Category Archives: Theological Ethics

#17 Out with the old God, in with the new

06 Monday Apr 2009

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

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dreamstime_8393599For Jews, Passover is supposed to be historically real.  The Haggadah (the text that sets the order of the Passover meal) commands Jews to consider themselves to have gone forth in exodus from Egypt.  The Haggadah emphasizes this absolute demand lest Jews be tempted to reduce it to the level of a metaphor.  “The authority is clear,” writes the Jewish theologian, Arthur A. Cohen (1928-1986).  Each Jew is to tell him or herself, “I was really, even if not literally, present in Egypt and really, if not literally, present at Sinai.  God contemplated my virtual presence then, thirty-odd centuries ago.”

At the very least, Cohen’s description of Passover signals to non-Jews that even if they celebrate something they call Passover, set a table no Orthodox rabbi could fault, prepare a kosher and hametz-free meal, and say all the right prayers from a Jewish Haggadah, their Passover is NOT a Jewish Passover.  Only Jews can comply with the absolute demand to go forth in exodus from Egypt.  Jews remain the chosen people no less today then when they were the people chosen by the Nazis for termination.  Cohen tells us, “the death camps ended forever one argument of history—whether [the Jews] are the chosen people.”  Chosen for departure from Egypt or chosen for the death chambers, “they are chosen, unmistakably, extremely, utterly.”  Certainly, others are able to contemplate this history. For the Christian and for the non-Jewish secular opponent of racism, the exodus is a paradigm of liberation from slavery, and the death camps are a paradigm of human brutality.  But the simple fact remains that they cannot share these historical events with Jews.

In the post-holocaust era, many ask (and if they don’t, they should!) how God could have witnessed the holocaust and remained silent.  The question persists, and rightfully so:  why was God silent—here, silence means “inaction, passivity.” But silence can also mean, at its worst and most extreme, utter and absolute indifference. What kind of God, worthy of the name, God, remains indifferent?  What kind of God stays silent “when speech would terrify and stay the fall of the uplifted arm?”  As millions of Jews were murdered in Europe, where was the God who had not hesitated to use miracles to liberate them from Egypt?  Where was the “Interruptive miracle, that the sea open and the army of the enemy be consumed?”  Unacceptable, of course, are any claims that the holocaust figured in God’s providential plan. 

For Cohen, the “interruptive model” of God is an ancient model of God.  This ancient model treats God as a “respondent;” God responds to situations of extreme hardship.  Under this model, the greater our need for God, the greater the certainty God will assist us.  Under this model, we assume that “the world is never independent of God.”  While Cohen agrees that the interruptive model of God undermines our freedom to do evil, he worries that it also undermines our freedom to do good.  If we could count on God to intervene, what would prevent us from slipping into moral passivity and quietism?  If we could count on God to intervene, what would prevent us from abandoning the hard work of becoming more moral people?  What would prevent us from shirking the sacrifices we’re called to make to help others have better lives? 

What we need, Cohen concludes, is not the interruptive God who is “the strategist of our particularities or of our historical condition.”  What we need is a new model of God.

Not content just to call for a new model, Cohen proposes one.  For him, God is not the cause of historical events.  God does not alter history.  But neither is God “wholly other and indifferent to the historical.”  Cohen understands “divine life” to be a “filament within the historical”–a filament of something like tungsten (tungsten is the metal used in electric light bulbs; when heated by electricity, the tungsten filament becomes incandescent and causes the bulb to glow).  As a filament, the divine element of the historical is a fragile conductor always intimately linked to the historical—its presence secures the significance of events while remaining separate from them.  Although we know that the filament exists in history and that it’s in continuous community with us, we don’t know its exact location.  Because we don’t know its exact location, we can’t manipulate it for our own purposes.  Ever elusive, God remains God.  This elusiveness preserves the historical as the realm where human beings are free to act.  This elusiveness also means that, at all times, even in extreme situations, it’s up to human beings, not God, to provide the current to heat the tungsten—it is we who either make the filament incandescent or burn it out.

Yes, the Passover Haggadah commands the Jew to consider him or her-self to have gone forth in exodus, liberated by the interruptive God.  But Cohen argues that God is “not ever interruptive even were the sea to part and close or the earth of Auschwitz to open and the murderers to fall in.”  God is not the “strategist” of our particular situations or of the particular age in which we live.  Instead, God (for Cohen) is the mystery of our future possibilities.  If we begin to see God less as the God who interferes whenever interference is welcome (i.e. when it accords with our needs) and more as the immensity whose reality prefigured our existence and whose fullness and unfolding are the hope for the future, then, Cohen promises, “we shall have won a sense of God whom we may love and honor.”  We shall have won a sense of God whom “we no longer fear and from whom we no longer demand.”  We shall have won a sense of God who is, for Cohen, the actual God.

HNFFT:  Is your model of God an interruptive model?  If so, as someone living in the post-holocaust era, how do you make sense of God’s silence?  How does the interruptive model impact your freedom?  Does Cohen’s filament model work better for you?  If yes, why?  If no, why not?

Reference:  Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum:  A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York:  Crossroad, 1981), 11, 23, 92-7.

#16 Will there be anyone left to speak out?

30 Monday Mar 2009

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

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According to the New Testament, Jesus entered Jerusalem without any illusion about what lay in store for him:  arrest, torture and crucifixion.  Prophesying and calling for reform have always been dangerous, but undeterred by the risks, Jesus headed to the temple with his controversial teachings.  Was he afraid?  In the gospel of Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane, where he became distressed and agitated.  He pleaded for a reprieve.  “Abba,” he said, “Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me” (NRSV, Mk 14:36).  Although among friends, Jesus was alone.  Several times, he roused his sleeping disciples and begged them to keep him company, but their eyes were heavy and they did not know what to say.

Two-thousand years later, on the day called Easter, Christians sing hallelujah and Gloria to commemorate the brutal trials of this man who went willingly to his death. 

How do non-Christians make sense of this commemoration? 

Analogies to more contemporary events can help us make sense of the past.  Even if we don’t accept the divinity of Jesus, or that he died for our sins, surely we can sing hallelujah and Gloria to commemorate and acclaim him just as we can sing hallelujah and Gloria to commemorate and acclaim others who willingly and willfully put themselves in harm’s way to speak truth to power.  Joan of Arc, Mahatma Ghandi, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., are but a few of the well-known martyrs who, with just as much clarity as Jesus, knew the risks they faced but still kept on keeping on.

More recently, we have the martyrdom of Lasantha Wickramatunga, shot dead by two assassins on January 8, 2009.  The editor of The Leader, Sri Lanka’s leading independent newspaper, Wickramatunga had written an editorial only days earlier predicting his own assassination by the government.  Aware of the danger, he chose to answer the call of his conscience and to voice ideas some found distasteful.  Aware of the danger, he kept on keeping on although he had a wife and three children.  Should we not sing hallelujah and Gloria to commemorate and acclaim such a man’s life and death?  If he was willing to die to improve the life of his fellow Sri Lankans, should we not honor the sacrifice he was willing to make on their behalf—and, by extension, because we are all part of the human family—on our behalf?

Why was Wickramatunga willing to die for our sake?  In his own words:

“People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemöller. In his youth he was an anti-Semite and an admirer of Hitler. As Nazism took hold in Germany, however, he saw Nazism for what it was: it was not just the Jews Hitler sought to extirpate, it was just about anyone with an alternate point of view. Niemöller spoke out, and for his trouble was incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, and very nearly executed. While incarcerated, Niemöller wrote a poem that, from the first time I read it in my teenage years, stuck hauntingly in my mind: 

     First they came for the Jews
     and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
     Then they came for the Communists
     and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
     Then they came for the trade unionists
     and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
     Then they came for me
     and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: The Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.”

God knows Jesus tried—this one of the messages of Easter.  He sacrificed his life. He spoke out for the poor and the despised and the persecuted.  And they came for him. 

Which leaves us with the most haunting questions of all.  Are our eyes heavy and we do not know what to say?  Or do we speak out?  Do I speak out?  Do you speak out?  Would we speak even if we knew they would come for us?  

Reference:  For a full transcript of Lasantha Wickramatunga’s editorial, see http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=26432.  

#14 Rescued from the iron cage of guilt

15 Sunday Mar 2009

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

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If you don’t have an ear for the music of Christianity, it may be hard to make sense of why the Lenten days tracking the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ journey from freedom to arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection are so important to Christians.

The answer partly lies in the doctrine that Christ liberates, or saves, human beings from bondage to sin.  

But what’s this about freedom from bondage to sin? 

Here’s an existential way of thinking about sin or wrongdoing.  If we reflect on the past twenty-four hours, a clear-eyed inventory of what we did, said, didn’t do, didn’t say, either leaves us with a comfortable feeling or it leaves us troubled.  Our consciences are a built-in mechanism that detects some (not all) of the gaps between what we consider to be the good and right thing to say and do, and what we actually did say and do.  When the gaps are wide, we feel bad—our conscience bothers us.  We call that feeling guilt. 

To do guilt is part of the human condition.  True, some people proclaim they ‘don’t do guilt’ as if ‘doing’ guilt was a bad thing and nobody should ever ‘do’ it.  But should Chris really not feel guilty about smacking the beJesus out of Rhianna?  Those who claim they ‘don’t do guilt’ probably mean that they ‘don’t do self-loathing.’  Although we may have been taught otherwise, the anguish of a guilty conscience need not result in self-loathing.  In fact, the anguish of a guilty conscience can prompt us to make some positive changes. 

There’s a difference worth noticing between self-acceptance and self-approval.  Guilt helps us keep the difference straight.  We might accept ourselves as we are, but a guilty conscience reminds us we’re a ways off from the acts and intentions that are in keeping with out-and-out self-approval. 

Back to guilt and sin.  Shall we agree that nobody (except a masochist) likes doing guilt?  Guilt feels bad.  Downright awful.   The problem then is what to do with our guilt.  Live with it?  Make amends to the injured party?  Ignore it?  Suppress it and make it ‘disappear’?  Deny it?  Feel sorry for yourself?  Take it out on other people?  Ask the wronged party for forgiveness?  Ask yourself for forgiveness?  Ask God for forgiveness?

We, human beings, always carry hope and despair within us.  On the despair end, most of us have a low tolerance for the despair of the iron cage of guilt.  We are trapped, bound, imprisoned.  We want release from guilt, some way to feel better, some way to heal the hurt and be reconciled with ourselves. 

Many Christians hand their guilt over to God in prayer or in ritual with the hope that God will hand back forgiveness.  Many Christians believe that thanks to Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, God forgives their wrongdoings.  The way this forgiveness works differs according to the Christian tradition.  Lutherans, for example, place their trust in Christ and, thanks to that trust, believe themselves forgiven by God (they know they’re still messing up as much as any of us, but they’re forgiven).  Roman Catholics confess their wrongdoings to priests who assign them works of contrition and forgive them in Christ’s name.  In all these Christian traditions, the key to forgiveness is Christ.  Thanks to the crucifixion, the doors of the iron cage of guilt spring open and the Christian is restored to wholeness.

Wholeness!  Stepping out of guilt’s iron cage!  Sounds great.  But if, for us, Jesus was not the Christ, then we must find other ways to seek forgiveness for wrongdoings and soothe our guilt.  Going directly to the party we have harmed and asking forgiveness is one way.  But what if they’re no longer alive, or we don’t know where they are?  

Helpful ideas, anyone?

#13 Giving up Me-Centrism for Lent

05 Thursday Mar 2009

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

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dreamstime_14845884Think you’re number one?  Who doesn’t?  Are you a narcissist? Hey, who isn’t? After all, our interior world is most vivid to ourselves.  Who could possibly know and care for our well-being and happiness better than ourselves?  A tidy amount of Me-Centrism is desirable (we Americans prefer to call it self-esteem), but in sloppy-sized doses, it turns into self-absorption.  Result:  lack of interest in, and lack of concern for others.  Not you, you say?  When was the last time you stepped out of the internal monologue a-buzzing in your head or the fatigue from a long day‘s work to look the checkout clerk at Dominick’s in the eye?  You know, like he was a real person worthy of your attention (which, of course, he is)?  And did you say, “Hello, how are you today?”  And were really interested in the answer?  Or did you look away before he finished telling you? 

A little thing, sure, this saying hello, how are you.  But imagine how different our every-day would be if we stepped out of our heads and shook off our tiredness just long enough to treat each other like each one of us mattered.  Imagine the ordinary wonderfulness of a simple “after you” as we stepped onto the bus or walked into the elevator.  Or letting a car (or two) merge ahead of us on a clogged freeway, or smiling at the stranger on the street for no good reason, or paying our frenenmy an unsolicited compliment, or turning off our cell phone to give a friend our full attention.  With all that free-flowing kindness, especially in these hard economic times, who knows what we could achieve?  Our quest for meaning could literally end.  We would all find peace of mind.  Messianism would have come to pass.

The great religious faith traditions ask their followers, at some point during the year, to step-out of their daily routines and orient themselves toward something greater.   To demonstrate that they mean it and are 100% committed to the exercise, these followers are asked to sacrifice something—in other words, to give up something they value, like a cow, or money, or food.  The act of having given up something serves as a prod of sorts, a powerful reminder (lest one slack off) to reflect on one’s relationship with the divine.   This giving-up takes place in community so that one gets swept up in a great shift of life-as-usual.  The new normal is a common life focused on God.   Whether one is taking part in the one-day fast of Yom Kippur or the month-long fast of Ramadan or the surrendering of something of one’s choosing for the forty days of Lent, the giving-up has a definite time-table with well-advertised and ritually-marked start and end dates. 

But what about those who aren’t followers of such traditions but want to engage in a similar kind of spiritual exercise (exercise in the sense of an intentional and disciplined activity)?  Yow!  That’s harder.  After all, you’ll give up something without any kind of communal or ritual help.  That’s like deciding to give up cigarettes without a support group and without nicotine patches.  Still, for those who are up to the challenge, it could be even more rewarding.  

So let’s dare to give up something for Lent.  How about Me-Centrism?  Give up Me-Centrism until April 12 and orient yourself toward God.  The phenomenologist and ethicist, Emmanuel Levinas, taught that we might, in the act of treating others as human beings instead of objects, discover a passageway to the extraordinary, the infinite, the transcendent.  No promises though.  Hopefully, even if you don’t find that passageway, the gift of a simple human interaction is gift enough.  And should the checkout clerk or the passenger on the bus respond to your friendly gaze by looking at you like you’re crazy, or looking past you like you don’t exist—well, you’ll know you did your part.  And no one can ask more than that.

Reference:  Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, intro. and trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1990).

 

#7 We fear not God, Who busts us not

26 Monday Jan 2009

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

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Oaths.  This blog’s previous entry, “#6 So help me God“, described how, for a truly-honest person, oaths “give rise to no new duties.”  For such persons, oaths “merely serve to awaken” the conscience.  In some other world, truly-honest persons may exist. But let’s face it, that world is not our world.  No perfectly, completely, 100%, all of the time, 24/7, honest person has ever travelled this world’s byways (some would argue that Jesus, the Buddha, and President Obama are exceptions).  No matter how hard we work at it (if we even work at it that hard), we swear to do such-and-such, we promise to do something-or-other, and then—shall we admit it?—we renege. 

And so, given that we don’t qualify for 100%-truly-honest-person status, oaths are for us after all.  Oaths are intended for what Moses Mendelssohn called the “ordinary, middling sort” of person, or for everyone, since we must all “be numbered among this class.”  Okay, we may take exception to being called ordinary, middling sorts of persons, but in our most clear-eyed moments, we know that, more often than we like to admit, we are “weak, irresolute, and vacillating.”  Sure, we have principles, and sure, we have the best of intentions to keep our word but we sometimes  (often?) lack the will to follow through, especially when the going gets tough.  

When Mendelssohn says we need oaths to God because we all qualify as ordinary, middling sorts of persons, he is making a claim about what we, human beings, are like.  In technical language, he’s making an anthropological claim.  His (philosophical) anthropology shaped his theology; it shaped the way he understood God and the God-human relationship.  

For Mendelssohn, God is a witness not only of our “every word and assertion,” but of all our thoughts and most secret sentiments.  And since God is privy to our every word, assertion, thought and secret sentiment, God is privy to our every “transgression of his most holy will.”  Armed with this knowledge, God allows no transgression to go unpunished.  

Such a view of God remains a common one.  After all, we want the world to be fair; we want good guys to finish first and bad guys to get their just deserts.  But since we’re familiar with plenty of bad guys who never get their just deserts, we assume or conjecture that God administers justice in the afterlife.

Universalists (by affiliation or sympathy) take a different approach to the fairness/justice conumdrum.  They believe that God is simply too good to punish anyone. But like most of us, the Universalists want the world to be fair.  And so they also believe that although God doesn’t punish us after we die, our consciences torment us whenever we do something like break a promise.  Thanks to our consciences, we’re punished during our lifetimes.  The Universalists have what’s called a high anthropology. They assume that human beings have fully-active, sensitive consciences.  They assume that we feel remorseful about the wrongs we commit.  

Most religionists reject the Universalist approach.  They might even suspect Universalists of being immoral people. That’s because they wonder why anyone who doesn’t believe in God’s punishment would ever be motivated enough to make the kinds of sacrifices required to do the ‘right’ thing.

When Mendelssohn explains that we need the assistance of an oath to God, it’s because he thinks we need a moral boost to keep our word.  He’s got a lower anthropology than the Universalists.  He thinks we need to transform a moment when our will is being tested into a decisive moment.  He thinks we need to transform a moment when we’d rather procrastinate into a moment when we resist every excuse under the sun (and there are no new excuses).  He thinks we need the assistance of a pledge to God, a “so help me God,” to shore up our resolve, to “gather up all the force and emphasis, with which the recollection of God, the all-righteous” can move us to do what we must.

So what is your anthropology?

Does fear of being busted by God motivate you to make good (more often) on your promises?  Or is giving your word to God (without fear of punishment) enough?  Hmm.  Really?  

What does your God demand of you?  Of human beings in general?  How does your anthropology influence your views about our ability to honor those demands? 

References:  Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 64-5.

#6 So help me God

18 Sunday Jan 2009

Posted by in God, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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An apocryphal story has George Washington saying “So help me God” at the swearing-in ceremony of his Presidential Inauguration.  While scholars debate the plausibility of this claim, what is known for sure is that many Americans today expect incoming Presidents to end their oath of office with those theological words.  Yes, those words are theological–I’ll return to why in a bit.  

The Presidential oath of office mandated by the Constitution merely requires the incoming President to swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”–no more, no less.  Hence, the Constitution leaves it up to each new President to decide how he wishes to end the oath–whether right after the words, “United States”, or after adding “so help me God,” or, in some future time, with “so help me Shiva,” or with “Allahu Akbar.”  Now do you agree that the words “so help me God” are theological?

For some, they violate the separation of Church and State.  Indeed, a lawsuit has been filed by the atheist Michael Newdow (a level-7 atheist on the Dawkins scale?) challenging the right of almost-President Barack Obama to use them at his Inauguration.  Since Obama wants to say them, the issue seems (to this naked theologian anyway) to be one of freedom of speech and religion rather than one of separation of Church and State.  

Could “so help me God” somehow ’strengthen’ the new President’s resolve to keep his oath?  The German-Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, made the following observation in a book he penned the year the American Revolution was about to stir in France (1783). Oaths invoking God, he wrote, “give rise to no new duties.”  In other words, oaths invoking God do not change the fact that the person, by dint of swearing to do something, has promised to make good on an obligation.  Oaths, Mendelssohn argued, “merely serve to awaken” the conscience. He also wisely observed that a truly honest person has not need of additional mechanisms to draw his or her attention to what he or she has already promised.  Hence, Mendelssohn concluded, oaths “are not, properly speaking, designed” for the person of conscience. (Nor are they designed for the n’er-do-well who has no respect for pledges–even his own).  Makes sense, don’t you think?  

If invoking God doesn’t serve as a moral booster, then “so help me God” takes on the quality of prayer.  Any new President who, at his discretion, chooses to close his oath with those words is, in effect, turning to God to ask for assistance.  He realistically anticipates that his resolve to keep his oath will be tested by the difficult compromises a head of state must consider.  He is asking God for help, not for moral reasons, but because he wants divine guidance and comfort when the going gets tough.  There’s no doubt, though, that he is, at the same time, telegraphing his theological convictions to the nation. In defense of almost-President Obama, he is limiting himself to the word God which signals an attempt to be inclusive of as many Americans as possible. Since Obama is a Christian, he might very well have preferred to finish with “so help me God, in Jesus’ name I pray.” Yes he could.  If he chose.  So help me God.  

Perhaps, one day, a President will surprise the nation by bucking the customary “so help me God.”  Perhaps, after repeating the Constitutional swearing-in oath, she will merely whisper to herself whatever words she wishes to add.  Perhaps she will even whisper so softly that recording devices and microphones will fail to register what she said. If so, she will have remained in the religiously neutral world of reason and common humanity, an all-inclusive world.  For now–well, if the President prays for God’s help, may God help the President.  

References:  1) Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 64;  2) Lisa Miller, “God and the Oath of Office,” Newsweek, Jan. 19, 2009, 13.