#63 The Theology of Nelson Mandela

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Religion, Religious Philosophy, Spirituality, Theological Ethics, Theology

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Image: Ashish Lohorung / flickr

Image: Ashish Lohorung / flickr

Much has been said and written about Nelson Mandela—except about his theology.

Because he became drawn to the ideology of Communists like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung, many commentators (and their readers) assume that Mandela also embraced these thinkers’ atheism. Near silence about Mandela’s religious views has contributed to the plausibility of this reasonable, but misplaced conjecture.

Since Mandela’s death, only one, brief analysis probing his relationship to religion has appeared in the media: Fredrick Nzwili’s “Shaped by Methodists, Mandela paid tribute to the role of religion,” RNS, Dec. 6, 2013.

As Nzwili reported, the primary religious influence on Mandela was the Methodist Church which, with 7% of the population, is the largest mainline Church in South Africa. Throughout his life, Mandela was deeply attached to the Methodist tradition in which he was raised. In 1994, at the age of 76, he addressed the Annual Conference of the Methodist Church and, sharing his joy in participating, he explained that, for him, the Conference was a spiritual homecoming. “I cannot over-emphasise [sic],” he said, “the role that the Methodist Church has played in my own life.”

Though the impact of religion and of the Methodist Church on Mandela may come as a surprise to admirers and disciples, it is probably no accident that South Africa’s great anti-apartheid activist came out of the most anti-apartheid religious tradition in the country.

Mandela highlighted the Methodist Church’s strongly-held commitment to social-justice activism in his 1994 address:

It is fitting that this Conference is taking place in this particular Chamber, after the advent of democracy in our country. The Methodist Church was the only Church to be declared an illegal organisation under apartheid, and for ten long years you were forbidden to operate naat e Transkei bantustan. It is in this very chamber that this banning order was promulgated.

One cannot over-emphasise the contribution that the religious community made particularly in ensuring that our transition achieves the desired result. The spirit of reconciliation and the goodwill within the nation can, to a great measure, be attributed to the moral and spiritual interventions of the religious community.

Distinguishing features of the Methodist tradition are its dedication to helping the poor and its systematic approach to moral, spiritual, and educational development. In his 1994 speech, Mandela praised, in particular, the early commitment of the Methodist Church to building schools in remote areas and to educating black Africans.

According to the History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of South Africa, the Church’s program of education began in a sustained way in 1815 when the Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Reverend Barnabas Shaw, and his wife set out from England for Cape Town with instructions to preach to the English soldiers stationed there and to the local white community, but mainly “to pay special attention to the large slave population.”

The Shaws opted to leave the comfort of city life and to travel some 500 km north into the thinly-populated land of the Namaqua tribe. By 1817, Rev. Shaw had baptized two Namaqua converts. As the Church grew, converts became schoolteachers, preachers, and tribal leaders; a few became missionaries to other tribes.

Additional Methodist missionizing activity, this time focused east of the Cape, began in 1820 when the Reverend William Shaw (no relation to Barnabas) arrived with British settlers. He, too, did not limit his attention to whites. By 1830, he established Wesleyville, planted six more mission-stations stretching east, and laid the foundation for another in the former Transkei.

In his 1994 speech, Mandela noted that the Methodist Church’s commitment to educating black South Africans had an invaluable and positive effect on the course of South Africa’s history. He was himself a beneficiary of the Church’s ministry of education.

Your Church has a proud record of commitment to the development of Africa’s sons and daughters in more areas than one. The great institutions of learning which spread from the Reverend William Shaw’s “Chain of Mission Stations” in this region shaped the minds and characters of generations of our people as well as many of our present leaders.

Note that Mandela uses the possessive pronoun, “your,” to refer to the Methodist Church instead of “our,” suggesting distance exists between himself and the Church. However, according to the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of South Africa, Bishop Ziphozihle Siwa, Mandela “remained a committed Methodist [throughout] his life.”

Born to a Transkei chief and a devout Methodist mother, Mandela was baptized Methodist and sent to a local Methodist school at the age of seven. Though his first-name was Rohihala, he was given the English name, Nelson, by his teacher, as was customary at the time.

Mandela’s father died when Mandela was nine and the boy was sent, by his mother, to live with his guardian, Paramount Chief David Dalindyebo. With Dalindyebo and his family, Mandela attended Methodist services every Sunday. Mandela also attended a Methodist mission school next to his new home.

For the start of his secondary education, Mandela chose to attend Healdtown, a Methodist college. Continuing his studies, he worked on a Bachelor’s of Arts at the University of Ft. Hare, where he joined the Student’s Christian Association and taught Bible classes in the local community. Of his education, Mandela said:

Although the dark night of apartheid sought to obliterate many [religious] institutions, the impact of their academic and moral teachings could not be trampled on. We who passed through them will not forget the excellent standards of teaching and the spiritual values which were imparted to us.

By 1941, Mandela had moved to Johannesburg where he attended Communist talks and gathering. However, he refused to join the Communist party, in part because its atheism conflicted with his Christian faith. In 1947, after he participated in founding the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), Mandela tried to expel Communists who joined. The same year, as a member of the ANC Transvaal Executive Committee, Mandela successfully helped oust its regional president for his cooperation with Communists.

Not until 1950, when he was elected President of the ANCYL, did Mandela concede to welcome and cooperate with atheistic Communists.

Was Mandela’s increasing politicization caused by his growing interest in Communist thinkers like Marx and Lenin? No. The record makes clear that he began to devote more time to politics and to participate more frequently in direct actions (like boycotts and strikes against the apartheid regime) before 1950, when he was actively anti-communist.

It is more likely that Mandela’s increasing politicization grew out of his religious commitments.

A distinctive tenet of Wesleyan Methodism is that faith in Jesus Christ is only the first step toward salvation. What is required, from then on, is to lead a moral life and to devote oneself to good works and social justice. In Mandela’s words:

The sense of social responsibility that the religious community has always upheld found expression in [the Methodist Church’s] immense contribution to the efforts to rid our country of the scourge of racism and apartheid. When pronouncements and actions against the powers-that-be meant persecution and even death, you dared to stand up to the tyrants.

The Methodist Church of South Africa expressed its “sense of social responsibility” by objecting to the policy of apartheid from the moment its imposition in 1948. The Church’s opposition culminated in its election of the Reverend Seth Mokitimi as President in 1964—an election that put the Church at risk of being declared “black” and thus evicted from properties located in white areas.

According to Mandela:

Especially while political leaders were in prison and in exile, bodies like the South African Council of Churches and its member churches resisted racial bigotry and held out a vision of a different, transformed South Africa. Methodist leaders were prominent among the prophets who refused to bow to the false god of apartheid. Your ministers also visited us in prison and cared for our families. Some of you were banned. Your Presiding Bishop himself shared imprisonment with us for some years on Robben Island. This you did, not as outsiders to the cause of democracy, but as part of society and eminent prophets of the teachings of your faith.

Besides Mandela’s positive view of the difference religious communities can make in righting political wrong, little is known about Mandela’s personal religious views during, and after his prison years. Yet, while jailed on Robben Island, he attended Christian Sunday services and participated in Holy Communion.

There are several possible reasons for the sparseness of the public record about Mandela’s religious commitments. Possible reasons include: media interviewers and biographers did not ask; well-known to have been an intensely private person, Mandela may have been reluctant to discuss his beliefs; in the interest of inclusivity, Mandela may have wished to model how to welcome multiple traditions (according to Bishop Siwa, Mandela received Holy Communion from an ecumenical team while at Pollsmoor Prison); after leaving prison, Mandela was preoccupied with implementing his vision of a free and democratic nation-state.

In Bishop Siwa’s obituary for him, the Bishop affirmed that Mandela’s life “demonstrated the finest characteristics of the Methodist faith: tempered with graciousness; a strong ethic of industriousness; and honesty with reconciliation.” (Of course, we might say, Bishop Siwa would claim Mandela as part of his Methodist community—who wouldn’t?)

Whether Bishop Siwa’s assessment is accurate or not, it remains important to ask why, in recent news reports and in the plethora of published obituaries, so little has been said about Mandela’s religious views, because the absence of a substantive treatment of these views allows the millions inspired by Mandela’s life to ignore what, ultimately, may have inspired him most—his grounding in Methodist beliefs and values.

The absence of such details also sends the message (if only unwittingly) that his political commitments can be divorced from his religious commitments, although the latter, by all indicators, ran deep, informed his actions, and remained consistent until his death.

With the hope that scholars, media commentators, and biographers will at last turn their attention to Mandela’s under-examined theology and its relationship to his political advocacy, Mandela reminds us of religion’s ability to serve as a powerful moral force:

The Church, with its message of forgiveness, has a special role to play in national reconciliation. After so much suffering and injustice, the instinct for revenge is a natural one. But the transition we are going through shows that those who suffered under apartheid are prepared to bury the past. At the same time, those who enjoyed the fruits of unjust privilege must be helped to find a new spirit of sharing. Your message and example can enable that to happen.

Source for the text quoted in green above: African National Congress. “Address by President Nelson Mandela to the Annual Conference of the Methodist Church.” Delivered September 18, 1994.

Other sources: 1. Alistair Kee, The Rise and Demise of Black Theology (Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2006); 2. J. Whiteside, The History of the Methodist Church in South Africa (Capetown: Mssrs. Juta & Co, 1906); 3. “Methodists Mourn Tata Madiba: Statement by the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of South Africa, Bishop Ziphozihle Siwa, Johannesburg,” 6 December 2013; 4. Fredrick Nzwili, “Shaped by Methodists, Mandela paid tribute to the role of religion,” Religion News Service, December 6, 2013.

Note (added January 2, 2014). For an in-depth article about the role of mission schools in Africa, read Samuel Freedman’s December 27, 2013, International New York Times article: “Mission Schools Opened World to Africans but Left an Ambiguous Legacy.”

#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)

#60 An LGBT Mosque opens in Paris

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Prayer, Religion, Spirituality

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Courtyard in the Grande Mosquee de Paris (Credit: Rob Annable)

Courtyard in the Grande Mosquee de Paris (Credit: Rob Annable)

No way could I keep this good news to myself, so here’s my ultra-fast (and possibly mistake-ridden) translation of an article published on November 30, 2012, in the online version, LeMonde.fr, of the French newspaper, Le Monde.  Read and celebrate!

In the home of a Buddhist monk located in an exclusive part of an eastern suburb of Paris, Muslim homosexuals will join together for their first prayer on Friday, November 30.  The ten-meter square room which Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, the sponsor of this project, is preparing will become the first ultra-progressive mosque in Europe, a gay and feminist friendly space where GLBT people will be welcome and where women will be encouraged to lead prayer.

The Buddhist monk, Frederico Joko Procopio, homosexual and militant supporter of LGBT rights, loaned him a part of his dojo out of solidarity.

Until then, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed prayed every Friday with several thousand believers in the Grande Mosquée of Paris.  This Muslim homosexual appreciated the anonymity of this mosque and the content, never political, of the services held there.  But such a combination is rare, and even in the crowd, certain individuals, especially transitioning transsexuals or effeminate men, “stood out and were immediately identified,” he said.  He intends, then, to offer a place to all those who cannot feel comfortable in a traditional worship space.

 

Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed in 2012 (Credit: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images)

Married to a South-African since 2010, Zahed declares, “Muslims must not feel ashamed.  Homosexuality is not condemned anywhere, neither in the Qur’an nor in the Hadith.  If the Prophet Mohammed were alive, he would marry homosexual couples.”  He dreams of an Islam, “peaceful, reformed, inclusive” that accepts blasphemy since “critical thoughts are essential to spiritual development.

“AN ABERRATION”

Not a single Muslim organization has supported this initiative.  For many Imams and Muslim personalities in France, this project goes against religious teachings.

“There are Muslim homosexuals, they exist, but to open a mosque is an aberration because religion, that’s not it,” says Abdallah Zekri, president of the Anti-Islamaphobia Observatory under the authority of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM).

“We don’t blame homosexuals, but we can’t make space for them to the point that their activities become part of society,” explains Dalil Boubakeur, Rector of the Grande Mosquée of Paris.  According to him, this mosque will not be recognized.  “It’s something outside of the community of faithful,” he says.

A PROGRESSIVE ISLAM

So-called “inclusive” mosques already exist in South Africa, in the United States, and in Canada, but the one in Paris is the first in Europe.  The organization, Muslims for Progressive Values, started in 2007 in the United States, has identified a dozen of such worship spaces in North America.

“The goal of Muslims who designate themselves progressive is not to focus on a ‘defense’ of sexual minorities against an interpretation of Islam that they judge intolerant and obsolete based on their experience of having been discriminated against,” explains Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, a research associate at the Institute of Research and Study of the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM).  “They want to reform, to promote an Islam that is inclusive of progressive values,” she adds.

Source:  www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2012/11/30/une-mosquee-ouverte-aux-homosexuels-pres-de-paris_1798351_3224.html, accessed 30 November 2012.  See also:  http://www.rferl.org/content/gay-friendly-mosque-muslims-near-paris-tests-taboos/24785688.htm, accessed 30 November 2012.

#59 Fundamentalism, the Republican Party, and women

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in Religion, Theology

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Two recent headlines in the online version of the NY Times underscored the disconnect between the reality of women’s lives and the agenda of the religiously-inspired, fundamentalist-controlled Republican Party.  On August 30, the article “Who Wears the Pants in This Economy?” by Hanna Rosin was illustrated with a photograph of a stately woman wearing—you guessed it—pants, chin held high, standing by a chair occupied by a round-shouldered, grim-faced man.  The description of the article:  “As the usual path to the middle class disappears, what’s emerging is a nascent middle-class matriarchy, in which women pay the bills while men try to find their place.”

In addition, a link took the reader to an opinion piece on the “Republican National Convention” (RNC) by Frank Bruni.  This piece explores the question of whether the RNC has declared a “War on Women.”  The RNC’s support of the Human Life Amendment, for example, would remove abortion as a choice for pregnant women even in cases of rape or incest.

It’s not surprising that the Republican Party is soft-pedaling its views on women’s issues (Mitt Romney’s sister, Julia, has made the curious promise that under “President” Romney, abortion rights will not be rolled back!).  The soft-pedaling demonstrates that the party’s policy-setters are aware that their stance on what women should and should not be able to do is unpopular.  On the surface, then, the RNC’s “war” on women appears inexplicable.  It does not serve the party’s best interest—that interest being to yank Barack Obama out of the White House in November.

But what exactly is religious “fundamentalism” and why its compulsion to undermine the rights currently enjoyed by women?  Like many catchwords, most people are confident of what they mean by “fundamentalism” until they’re asked for a definition.  You may be surprised to learn that this catchword has only been in use since the late 1970’s.  At best, it is squishy and contested even among scholars.  Rather than agreeing on a single definition, scholars have advanced different conclusions based on their research.  For example, the sociologist of religion, Martin Riesebrodt, defends the view that “religious fundamentalism” is a radical-traditionalist movement—in other words, traditionalism on steroids.

Fundamentalism is, according to Riesebrodt, a “patriarchal protest movement.”  It is patriarchal because it seeks a return to male-dominated family life, a protest against current social and ethical norms perceived as destructive to this form of family life, a movement because it is an alliance of religious groups as disparate as conservative Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons who, in spite of their impossible-to-bridge doctrinal differences, have cooperated on issues such as birth control, availability of abortion, and gay marriage.  More than a disposition or an ideology—its adherents have joined together to effect real and sweeping social change.

This interpretation of fundamentalism may, on the surface, sound like a feminist reading of what is going on.  However, a feminist interpretation would focus on the continuity of male dominance throughout human history and call for an end to that dominance.  Fundamentalism is a social movement set in motion when religiously-sanctioned patriarchal family life and sexual morality is replaced by “depersonalized” and therefore “morally vacuous”—often called secular—principles that alter the relationship between the genders and loosen constraints on sexual behavior.

Of interest too is Riesebrodt’s conclusion that the feared impact on family life need not be “objective” in the sense that it can be borne out by scientifically-conducted surveys; all that is required is a “subjective” assessment.  As a result, data are irrelevant.  Driven by their fears, fundamentalist elements of the Republican party are attacking what they perceive as threats to traditional, patriarchal family life.  Based on their audiences, party spokespeople sometimes attempt to conceal the more obviously absolutist parts of their desired reforms.  Mostly, though, votes be damned.  This may strike the non-fundamentalist as self-defeating but these reforms are not bound to utilitarian calculations.  They are motivated by religious commitments.

To recap, fundamentalism equals radical traditionalism.  But what does “tradition” mean in this context?  For Riesebrodt, tradition is not limited to the attempt to preserve “arbitrary, received conventions, ethical precepts, or customs,” but rather refers specifically to maintaining “structured social relationships and an ethical regulation of life conduct.”  Indeed, he uses the term “neopatriarchal” to describe contemporary fundamentalism because it is open to exploiting the latest technology to serve its ends of spreading its message widely and effectively.  In this sense, it does not wish to return to the past.  Technology is held to be “ethically ‘neutral’” because it poses no threat to social relationships.  Thus, radical traditionalists do not insist that women are needed at home because their labor is required to wash dishes by hand, make clothes from patterns, cook meals from scratch, etc.  Religious reasons, not practical considerations, underlie the drive to secure a patriarchal family life.

Riesebrodt’s analysis undermines a popular stereotype.  It shows that fundamentalists are in no way limited to certain segments of the American population.  They come from the “lower, middle, and upper classes, from the unemployed, domestic personnel, blue-collar and white-collar workers, students, artisans and craftsmen, small and large merchants, and professionals.”  As members of a movement, fundamentalists share a common set of values and a common vision of the moral life.

Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. Photo credit: Christian Post Reporter.

Nor are fundamentalists limited to certain areas of the nation as maps showing blue states and red states seem to indicate.  The reality is that the fundamentalist movement’s nerve centers are located in urban areas not rural ones.  If fundamentalism relied on rural areas for its clientele, its small-town, “old-fashioned” roots could account for the compulsion to assign women to traditional family roles.  However, the centers of fundamentalism are, in fact, established in large cities “for organizational or administrative reasons.”  Indeed, the so-called mega-churches are only capable of attracting thousands of members because their urban locations allows them to draw on significant populations.

In essence, fundamentalism is a reaction by a broad section of the population to a perceived crisis in society.  It copes with this crisis by relying on its specific interpretation of religious beliefs and organizational models.  The dividing line between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist is not the line between social classes but between “believers and unbelievers, people who obey the religious commandments and those who disdain them.”

So far, we have examined fundamentalism’s insistence on eroding the depersonalized rights that women enjoy in favor of the right of the male head of families to say yay or nay to each individual petition.  Its principal motivation is a return to patriarchal models of family life and limits on a women’s sexual behavior (how else to explain the single-minded focus on a woman’s behavior—it does take two to mess around).  A properly organized family is required to instill the correct values and moral habits of society.  Without religious sanction, fundamentalists believe, anything goes, all social and ethical standards become arbitrary, everyone is free to pick and choose their mode of life.  The result?  Society slips into criminality and debauchery—witness, the fundamentalist says, the contemporary “collapse of the social order.”

The principal conflict, then, between fundamentalism and other responses to the problems of modern life is over principles of family order and ideals of sexual conduct.  Though fundamentalism is not a ‘single-issue” movement, Riesebrodt explains, “it formulates its critique…of quite specific social structural principles.  The idea of a legitimate order is bound up with patriarchal structural principles and values, and it raises its protest against their erosion and transformation into depersonalized structural principles.”

As a religious protest movement, fundamentalism’s “radical demands and spectacular actions” have, and will continue to have, a major impact on the nation’s political life—not just its economic life, but on the everyday lives of women and men.  No public policy that impacts women fails to impact men as well.

Fundamentalists have plugged into the Republican Party and strengthened it, but by doing so, they have supported policies—for example, the party’s implacable opposition to unions—that have eroded the ability of the middle-class men to serve as the primary breadwinners and facilitated the growth of middle-class matriarchy.  By design or by necessity, more women are wearing the “pants” in the family.  How does a man insist on maintaining his religiously-sanctioned patriarchal rights when his wife assumes primary responsibility for the care and keeping of the family?

Photo Credit: Paul Kiser’s blog

In his Presidential-nomination acceptance speech, Romney tossed out the line, “My promise is to help you with your family” (meaning—patriarchal family), but he acknowledged that women are more likely to start businesses these days than men.  More difficult, in any case, is to convince women to give up the rights to which they have become accustomed.  Women have come a long way baby, and mighty few, whether Democrat or Republican or Independent, are anxious to turn back the clock.

Sources:

  1. Martin Riesebrodt, Pious Passion:  The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran, translated from the German by Don Reneau (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993).
  2. www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/magazine/who-wears-the-pants-in-this-economy.html?pagewanted=all; accessed 30 August 2012.
  3. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/30/opinion/voters-a-war-on-women.html?ref=opinion, accessed 30 August 2012.

#58 Another religious revival?

09 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Religion

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Rick Warren at TED in 2006

Is the United States in the throes of another religious revival?  The high visibility of traditionalist-Evangelical Christians in their political guise—the Christian Right—gives the impression that their numbers are growing at exponential rates.

According to reliable survey data there are, today, twice as many Evangelical Christians as mainline Protestants (Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, United Church of Christ, etc.).  In 1970, however, the number of Evangelical Christians was equal to the number of mainline Protestants.  On the surface, then, it appears that in only forty years, the number of Evangelicals has doubled.

The numbers are misleading.  The Evangelical-mainline teeter-totter has clearly tipped but mostly because the number of mainline Protestants has plummeted.

Of church-goers, 40% are Evangelicals.  Church attendance is more highly correlated to political conservatism today than in the 1970s.

On any given Sunday, 40% of Americans report that they are not sitting in pews.  The actual numbers of church-goers is closer to 20-25%.  The disparity indicates that some Americans who believe they go to church are, in fact, staying home; if they over-report, it may be because their religious identity is important to them.

Not just any pews are nearly empty.  The data suggests a dramatic decline in mainline congregations since 1972 when relevant data began to be collected.

While church attendance declined between 1950 and 1980, since then, the decline has been slight.  In other words, there is no data to suggest that attendance is increasing.

To the question of whether the United States is in the throes of another great religious revival—the answer is a decisive no.

Why has the number of mainline Protestants collapsed?  This is a difficult question to answer.  It’s easier to answer the other obvious question—why have Evangelical Christians maintained steady numbers?  In the past, when children of Evangelicals sought upward social mobility they switched to mainline churches.  This is no longer the case.  Overall, Evangelicals are better at hanging onto their children than more liberal Protestants.

If a person raised as a traditionalist-Evangelical becomes more liberal theologically, s/he usually drops her or his congregational membership altogether.  S/he skips church on Sunday mornings along with the growing numbers of “nones” (called “nones” because when asked about their religious preference on questionnaires, they answer “none”).  As a result, the mainline churches can no longer count on a steady stream of incoming ex-Evangelical Christians to take the place of the members they lose.

Suppose that traditionalist-Evangelicals and mainline Protestants sang in the same church choir; in 1970 the right-side and the left-side were balanced.  Now half of the left-side is gone.  The people from the missing half are doing their own thing on Sundays.  If they sing, they sing when they’re moved to sing.  And when they sing, they sing whatever pleases them—a Mozart aria or a song by Katy Perry or a tune by the Mamas and the Papas.

Even if the nones or the unchurched were to be moved to sing on cue, imagine the dissonance of a Mozart aria alongside a Katy Perry song alongside a Mamas and the Papas tune.  However lovely individually, these tunes would send listeners (and probably singers too) scrambling for the nearest earplugs.

Credit: Marion S Trikosko via Wikimedia Commons

In essence, then, ex-mainline and ex-Evangelical congregants have fragmented into millions of units of one.  The Christian Right didn’t get loud by converting mainline religionists; all it had to do was remain firmly seated in its pews and continue singing as a block while the theologically-liberal churches lost members.  If their voices sound stronger, it’s not based on growing numbers but due to a lack of synchronized countervoices.

Could the nones and the unchurched be led by someone like Martin Luther King Jr.?  Let’s not forget that King did not start alone.  He rose from the ranks of that substantial singing block, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and although one would hope that he could galvanize the nones and the unchurched today, he spoke in the language of the Bible:

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

“I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

Without a recognized leader to choose songs and coordinate run-throughs, the nones and the unchurched aren’t likely to sound like a choir with a common purpose and common goals in two weeks, or a month, or a year from now.

Perhaps another leader, religious or not, will emerge and inspire enough one-person-choirs to sing together that their combined voices will match, in strength and power, that of the Christian Right; or better yet, ring more loudly.  After all, as King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Sources:  Dr. Mark Chaves, “Continuity and Changes in American Religion,” a talk given at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School Conference, “On the Edge of Glory:  Making Disciplines in a ‘Secular Age’,” 13 April 2012 (Dr. Chaves’ remarks were based on data collected by the National Congregations Study and by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago);  brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/martin_luther_king_jr_2.html#gri7ak01Ig25DzmL.99, accessed 09 Aug 2012.

#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).

#56 Ode to the “Little Way”

11 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality

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Powerless and powerful?  At the same time?

You’ve been diagnosed with lung cancer and told you have two months to live.

Powerless, right?

The message of Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer is familiar:  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

But what about taking Niebuhr’s prayer a step further.  What if you actually chose the bad things you can’t change?

Without a doubt, you wouldn’t have chosen terminal cancer had been given a choice.  Who willingly chooses cancer?  Cancer chooses you.  But choose it in return and you’re back in control.

One of France’s favorite saints, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, did just that.  Here’s how her version of Niebuhr’s prayer might have sounded:  “God grant me the serenity to embrace the things I cannot change, to choose them as if on my own terms, to choose them as if I wanted them.”

Thérèse, a Carmelite nun, died a drawn-out and painful death from tuberculosis.  She vomited blood.  Bedsores afflicted her.  Her Mother Superior denied her the relief of morphine.  Unable to take a sip of water or swallow a spoonful of food without suffering waves of nausea, she practiced what she called the Little Way—the choosing of what was handed to her.

One of Thérèse’s biographers, Monica Furlong, finds genius in the Little Way:  “to lie dying an excruciating death that took away the little privacies and forms of self-control which are precious to most of us, to endure almost unremitting pain, to have to rely on others for the smallest services…was to have ‘the last shred of dignity’ forcibly ripped away.  What else to do then but to ‘choose it,’ to respond to it out of freedom rather than out of necessity?”

Some interpret the Little Way as the way of subservience, especially for women.  But, as Furlong points out, the Little Way has “an almost ironic quality to it.  ‘If I may have nothing,’ it says gaily, ‘then I will turn reason inside out and make having nothing the most enjoyable of possibilities.’”  In essence, Thérèse charts a way “to live out an impossible situation.”

And so, faced with terminal lung cancer, the Little Way would say, “if I may lose my life to cancer in two months, I will turn reason inside out and choose the cancer.”  Seemingly powerless before the advance of one’s disease, one may choose snatch the cards one’s been dealt and play them triumphantly, powerfully, as if they were “the purest piece of luck.”

Did her practice of the Little Way as she succumbed to tuberculosis make Thérèse a saint?  According to Furlong, “at the time of her canonization Cardinal Vico described how, in the early days of the Catholic Church, people became saints by popular acclaim…  Several centuries had passed without a popular saint.” And yet, Thérèse became such a saint.  In her, ordinary people saw courage and strength.  From her, they drew encouragement to face the bad things in life.  They embraced her as their own.  Indeed, rare is the church in France without a statue of Saint Thérèse.

Often, the Little Way is not the best way.  The Little Way isn’t the best way for the Russians who are pouring into the streets to protest Vladimir Putin’s over-reach.  Many challenges are worth a good fight—like securing hot meals for underprivileged kids in public schools, or seeking refuge in a battered women shelter, or working to prevent contamination of the drinking water in your community, etc.  These are not scenarios that call for the Little Way.

But some scenarios come without options.  They have only one possible outcome.  A bad one.

May you never find yourself power-less.  If you do, the Little Way could return you to a sense of power-fulness.  You could decide to embrace the non-negotiables that life throws at you.  You could put yourself back in charge.

Resource:  Monica Furlong, Thérèse of Lisieux (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 1987).

#55 iHeroes, iReligion, and iHistory

12 Wednesday Oct 2011

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

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Who, among those blessed with extra cash, doesn’t remember their first Mac?  Or first iPod?  Or first iPhone?  Or first iPad?  Or, for that matter, their first visit to a sleek, modernist Apple store?  Or first appointment at the Genius Bar?

Will Steve Jobs’ death (on Oct. 5) restore us to agnosticism when it comes to electronic marvels?  Many had become faithful converts to the power of high-tech.  We had faith that each invention would be better than the last.  Apple’s product announcements had teleological force—we needed to wait only a little before another brilliant and stylish bit of Apple wizardry paradigm-shifted our lives—yet again.  And we were justified in our faith.  Revolutionary products did arrive.  And life did change.  For the better.

Surely, Jobs belongs on the shortlist of American, if not the world’s, cultural heroes.  Our grandchildren will learn of Jobs in their American history classes.  In general, people are suckers for great men and women.  Early historians understood that we are fascinated by great individuals; these historians did not so much write biographies as produce hagiographies, distorting what could be known about their subjects and adding details to make them appear less prone to human failings than they actually were.  Among the sacred texts, the Hebrew Bible is one of the few that resists burnishing the lives it recounts.  This is a strength of the Hebrew Bible; its authors understood that it is through their faults that we recognize great heroes as fellow human beings.

A close friend of Steve Jobs, Dr. Dean Ornish, understood this too, saying, Steve “was very human…  He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That’s what made him so great.”  Jobs was imperfect like most of us schmoes.  His sister, Mona Simpson, wrote a “fictional” novel, A Regular Guy, whose main character bears many similarities to her iconic brother.  Reviewers of the book noted that it was not an unalloyed portrait.  Even his worst enemy, however, cannot deny that Jobs was blessed with unusual leadership and vision.

He belongs, then, on that list of individuals that the 19th Century Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle, used to illustrate his “great man” theory.  This theory views Western history as the playground of men and women who, thanks to their genius-level scientific or artistic talents, or beyond-brilliant military and leadership instincts, or ground-breaking philosophical or spiritual gifts have impacted millions, even billions of lives over the course of their own generations and beyond.  Carlyle speculated that history could be explained by the actions of these “greats.”  He wrote, “The soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”  Their extra-ordinary attributes, like “the light which enlightens” is not “a kindled lamp only” but rather “a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven.”

The author (Steven Levy) of the 1994 book, Insanely Great, chronicling the birth of the Mac, described the light cast by Jobs:  “He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel.”  A co-founder of Pixar (Edwin Catmull) commented that over the course of the four years during which his company struggled to make “Toy Story,” Jobs never flagged in his determination:  “You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course…In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

These traits—Jobs’ vision, stubbornness, tenacity, belief, and patience to stay the course, pushing right to the edge, driven to make the next big step—were surely shared by other “great men and women,” like Winston Churchill or Muhammad or Isaac Newton or Martha Graham, all of whom excelled in the face of outrageous odds and legions of naysayers.

Carlyle also held that the thoughts of “great men and women” were “the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual.”  Religion was not, for Carlyle, defined by creeds or by the houses of worship to which they belonged.  Religion meant, rather, that which these great men or women believed, that they kept close to their hearts, that was “in all cases the primary thing” determining their practical actions.  If one adopts Carlyle’s definition, then the “chief fact” about Jobs, his “primary thing,” his religion, was this: “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” and “don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

A contemporary of Carlyle, the German philosopher, Hegel, embraced a similar view of the role of superlative individuals in history.  But for him, great people served as vehicles for the progressive unfolding of God-Spirit, or Geist in the world.  Heroes, he wrote, are not agents who act independently of the Whole; rather, they serve as agents for Geist in moving history forward.  This movement, according to Hegel, is inevitable.

Indeed, there will be those who—out of a personal dislike for Jobs, or because they are strongly attached to the notion of equality and thus resist recognizing that some human beings make greater contributions than others—will opine in Hegelian mode that if Jobs hadn’t brought forth an abundance of culture-changing gadgets, someone else would have.  Or they will turn to the common 20th Century position that we are all products of our social space and that the contributions of all “great men and women” would have been impossible without the prior existence of this space.

But the fact that it could have been some other individual produced by our current social space, actually underscores the truth that, regardless of possible competitors, Jobs was the one, the singular channel.

Goodnight sweet prince of tech.  We’ll miss you lots.  We miss you already.

Resource:   Carlyle, Thomas  (Author). On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. London, , GBR: ElecBook, 2001.

#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.”