In light of our recent discussion surrounding souls, I would be interested in hearing feedback regarding PETA’s new campaign to “save the sea kittens”. What do you think about PETA’s attempt at creating more sympathy towards fish species by way of renaming them? Is it silly? Helpful?
Thin Blue Flame
I have recently been listening to Josh Ritter’s Thin Blue Flame (you can listen to it above, I linked it from his site) and can’t help but be struck by its beautiful and haunting exploration of God, the afterlife, and how our perceptions of the afterlife shape our ethics and our politics. Thin Blue Flame is a vision, ala John’s Revelation, that draws the reader/listener in with its compelling and disturbing imagery meant to shake us into a realization of our negative human tendency towards escapist conceptions of the afterlife that in turn negatively affect our ethics. If we, of course as the chosen ones, are escaping to a heavenly dwelling where we, along with God, will simply exist as energy ”mixing with nitrogen in lonely holes where neither Seraphim or raindrops go” then who cares if we spend our earthly time ”bringing justice to the enemies and not the other way around”….enemies defined of course by their lack of adherence to our particular God ordained “laws”, those things that we “loose on earth”. But as the song says, “If what’s loosed on earth will be loosed up on high
It’s a Hell of a Heaven we must go to when we die”. Who can dispute this when God’s laws explained on earth are often used to justify war against the “enemies” of God.
Throughout the song, there is a counter-appeal (over against the dualism of body-soul) to a heaven that is far more earthly; a heaven that is shaped “like the hips of a girl”; a heaven that is like a city where “the weddings in pollen and the wine bottomless And all wrongs forgotten and all vengeance made right The suffering verbs put to sleep in the night The future descending like a bright chandelier” (See Rev. 21:2)
What is left of our goodness as created beings if all we can do is wish to escape the home which God has given us? What if redemption is the culmination of creation and not escape. What if heaven is “the world just beginning and the guests in good cheer”?
But, the alternative is to believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and thus Thin Blue Flame mourns: “Oh it’s hell to believe there ain’t a hell of a chance”
Throughout the song, there is also the constant refrain: “Only a full house is gonna make it through”. In other words, only a world that is full of created matter — body, earth, wilderness, diversity, — only a world where “heaven is so big there aint no need to look up”, only THAT world is anything worth hoping for in the afterlife. A different, redeemed world to be sure, but a world that can be called a “full house”, not just the emptiness of “a cold dark room”.
What do you think?
For the last two weeks I have been speaking at my Church on how Christians should understand our place in relationship to “nature” or “creation” from a renewed look at the biblical perspective on this issue. It has been an interesting and enjoyable process, especially during the discussion time afterwords. I have been positing that as Christians living in a highly anthropocentric (human centered) world, we must re-adopt a biblical conception of the inter-connectedness of the created order — an order in which humans, while certainly understood to have a special place (created in God’s image, commanded to “subdue the earth”), are not by virtue of that place, all that matters to God.
Throughout this series and some other reading, it has become evident to me the tension in modern Christian discourse over how we are to, on the one hand, appreciate the neccessity and privelage to be responsible for the health of the natural world, and on the other hand, to recognize the way in which the very term “nature” is loaded such that to speak of caring for the health of the natural world is really to some extent to speak without making any clear referece as to what we are really speaking about.
What I mean to say here is that in some sense, there is great uncertainty as to what actually consititues “nature” and whether or not what some people understand as “nature” is worth fighting to protect or fighting to “overcome”. For example, some ecologists or environmental activists seem at times to want to posit a conception of “nature” that is overly romantic and that does not deal adequately with the fact that, as humans, to some extent, we must do damage to nature if we are to construct a world for ourselves to live in. This may sound offensive to some ears, but I think it is fairly easy to see that this is the case.
When we build cities, we damage “nature” — nature here understood as wildlife, grasslands, lakes, and the list goes on. Now, surely there are less “nature-damaging” ways to build cities; this is not what is at issue. What is at issue is that no matter how we avoid or reduce the damage done, to some extent, we must “damage” or “uproot” the previous environment in which nature would otherwise have taken over. The idea of a comprehensive symbiosis is just simply far fetched. On the other hand, it is also completely wrongheaded, in my humble opinion, to take the view of some Christian conceptions of eschatology that say that God’s ultimate plan for the “creation” will be one of destruction, while the disembodied souls of human beings are raptured up to a blissful, heavenly dwelling.
What do you think? As human beings in an inter-dependant relationship with “nature” or “creation”, what is our role? How can we adequately speak of caring for the earth while also adequately dealing with the clear tension of the impossibility of total symbiosis? Furthermore, how can we be empowered to speak well about such issues when terms like “nature” or “creation” contain such ambiguities? Thoughts?
After stumbling upon this post I couldn’t help but feel both sad but not surprised at the latest that bible publishers have come up with:
The Bible is constantly used as a tool to push forward the agenda’s of particular people and now we have a bible that is pushing American Patriotism: “The American Patriot’s Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America”. Yet, because the bible is so often used to push human agenda’s, does that mean that the bible cannot offer the truest moral vision in a time in which so many of us wish to use it to prove that we are right?
I think that the bible alone cannot, but that when those who approach the bible seeking after the WORD of God that transcends the text, the bible can be the authoritative venue through which we can come to know how to live right and true lives. Since this approach to the bible requires a huge amount of humility, it means we must be ready to have aspects of ourselves both affirmed and rejected through our encounter with the God of the bible. I think that Karl Barth is a helpful dialogue partner in thinking through some of these questions. I refer to a quote from Barth that I posted on an earlier post:
“The Gospel neither requires men to engage in the conflict of religions or the conflict of philosophies, nor does it compel them to hold themselves aloof from these controversies. In announcing the limitation of the known world by another that is unknown, the Gospel does not enter into competition with the many attempts to disclose within the known world some more or less unknown and higher form of existence and to make it accessible to men. The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths. The Gospel is not the door but the hinge. The man who apprehends its meaning is removed from all strife, because he is engaged in a strife with the whole, even with existence itself. Anxiety concerning the victory of the Gospel — that is, Christian Apologetics — is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome. By the Gospel the whole concrete world is dissolved and established. It does not require representatives with a sense of responsibility, for it is as responsible for those who proclaim it as it is for those to whom it is proclaimed.”
Karl Barth — The Epistle To The Romans, pg. 35.
As Karl wants to show, the Word of God is independant from us, not ours to control and “defend”, whether through “patriotic” wars or the wars of logic. The whole concept that the bible be read through the lens of American Patriotism is I believe, in light of these thoughts, idolatry as it makes the bible into ONLY an affirmation of the shaping of America without the possibility for the rejection of much of that bloody and conflicted history. At least, this is my humble opinion. 
A while back we discussed the Atheist Ad campaigns and whether or not such an approach to “sparking” discussion was effective or not. While we certainly had differing viewpoints mentioned, what we didn’t investigate, is the validity or depth of the modern Atheist movement as seen through such authors as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, or Sam Harris. In many ways, each of these authors has pulblished their own Atheist Gospel, aimed at showing how belief in God is not only illogical, but also inherently violent to the human race.
Of course there are ardent supporters and opponents of such a movement and of such “Gospels”. Unfortunately, both of these camps of supporters and opponents often oscillate between opposing poles of fundamentalist rhetoric that tend to avoid the work of theological, philosophical, and scientific investigation that are required to helpfully and truly discuss the topic of faith in God.
However, there are some Christian theologians who have decided to take on the Atheist Gospels and do so without avoiding the work of such a task. David Bentley Hart has just recently release his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, in which he argues that Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, and Harris’s “Gospels” are essentially documents founded on “intuition” and “rhetoric” rather than a sensitive historical engagement with the Christian faith. Here is are two excerpts that I particularly enjoyed:
“I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. (4)
“…the extraordinary scientific, philosophical, and political ferment of the nineteenth century provided Christianity with enemies of unparalleled passion and visionary intensity. The greatest of them all, Fredrich Nietzsche, may have had a somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, and who had enough sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the fading of the Christian faith would bring about. Moreover, he had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was — above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion — rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy….By comparison to these men, today’s gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful, less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is.” (5, 6).
What I like about what Hart says here, especially in his comparison of the modern Atheists to Nietzsche, is that these modern Atheists tend to assume that the core of religion is violence and that the only salvageable component of the machine of religion, is this tendency to want to be nice to each other, which is kind of an incidental component of religion that we can perhaps appreciate. To make the statement that religion is at its core, violent, is to be ignorant of thousands of years of history in which human beings acted from the convictions of their faith to perform loving and admirable acts. To simply right these incidents out as incidental and fortunate variations on a system whose base is inherently violent is to assume an ignorace and historical totalitarianism that is itself violent. No doubt, Christian’s often engage in such ignorance as well, but this is just to say that they make the same mistake as the modern Atheists.
What do you think?
For those interested in thinking some more about the cross/resurrection:
An interview with Stanley Hauerwas, and a sermon by Kim Fabricius on Ben’s blog.
Since I posted the Rowan Williams quote and since we have had our podcast on the resurrection, I have been doing some more thinking about Easter and figured I would turn to Eastern Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart for some more wisdom. Here Hart explores what it might mean to reject the cross as the symbol which points us to a God whose primary mode of salvation is found in a sacrificial system that we can comprehend as producing a theoretical “resurrection” whose only meaning is found in an idea or in the mind’s meaning. Hart also then gives a counter reading on the resurrection that actually incorporates some Marxian critiques of humanity’s tendency to externalize. Hart uses this Marxian critique as a way of critiquing theology that frames ressurection as simply idea, and proceeds to then give his own quasi-Marxian defense of the bodily resurrection:
“Christian love erupts from the empty tomb, and so must always be in rebellion against all tragic “profundities”. Such considerations call even more severely into question Lash’s reading of the story of Easter as the communication, by the power of the Spirit, of Christ’s experience of transcendant “meaningfulness” in the midst of his sacrifice, his sense of the significance of his whole life as standing eternally in God’s light. There is before all else, a moral danger in Lash making Easter a secondary, speculative vantage upon what happened at Golgotha: it comes perilously close to placing his reading on the side of the pagan order of sacrifice and of its wisdom regarding the crucifixion (regarding every crucifixion). One should, first and foremost, be troubled by the way this reading makes knowledge and spiritual comfort the fruit of an annihilation of finite form; every theoretical recasting of violence is mactation, a sacrifice in the most elementary propitiatory sense. It requires a certain very refined, altogether exquisite sensibility to grasp the crucifixion in just this fashion: one must step back from the act of murder itself, enacting the partial withdrawl of theoria, to that place where truth never simply happens (as difference, as irreducible historical particularity), but where “Truth” is intuited as total light, something recollected. Such a reading invites not only Kierkegaard’s critique of contemplation’s aristocratic indolence, but the still more solvent critiques of both Nietzsche and Marx. On Lash’s reading the crucifixion becomes a spectacle in the Hegelian sense – with its convertibility between death and life, negation and spirit, death and wisdom — which means it is “true” only insofar as it has a speculative inner fold: the spectacle is always a speculum, the mirror whose specular reflex allows the self a contemplation of itself, a return to the self; and thus the crucifixion constitutes an act of speculation in the economic sense as well, which secures a return to the investment made in the surrender of the particular.” (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 387-388).
In other words, Hart is pointing to a crucial tension in the Easter story: If Christ’s death be real, but his resurrection only an idea, then Christ is not significant in his particularity as the one who died in history and also was raised in history, then Christ must simply become the abstract idea or meaning of salvation, not salvation’s particular bodily, historical form. Hart continues:
“But theology is not permitted to make the cross a place of enlightenment, or to allow it its “spectacular” singularity, because the resurrection occurs as yet another event, in excess of the totality death bounds, and so upsets the tragic balance of the scene and leaves it in a state of dramatic undecidability: Is it a kind of ending or beginning? Does Christ on the cross affect history or succumb to history’s violences? Where can the cross be aesthetically placed, how can it be seen, when the blinding radiance of the next historical event (where Christ’s history would seem to have been exhausted) has so radically altered its deployment of shadows and light? Easter forces Christian reflection out of the depths of speculative solace and back to the surface of history. Christ’s resurrection transgresses the orderly metaphysics that makes negation a tragic or dialectical moment; for theology, then, the…crucifixion is never translated into contemplative repose (self, “meaningfulness”, eleos and phobos, Geist), because the serenity of every tragic representaiton has been disrupted by a sudden, unanticipated, inassimilable declaration of divine glory. Any attempt to reinterpret the resurrection as the speculative inner fold of the crucifixion is also an attempt to moderate the aesthetic affront of Easter, so that the crucifixion may still subserve a return to the self and the Same; but within the Gospel narratives themselves Christ’s resurrection is seen as calling us not to ourselves but beyond… (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 389).
I think Hart wonderfully displays the danger to the particularity of the Christian faith if the resurrection is simply an idea. What do you think?