desperate and dismal of circumstances.

Whether we are Christians or not, blessed light buoys us during these days of dreariness. And blessed love cradles us during days of trial (whether we are the bearer of love or its object).

During this season of light and love, or during any season, may love break into your life like the lights of Christmas. And may you, like the light, be an in-breaking source of love to others.

#62 Compassion: what is heck is it?

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

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Jon Barstad/Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway)

Jon Barstad/Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway)

Compassion? Do you know exactly what you mean when you use the word “compassion”? Do you mean “compassion” as in Karen Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion, or as in Arthur Schopenhauer’s “compassion is the basis of morality,” or as in the Bible’s “Good Samaritan who had compassion for the wounded traveler?”

“Compassion,” after all, is used in different sorts of conversations and in different contexts. It has a wide range of meanings. It could mean a feeling akin to empathy. Or it could mean an act of kindness. Is Christian compassion equivalent to Buddhist compassion? Or is compassion trans-religious, or philosophical, or not religious at all? And what is the relationship between compassion and ethics?

The 19th Century Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, took up the question of compassion decades ago but his answers remain helpful even today.

Compassion, for Cohen, turns our entire orientation in the world towards one, unavoidable question: “How can suffering be overcome?” Compassion, he said, pulls us up to a summit of sorts; from there, new vistas open up, along with new insights on how to overcome suffering.

Like any good philosopher, Cohen studied the history of the meaning of compassion. In his masterpiece, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, he offers a brief retelling of this history. Two factors emerge. First, “compassion” is a term long embedded in European thought—Cohen describes what compassion meant to the Ancient Greek Stoics. Second, it is clear that the meaning of “compassion” has shifted over time—in a hundred years, it might well be understood differently than it is today.

Just as we do, the Stoics, Cohen explains, knew that people suffered. They, too, were interested in answering the question: “How can suffering be overcome.” Their answer? They believed that decisions about how best to alleviate suffering should be made on the basis of reason alone because, in their view, reason is the human faculty best suited to making right and good choices. The problem with compassion? Reason may tell us to do one thing while emotions like compassion may tell us to do something else. For the Stoics, when we evaluate our options with respect to suffering, options prompted by compassion must be set aside when they conflict with options offered by reason.

Cohen also discusses the unusual, but internally consistent, view of Baruch (the Latinate version of “Barack”) Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. Spinoza rejects compassion which he understood as feeling or “affect.” He is pantheist and thus God is everything that is. Human beings are “only modes” or expressions of God, the one substance. As “modes” or expressions of God, each of us is just like every Other. No single person has individual worth. What we have, as individuals, is differing knowledge of God, the One. Good knowledge is knowledge that we are all expressions of the One. Evil knowledge denies this. Spinoza holds that “compassion is of the same breed as envy”—a surprising equivalence but one that is fully aligned with his pantheistic worldview because, according to him, compassion and envy either lead us to focus on the Other, or they lead us from the Other back to the Self. Either way, we have abandoned the “good” knowledge that we are all expressions of the One for an “evil,” differentiating knowledge of the Other or of the Self. (If you, too, are a pantheist, how do you get around Spinoza’s unsatisfying view on suffering?)

Cohen disagrees with the Stoics and with Spinoza.

In his opinion, most human beings are incapable of succeeding at a Stoic-like approach. We are, quite simply, constitutionally unable to be indifferent to our own suffering. We find it impossible to set aside pain—whether emotional or physical—and pay attention only to reason.

Cohen also argues against allowing, or training ourselves to be indifferent to other people’s suffering. For him, this is a moral issue and a religious one. Compassion must be more than an “inert” response like that of the Stoics. It is not enough simply to note that others suffer or that we suffer. An “inert” reaction is tantamount to laissez-faire ethics because, most likely, it will fail to motivate us to make efforts (and sometimes sacrifice) to alleviate or end suffering. Compassion, on Cohen’s telling, is no “fruitless sentimentality”—it is a fruitful reaction if it drives us to act.

As for Spinoza’s approach to compassion, Cohen worries that the indifference to the unique worth of each human that this pantheist recommended will result in narrow-mindedness. Such indifference, Cohen believes, makes us passive with respect to suffering and reduces compassion to a “reflex action”—we act, yes, but our actions are informed by habit or by our community’s customs, not by our appreciation of the individual before us.

Suffering is pain, Cohen writes. Who wouldn’t agree? But he gets more interesting. When we attempt to be indifferent to other people’s suffering as the Stoics and Spinoza suggest (on Cohen’s reading), we rob ourselves of the possibility that the Other before us might change from a mere “S/he” (“a representative carrier of humanity,” a human like other humans in the world falling under the purview of ethics and of laws of the state) to a “Thou” (“a classification within the notion of humanity,” an individual person distinct from all other persons). The moment we shift, for Cohen, from encountering the Other as a “S/he,” to encountering them as a “Thou,” is the moment when the suffering of the Other pulls us out of the generalized “He/She” realm of concepts and ethics into the particular “Thou” realm of compassion and religion.

Important to Cohen as well: through the compassion to which suffering gives rise, we discover the Thou in the Other, and when we do so, we wonder whether “S/he” is like me, whether S/he” can suffer like me. The discovery of the Thou thus leads to an ethical realization. We hope that when the “I” reappears (after the moment of discovery passes) it will reappear “liberated from the shadow of selfishness.”

Can compassion, Cohen asks, illuminate ethics and help it answer its own questions about how suffering is to be overcome?

Ethics, according to Cohen, relies on concepts like “the good” and “the right” and “duties.” To this conceptual work, compassion has nothing to offer except when ethics takes a pragmatic tack. In this case, compassion becomes “a useful illusion,” because it serves as a lens through which we can try to understand the suffering of others. Compassion, as “a useful illusion,” helps us share the suffering of others. By virtue of this sharing, we may help ethics find answers to the question of how suffering can be overcome.

To return to this post’s initial question: does the oft-used word, compassion, signify more than a feeling-ful or action-ful response to suffering? Cohen offers an insightful and nuanced understanding. Using the language of poets rather than philosophers, he writes that compassion knows suffering as a dazzling light that “suddenly makes [you] see the dark spots in the sun of life.”

When struggling to define compassion, remember Cohen’s lovely riff on this word. Suffering brings you to the limit of the ordinary realm of “S/he.” It is at this borderline that compassion and religion arises. Compassion for suffering may then propel you into the “higher pinnacle” of “Thou.” From this place, this summit, you can see more clearly what actions on your part and your community’s could ease the pain. And, upon returning this place, you are spurred to make it so.

Reference: Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1995), 11-19.

#61 A humanizing and humane God

08 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

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© Dreamstime Agency | Dreamstime Stock Photos

© Dreamstime Agency | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Ever wonder what an academic paper on theology looks like?  Or wonder what this Naked Theologian does with her “spare” time when she’s not writing blog posts?  Here’s a short paper that I presented in November 2012 to the Liberal Theologies Group of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), a yearly conference hosting more than 10,000 religion scholars.  Should you choose to accept the mission of reading my paper, don’t worry about arcane technical language; there’s almost none (in order to be accessible to an AAR audience of specialists from a variety of disciplines).  Also, the paper was intended for oral delivery and so avoids possible tongue-twisters.  Enjoy!

Lived Religion and the ‘Agent-God’: Making a Case for the Personalist Theological Method of Gordon Kaufman

Gordon Kaufman’s constructive theology evolved significantly over the course of his decades-long career.  However, since 1993, the year that he published In Face of Mystery, much of the scholarly engagement with his work has focused on this text and those that followed.  This last phase of Kaufman’s theology with its impersonal concept of God as serendipitous-creativity has much to recommend it.  However, I want to argue for renewed attention to the second, or personalist, phase of his theology.

In my view, there are three phases to Kaufman’s theology:  first, Kaufman’s historicist phase; next, his personalist phase—so-called because he assumes that God-concepts will have person-like characteristics, and finally, his naturalist phase.

My case for taking a new look at the personalist phase of Kaufman’s theology and its associated theological method is based on a two-pronged argument:

First, during his personalist phase, Kaufman designed his theological method to facilitate the construction of God-concepts ranging from a sparse God to an Agent-God.  This method is of special interest to theists who seek to construct, or more likely re-construct, a concept of God which is existentially meaningful, comforting in times of suffering, and which serves as an ultimate reference point.  For the theists he has in mind, Kaufman writes, the word “God” “stands for” or “names” the “ultimate point of reference or orientation for all life, action, devotion, and reflection” (ETM, 17).

Second, the personalist phase of Kaufman’s theological method is well suited to the hybrid theologies that have become a fixture of the American religious landscape.  His method, during this phase, is open to diverse religious and theological perspectives and to perspectives from science and secular humanism.  But, for theists who incorporate a variety of religious symbols, rituals and texts from multiple traditions or from non-traditional sources to create individualistic theologies, Kaufman’s personalist phase provides checks to reduce the risk of producing Feuerbachian—or human-writ-large—God-constructs.  And his method includes criteria to help theists identify the most humanizing symbols, rituals, and texts from among the plethora of possible options.

I now want to elaborate my first point—namely, that the personalist phase of Kaufman’s method, by offering a procedure for constructing an Agent-God, is helpful to theists who seek to construct, or more likely re-construct, a concept of God which is existentially meaningful, comforting in times of suffering, and an ultimate reference point, moral and otherwise.

In this phase of his work, Kaufman holds that the only God available to human beings is the concept of God that we imaginatively construct.  He accepts Kant’s claim that it is impossible to have knowledge of God since God is not a “thing” like other “things.”  Though God may exist, knowledge of God is beyond the capacity of our limited intellects.  For this reason, Kaufman writes, “theology is (and always has been) essentially an activity of imaginative construction.”[1]  Though imaginatively constructed, our concepts of God can play a central role in our lives.  “Believing in God,” Kaufman argues, ”means practically to order all of life and experience in personalistic, purposive, moral terms, and to construe the world and man accordingly” (GP, 107, italics mine).  For Kaufman, as for Kant, theology is above all a practical discipline (GP, 101).

During the personalist phase of his theology, Kaufman anticipates that individuals constructing a concept of “God” are likely to incorporate terms, concepts, and metaphors drawn from their relationships, every day experiences, and familiar images (TI, 155).  Indeed Kaufman recommends that “God” include anthropomorphic characteristics though he does not require them.  However, Kaufman argues, unless we conceive of God as person-like, God can’t be existentially meaningful to us since “the human person is the only reality we know” for which our “concerns are of significance” (ETM, 65).  Thus, Kaufman writes, “it is not surprising that metaphors such as ‘merciful father’ or ‘powerful savior’ were from very early on prominent in talk about God and that they remain among those which are more existentially meaningful to many” (ETM, 65).  Indeed, these metaphors are also comforting to many in times of suffering.  God as “merciful father” or “powerful savior” is, of course, an Agent-God.

The personalist phase of Kaufman’s method includes three mutually adjusting steps or moments as he calls them to signal that he does not intend them to be undertaken in any particular order and that they can be used recursively.

In broad strokes, Kaufman’s three moments for “methodologically sound theological work” are as follows (1995):

1.            Construction of the concept, “world”

This moment entails a description of “reality” (for example, a phenomenological or scientific description).

2.            Construction of the concept, “God”

The God-concept is required to include a “humanizing motif” for devotion, work, and practical orientation, as well as a relativizing motif to call into question our values, norms, and goals.  I will have more to say about the humanizing and relativizing motifs when I discuss the second prong of my paper’s argument.

3.            Adjustment of the concept, “world,” based on the relativizing and humanizing components of the concept, “God”

The concept of “world” is now to be understood as being “under God.”  As a result, “world” may need to be adjusted to reflect the relativizing and humanizing components of the concept, “God.”

To recap the first prong of my argument, the personalist phase of Kaufman’s method is well suited to help theists who want to construct a person-like God who is existentially meaningful, comforting in times of suffering, and an ultimate point of orientation for their day-to-day decision-making.

Now, for my second reason for recommending renewed engagement with Kaufman’s middle, personalist phase—namely, that this phase of his method is well-suited to the hybrid, “lived” theological approach that has become a central feature of the American religious landscape.

Charles Taylor, in his 2002 Varieties of Religion Today, describes what he considers a new, contemporary age of “widespread ‘expressive’ individualism” (80).  In the religious sphere, according to Taylor, expressive individualism means that (and these are Taylor’s words) “More and more people [are adopting] what would earlier have been seen as untenable positions, for example, they consider themselves Catholic while not accepting many crucial dogmas, or they combine Christianity with Buddhism, or they pray while not being certain they believe” (107).  Though he traces this kind of expressiveness back to Europe’s Romantic period, what is new, he argues, is how it “seems to have become a mass phenomenon” (80).

More recently, Heidi Campbell, in her March 2012 Journal of the American Academy of Religion article, confirms Taylor’s assessment. Campbell reports that, in their autonomy, theists practice what she calls “lived religion.”  By this, she means that theists pick a variety of religious symbols and narratives out of traditional structures and dogmas and then recombine them into new theologies.  This mix of symbols and narratives often originate from multiple traditions including traditions previously considered non-religious.  Like Taylor, Campbell finds that “pic-n-mix” (her expression) religiosity has become mainstream.  She writes:  “The process of mixing multiple sources of forms of spiritual self-expression…once done by individuals in private or on the fringes [is growing] more accessible and visible to the wider culture” (Campbell, 79).

Why is Kaufman’s personalist-phase method especially helpful for those who practice “pic-n-mix,” lived religion?  Because, during this phase, his method is intentionally open to diverse religious and theological perspectives as well as to perspectives from science and secular humanism.  Indeed, Kaufman assumes that encounters with other worldviews are important.  These encounters, he believes, are bound to lead to discriminating and informed judgments about what is humanly significant.  In his words:

The coming new age of a thoroughly interconnected and interdependent worldwide humanity must build upon the best insights and disciplines of all our long and varied human experience, as conserved for us in the many religious and cultural traditions alive and meaningful today.  We must be open to all, in conversation with all (GMD, 40).

No doubt, picking and choosing from various models and images can lead to God-constructs that are formulated in terms of human needs and desires.  As I mentioned earlier, Kaufman finds nothing strange about this.  For God to be “God to us” and orient our lives, then our concept of God must share at least some of our human attributes and be capable of understanding our concerns in a significant way whether these are physical, moral, social, or cultural (ETM, 64).

While Kaufman’s personalist phase is open to anthropomorphic concepts of God, it is designed to combat anthropocentrism in two significant ways.  Kaufman insists that any concept/image of God include what he calls 1) a humanizing motif and 2) a relativizing motif.

The humanizing motif of the God-construct helps transform us into” genuinely humane beings” and enables us to fulfill “our human potential” (TI, 32, 41).  It is the humanizing motif that tends to introduce anthropomorphism into a concept of God.  Powerful anthropomorphic images enable the God-construct to personify our highest and most important “ideals and values” (TI, 32, 41).  Indeed, these images, Kaufman writes, can emphasize “the goodness of creation as a whole and specifically of human existence,…the importance of human communal existence and [of] just social institutions, a high valuation of morally responsible selfhood and such virtues as mercy, forgiveness, love, faithfulness, and the like…” (GDM, 94).  In addition, the humanizing motif enables theists with a pic-n-mix religiosity to adjudicate between symbols, ideals, and artifacts and decide which to incorporate (or remove) from their hybrid God-constructs.

In contrast, the relativizing motif of the God-construct judges all of our achievements, according to “a very demanding norm,” to reign in our “tendencies toward anthropocentrism, hubris, and self-aggrandizement, our tendencies to make ourselves into gods instead of accepting our proper place within the creaturely order” (TI, 154-156).  The relativizing motif “emphasizes God’s radical otherness, God’s mystery, God’s utter inaccessibility” (TI, 41).  By virtue of its radical otherness, the God-construct provides us with “a center of orientation” outside of ourselves.  As an ultimate reference point, the concept of God calls into question all of our projects, values, and goals.  And because it calls into question everything finite, the relativizing motif of the God-construct even calls into question “every formulation or expression” of the concept of God itself (TI, 35, 87).

The humanizing and relativizing motifs are connected.  If a God-concept is properly constructed, the two motifs operate as a powerful dialectic internal to its structure.  The tension between them, Kaufman asserts, gives “the symbol much of its power and effectiveness as a focus for devotion and orientation in human life” (TI, 41).  As long as “its highly dialectical character” is maintained and “its demand for continuous self-criticism” is honored, the God-construct cannot be “converted into an idol sustaining and supporting our own projects, but is apprehended as truly God,” forcing the self “into a posture of humbleness in its claims” (TI, 87).

I want to underscore the point that, during his personalist phase, Kaufman held that an anthropomorphic concept of God is not necessarily anthropo-centric.  In fact, it is designed to fight against anthropocentrism.

It is true that he eventually decided that human beings are unable to resist 1) giving God-constructs ontological status and 2) reifying the anthropomorphic attributes of God-constructs.  The only reliable way to deflate these impulses, he decided, was to make an impersonal God the proper object of devotion.  Thus did Kaufman abandon his personalist phase.  These considerations led him to the naturalist phase of his theology. 

Yet, even in his naturalist phase, Kaufman recognized what I have argued in this paper—namely, that many theists continue to “opt for the more traditional agent-God” (IFM, 273).  Despite the shortcomings that he came to associate with the Agent-God, Kaufman granted that this concept, “based on the model of the self-conscious and dynamic human agent, has been (and still is in many quarters) of great effectiveness in the ordering and orienting of human life” (IFM, 272).  A world picture with an Agent-God at its core, he wrote in In Face of Mystery, continues “to function in important ways, not only among the traditionally pious but also in shaping ideals and goals in society at large” (IFM, 273).

Kaufman may not have fully anticipated contemporary “lived” religion or the degree to which theists today practice pic-n-mix religiosity, but the personalist phase of his theological method supports and even encourages exchanges between different religious, theological, and secular worldviews.  This phase offers the possibility of constructing a wide range of God-concepts while also designed to defeat Feuerbachian God-concepts.  The humanizing motif inspires theists to become more humane and to fulfill their highest potential; the relativizing motif calls the God-concept into question as well all of our projects, values, and norms.

Given these strengths, the personalist phase of Kaufman’s theological method deserves another look.

Endnote:

[1] Kaufman, “Theology as Imaginative Construction,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. I., No. 1, March 1982, p. 73.

References:

Campbell, Heidi.  “Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80:1 (2012): 84-93.

Choi, Yang Sun.  “A Critical Study of Gordon D. Kaufman’s Theological Method.”  Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1995.

James, Thomas.  In Face of Reality:  The Constructive Theology of Gordon D. Kaufman.  Eugene, OR:  Pickwick, 2011.

Kaufman, Gordon.  “Theology as Imaginative Construction.” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, I:1 (1982).   Also GP, ETM, TI, IFM.

Nordgren, Kenneth.  God as Problem and Possibility:  A Critical Study of Gordon Kaufman’s Thought Toward a Spacious Theology.  Uppsula, Sweden:  Uppsula Universitet, 2003.

Taylor, Charles.  Varieties of Religion Today:  William James Revisited.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2002.

Gordon KAUFMAN’s book-length works organized by phase:

Phase I    Historicist Phase  (God-known-through-Christ-event)

RKF    Relativism, Knowledge, and Faith (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1960)

CD     Context of Decision (1961)

ST     Systematic Theology:  A Historicist Perspective (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968)

Phase II   Personalist Phase  (Imaginatively-constructed-agent-God)

GP     God the Problem (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1972).

ETM   An Essay on Theological Method (Atlanta:  Scholars Press, 1975, 3rd ed, 1995)

NR     Nonresistance and Responsibility and Other Mennonite Essays (Newton, KS:  Faith and Life Press, 1979)

TI      Theological Imagination:  Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia:  The Westminster Press, 1981)

TNA  Theology for a Nuclear Age (Philadelphia:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1985)

Phase III  Naturalist Phase  (Steps-of-faith-process-God)

IFM    In Face of Mystery:  A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993)

GMD   God—Mystery—Diversity:  Christian Theology in a Pluralistic World (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 1996)

IBC     In the beginning…Creativity (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2004)

JC       Jesus and Creativity (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2004)

#57 Did Jesus have to die?

05 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

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Participant in the Senakulo in Cutud, San Fernando, Pampanga in the Philippines where they dramatize the Passion of Jesus Christ during Holy Week. The event is highlighted by live crucifixions. Photo credit: Tony Oquias Photography

During this, the 40-day Lenten period leading up to Easter, the inevitable question comes to mind:  why did Jesus—said to be the Son of God—suffer and die on a cross?

Rebecca Ann Parker

As.a child, theologian and Methodist minister Rebecca Ann Parker learned that God sacrificed his beloved child for the sake of humanity.  Influenced by this teaching, Parker grew up believing that Jesus’ suffering on the cross was “virtuous and redemptive.”  So completely did she integrate the message of willing self-sacrifice that she forgot she’d been raped by her neighbor.  When she was five.

Most Christians still subscribe to the idea that Jesus died “for the sake of the world.”

Those of you who are not friendly to religion in general or to Christianity in particular may wave away the question of why Jesus had to die.  You think it’s silly (“Jesus was not God, so who cares”) or irrelevant (“who cares”).  But since harmful and life-constricting answers remain popular, why not lend a hand and help formulate a life-enhancing response instead?

Not possible, you say, to find a life-enhacing answer for why the man Jesus had to suffer and die?

Truly, we don’t have the option of giving up on finding such an answer.  There are too many Christian lives on the line to throw in the proverbial towel.  Three in four Americans are Christian.  One in three human beings are Christian.  Which means that millions of today’s kids are, like Rebecca Ann Parker, integrating Christianity’s message that suffering is “virtuous and redemptive.”

While the idea that “Jesus died for my sins” may have become the most commonly accepted explanation, it has never been the only alternative.  Impassioned conversations about Jesus’ suffering and death began almost as soon as his maimed body was lowered from the cross.  In other words, for two thousand years, this question has preoccupied Christians who could not or would not leave it at that.  Internal to the tradition itself, theories and counter-theories have been put forward.

Rebecca Ann Parker explored several alternatives championed by Christian thinkers in Lenten sermons that she preached to the Methodist congregation she served early in her career.  She republished these sermons in her book (co-written with Rita Nakashima Brock), Proverbs of Ashes:  Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us.

What follows are six of the answers that Parker mentioned in her book.  Direct quotes from Proverbs of Ashes appear in Lenten purple.

Anselm of Canterbury

1.            Anselm of Canterbury (Italian, c. 1033 – 1109, Roman Catholic) is the thinker responsible for the Jesus-died-for-your-sins theory of the crucifixion (called “substitutionary atonement theology” by theologians).  Yes, it is the theology that has become, for many Christians, the standard explanation for why Jesus had to die. But a full millenium passed after Jesus’ death before Anselm gave this theory a systematic formulation.

In the beginning, human beings lived in the Garden of Eden, in perfect harmony with God.  But Adam and Eve disobeyed the commandment of God. Because of their sinfulness, God had no recourse but to demand repayment for the harm they caused.  We inherit their sin.  The penalty for sin is death.  God loves us and doesn’t want to punish us.  But his honor has been shamed.  God is torn between love for us and the requirements of justice.  To resolve this problem, he sends his only son Jesus into the world to pay the price we owe, to bear the punishment that all of humanity deserves… In Why did God Become Human? Anselm said, “No one can give himself more fully to God than when there is self-surrender to death for God’s honor.”

Pierre Abelard

2.            Only a generation later, theologian Pierre Abelard (French, 1079-1142, Roman Catholic) challenged Anselm’s view.  Resistance—nay, revulsion—over the substitutionary atonement theory is almost as old as the theory itself!

In his Exposition on the Epistle to the Romans, [Abelard] questioned [the substitutionary atonement theology of Anselm of Canterbury].  “Who will forgive God for the sin of killing his own child?” he asked.  “How cruel and wicked it seems that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything, or that it should in any way please him that an innocent man should be slain—still less that God should consider the death of his son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world!”

John Calvin

3.            Abelard’s outrage had no impact on the theologian, John Calvin (French, 1509-1564, founder of Protestant Calvinism).  Calvin not only adopted Anselm’s substitutionary atonement theology but he pushed it further.

In his Institutes [of the Christian Religion], [Calvin] said:  “Not only was Christ’s body given as the price of our redemption, but he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in spirit the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man…  He bore the weight of divine severity, since he was “stricken and afflicted” by God’s hand and experienced all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God…  Jesus struggled with the assignment to be our substitute.  He prays, “Father, let this cup pass from me.”  But Jesus loves his father and honors the request even though it means a terrible death.  Adam and Eve were disobedient, but Jesus obeys.  “Let thy will, not mine, be done.”  On the cross, Jesus bears the punishment we deserve [for our sins] and we are set free.

Hosea Ballou

4.            The theologian Hosea Ballou (American, 1771-1852, Protestant-Universalist) offered a no-holds-barred critique of Anselm and Calvin’s explanations for Jesus’ death.  Ballou was certain that these explanations were wrong.  He was also certain that they had harmed the life and spirit of the Christian religion.

In his Treatise on the Atonement, Ballou said, “The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries.  The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those principles which are to be dreaded by men have been believed to exist in God; and professors have been moulded [sic] into the image of their Deity, and become more cruel…”

Walter Rauschenbusch

5.            Walter Rauschenbush (American, 1861-1918, Protestant-American Baptist), like many liberal theologians of his time, rejected Anselm and Calvin’s ideas of a wrathful, punishing God.  God, for Rauschenbush, was not a cruel deity who rules us from afar. No. God is among us.

In A Theology for the Social Gospel, Rauschenbush argued against concepts of sin and salvation that “have too much the flavor of the monarchical institutions under the spiritual influence of which they were first formed…  Our universe is not a despotic monarchy with God above the starry canopy and ourselves down here; it is a spiritual commonwealth with God in the midst of us.”  Rauschenbush defined sin as betrayal of the bonds of care among human beings.  The root of sin is not rebellious refusal to obey God, but a deep-seated selfishness…  Selfishness is more than a personal failing.  It is a transpersonal evil, institutionalized in social systems that benefit some individuals while exploiting and oppressing many others.

6.            Twentieth century theologies such as liberation theology drew inspiration from Medieval Christian thinkers—in this case, from Abelard’s moral influence theory.  While this theory’s intentions are well-placed, its results are awful.  Parker rebels against liberation theology’s use of Abelard’s strategy because it makes “acceptance of violence” a way to move perpetrators to repentance.  It assumes that perpetrators have “the empathy and moral conscience necessary to be moved by the suffering of others.”  This assumption doesn’t square with Parker’s experience of being raped as a child.  Plus, Abelard’s strategy “makes every victim an agent of God’s call to repent and accept mercy.  The repentance of the perpetrator becomes “more important than the suffering of the victim.”

Abelard argued against the idea that God was a dishonored lord whose honor was restored by the murder of his own son.  Instead, he said the problem is that human beings see neither their sin nor the mercy of God.  The death of the Son of God brings human beings face to face with cruelty.  Contemplating the suffering of Christ, people will feel remorse and repentance—especially seeing that Christ submitted to violence rather than turning it back on his enemies.  A love so great that it withholds evil for evil reveals the mercy and kindness of God.  Seeing this, Abelard said, human beings would be moved to stop rejecting God and would open their hearts to receive God’s mercy.

Parker’s brief analysis of Christian thought over the past thousand years demonstrates that while the Jesus-died-for-our-sins explanation may have become the dominant explanation, it is not the only explanation.  Not by a long shot.

Parker herself rejects all of the options discussed above.  But where does that leave our effort to find a life-affirming way to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross?

Gordon Kaufman. Photo credit: Harvard Div School

Here’s another approach–one that’s not included in Parker’s book (though it bears some resemblance to the at-one-ment theory she discusses).

The theologian, Gordon Kaufman (American, 1925 – 2011, Protestant-Mennonite), wrote, in his Systematic Theology:  A Historicist Perspective, that, for many believers, there are times when the transcendent God appears distant and uncaring—silent when his help is sought in prayer, absent during periods of suffering.

Taking human form, Jesus, the God-man, suffered one of the cruelest deaths ever devised by humans for humans.  In the dramatic and tragic way in which his Son died, God has signaled to those who would see and hear that even in his silence, even in his seeming absence, he, God, knows the worst that life will ever ask us to bear.

Though silent, God has shouted, through Jesus (according to Kaufman), that he is no stranger to physical or emotional pain like ours.  Seemingly absent, God has shouted, through Jesus, that he is no stranger to tears like ours, to fears like ours.

God came to us in a human-body so that we might recognize him; he declared his love for us in human-language so that we might understand him.

God came, Kaufman wrote, so that we would know that our trials and tribulations are, for him, personal.  In our despair and agony, he’s there in the silence.  In our pleas and weeping, he’s there in the absence.

For Christians trying to make sense of the Easter narrative, Kaufman’s proposal is one way to understand why Jesus had to die.  His is a proposal that does not glorify Jesus’ pain and suffering.  No Christian is stuck with Anselm’s life-robbing substitutionary-atonement theology.  S/he is free to choose a different theology.  S/he is free to develop a new one.

What about you–you who are willing to participate in this Lenten thought-experiment–what do you propose?  Have you succeeded in finding a helpful explanation for the crucifixion of the God-man?  What life-enhancing answer can you offer your three out of four Christian neighbors?

Resources:  Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock, Proverbs of Ashes:  Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston:  Beacon Press, 2001); Gordon Kaufman, Systematic Theology:  A Historicist Perspective (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968).

#54 Wrong beliefs about beliefs

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in God, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

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A popular belief among today’s gentle partisans of inter-religious dialogue is that sharing of individual journeys succeeds where other approaches fail.  If only this were the case. Except that our beliefs shape our reaction to the experiences of others.

The sharing of individual journeys sounds promising, at first glance. What counts as success? —More humane views.  What counts as failure? —Arguing about beliefs. At the core of this approach is the assumption that talking about beliefs leads to arguing about beliefs, impasse, raised voices, bruised feelings, and, for all of these reasons, it is worse than a waste of time.

Hence the impetus to find other ways to “do” inter-religious dialogue.

One partisan of the sharing-of-life-journey approach to inter-religious dialogue is the Reverend Peter Laarman.  In Laarman’s view, if I say yes-there-is-a-God and you say no-there-is-no-God, we should avoid talking about why I don’t believe in God and why you believe in God.  Instead, we should talk about how we came to hold these views.  This kind of exchange, for Laarman, would give us the best shot at finding common ground.  It might even change our hearts and minds.  At the very least, it can lead to greater empathy.

Except that gentle and admirable folks like Laarman who recommend sharing-our-journeys as a way to make headway in inter-religious conversation are not taking into account how our beliefs influence our interpretation of experience.  In other words, our reaction to someone’s life journey is largely determined by the beliefs we already hold.

Here are a couple of scenarios illustrating the role of beliefs:  if I believe that God gives men dominion over women, then I will react differently to the life story of a woman whose nose was cut off because she shamed her husband than I would react if I believed that, to God, women and men are equally precious.  If I consider homosexual sex a sin and believe that God banishes homosexuals from his Kingdom, I am likely to react differently to the life story of a gay man whose family shunned him after he moved in with his boyfriend than I would if I believed that God loves all of God’s children, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Still unconvinced that our beliefs influence our interpretation of other people’s experiences?  Let’s take a look at what Laarman wrote in a recent article in Religion Dispatches:

We can see how ineffective our argumentation is by looking at the interminable debate over whether to welcome LGBT persons as full and equal members of congregations—not to mention as ordainable leaders, marriageable people, and members of normal families.  

Every poll and every wise observer points out that gay-affirming folks have not been winning on account of superior arguments, whether arguments from the Bible or theology or science. They aren’t winning on account of their superior debating skills. They’re winning by being present and visible in faith communities: by coming out in ways that clergy and congregations can’t ignore. Gay people are winning because straight people who love and respect them are coming out right along with them.  

The classic instance is the faithful older church woman—a devoted and beloved member of the community—who, at just the right moment in a congregational meeting, stands up and says, “Well, friends, I guess we can argue about all of this until the cows come home. All I know is that ________, my ________, is as dear a child of God as I will ever hope to be.” She then goes on to tell the story of she found out about ________, how they stayed close, and how her heart was changed. Bingo. Are we ready for the vote? 

Sure, those of us who welcome GLBT persons as full and equal members of our congregations would like to believe that sharing-our-life-journeys could change neah votes to yeah votes at a congregational meeting.  But it’s not that simple.  Only in a GLBT-friendly, progressive congregation would the outcome that Laarman describes be a likely one.  Members who believe homosexuality is wrong (for any number of any reasons) will not be swayed by our church lady’s experience with her ____________.

Let’s take a closer look at Laarman’s account of the faithful older woman.  Let’s suppose that another faithful older church woman—also a devoted and beloved member of the community, had said the following at the congregational meeting: “Well, friends, I guess we can argue about all of this until the cows come home.  But I know is that ____________, my ____________, is no longer a dear child of God, because the day he chose to take up with that boyfriend of his, he said his goodbyes to God.”  Then our beloved church member tells the story of how she found out about ___________, how he’d had a good head on his shoulder until his boyfriend came along and led him astray and how heartbroken she was and his parents too.  If God was against these shenanigans—and clearly God was, because sex between men was unnatural—well then, the congregation would be wrong to smile upon what God forbade.  Besides, does this congregation really want to send people like ___________ and his boyfriend the message that what they were doing was okay?  Bingo(?).  Are we ready for the vote?  Not on your life.

Our beliefs are the lenses through which we view the world.  The telling of a personal story will either reinforce what we already believe (because it aligns with our beliefs) or we will discount it because it doesn’t fit what we already deem to be true.

Until our lenses change colors, our views remain the same.  Fortunately, minds, like lenses, can be changed.

No doubt, though, on some issues we’ll have to be inflexible.  Should we give any credence to the belief that homosexuality is wrong in the eyes of God?  No way, Jose.  We don’t BELIEVE it.  In our mind of minds we get it that GLBT persons are full and equal human beings.  God, we believe, doesn’t give a fig leaf whether men are doing it with men or women are doing it with women.  So there.  Beliefs matter.

About such issues we can talk about our life journeys until we’re blue in the face.  The two beloved church members described above, one in favor of welcoming GLBTs into her church and the other against, have about as much chance of finding common ground as Barak Obama and Mitt Romney.

Although we may admire the Peter Laarmans of the world and find them praiseworthy, some issues call on us quite simply to declare:  “Here I stand.  From here I will not budge.”

#53 Grace to the rescue

08 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

≈ 6 Comments

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Cover by Sandra Lawrence

Summer’s nearly over and the routines of autumn are once again settling over the ever-shorter and cooler days.

Looking for something to read through the coming bevy of chilly nights?  The Naked Theologian, aka moi, has a new column in the Fall issue of the UU World magazine. To read it, click on this link: “Grace to the Rescue” or cut and paste the following web address into your browser: http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/186475.shtml

You may not agree with the points of view that I discuss in the column (i.e. those of Henry Nelson Wieman, James Luther Adams, and Jerome Stone). That’s A-okay.  In the end, what matters is participating in the conversation.

To thank the UU World for making space for theology and to encourage more such offerings, post a comment on facebook.com/uuworld or send an email to world@uua.org.

Best of all, discuss the “Grace to the rescue?” piece in your blogs and link the column to the URL provided above. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the points I made in my piece and I’m sure that others would too!
The Church of the Larger Fellowship - Your Online Congregation of Unitarian Universalists.

Starting next Wednesday (Sept. 14), I’ll be teaching a five-session, online course in theology. Its highly creative title is “Theology for UUs.”  The class is offered by the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), which means it’s designed for Unitarian Universalists but is open to anyone.  Session topics:

  1. Early Christianity and its impact on Unitarian Universalism today
  2. Atheism<->agnosticism<->deism<->theism
  3. Religious and secular humanism
  4. Earth-based religions
  5. Process thought and religious naturalism

To sign up and pay the $40 fee (come on, you’re worth it!), click on this link: www.uurgl.com/learn.

Questions?  Comments?  Compliments?  Jokes?  Hey, get in touch!