Dorothy Soelle on the existential origin of feminist theology

"Feminist theology arises, as does every liberation theology, from the experience of being wounded. It grows from the destruction inflicted on the lives of women, whether conceived in economic, political, social, intellectual, or psychic terms. It makes mutilations visible. It arises among women who perceive their situation and take common steps to change it, breaking out of the conventions and forms of the dominant theology and its pact with power. The pact which is made there tenders a cultural task for the church which contradicts its mission and its tradition: the church is supposed to make the victims of our situation invisible; and if this isn't possible, at least the causes of the misery should remain fatefully uncertain. Preachers may tell of Mary and Joseph but should not know the particular homeless in our own cities. They expound on the story of the paralytic and his friends, but whether those suffering from AIDS have friends, they don't know. They mention the 'hungry,' but the feminization of poverty remains outside of their horizon.

"In view of the real suffering of women, the theology and devotional practices of churches show up as strangely blind and ignorant. Among feminist women who have begun to reflect from the perspective of their wounds, there has spread astonishment concerning the dispassionate abstractness of masculine theology, boredom with biblical exegesis removed from experience and praxis, and revulsion against spiritless masculine administration within the institution. 'Therefore I ask God,' writes Meister Eckhart, 'to rid me of God.' There is no heresy but rather the petition for liberation from the prison of a language which is too small for God. Therefore I ask God my Mother--so I understand Eckhart today--to rid me of the God of men." (Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God, Augsburg-Fortress, 1995), 39-40.

Esau McCaulley says his church, the black church in America, has something to say

Yesterday, I finished Esau McCaulley's book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. IVP Academic. 2020. McCaulley's bona fides are beyond question. He has a PhD from St. Andrews. His Doktorvater is N. T. Wright. He teaches New Testament at Wheaton College. He is a priest in the ACNA. He is a black man and a Christian. This is a book McCaulley was born to write. And it is a book with a message: the South got somethin' to say.

These notes are not a book review. Rather, they are a short treatment of some of his ideas. Nevertheless, if you have never read his book, I do recommend it. The faculty and staff of my alma mater, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, read it together. That encouraged me to pick it up; it took five years to find a cheap copy bc I'm a cheapie. Plus, I am very interested in looking at the faith through the eyes of non-white people.

Chapter One: The South got Somethin' to Say

As he grew up, McCaulley found himself caught between two communities in the Black church. One of these was evangelical scholasticism and the academy. The other, social justice and the pulpits. He appreciated the serious scholarship of the former, but its papers and commentarites "displayed little concern for how biblical texts speak to the experiences of Black believers" (12). He also thought they read for a white audience, if they even made it out of the first century. "To me, it was a sign of privilege to imprison Paul and Jesus in the first century (13). But what about the social justice side? Here, scholarship was viewed with suspicion. Getting the exegesis right and whiteness have often gone hand in hegemonic hand. Wasn't exegesis the tool of white churches seeking to baptize slavery in the first place? McCaulley cedes the point but disagrees. Looking at the earliest strate of Black ecclesial leadership, he finds plenty of exegesis--and a thoroughgoing message of liberation and freedom.

As McCaulley argues, God is a liberator. Liberation erupts from God's very character, from out of and to his ontological sabbath shalom.[1] God desires freedom for his people. And his expectation is that his freed people will live lives of holiness, living out their liberation before the world. They participate in God's continual and peaceful call. Any reading of the Bible that says otherwise is in error. Scholarship and justice pick up the liberating cross together in whatever historical situation it is found and partner with one another to discern the mind of Christ for this day.

Handpicking other points of interest

McCaulley goes in for re-examing texts used historically to subdue and subjugate Black Christians. Eschatology is on his mind, the kind of eschatology that bubbles up into every living moment. Eschatology stimulates the church to act for justice and for liberation against the horizon ofeventual and certain shalom. But eschatology is also "not yet." And, in the intervening time, there is mourning.

Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, McCaulley writes, "To mourn involves being saddened by the state of the world. To mourn is to care. It is an act of rebellion against one's own sins and the sins of the world. . . A theology of mourning never allows us the privilege of apathy. . . Mourning is intuition that things are not right--that more is possible. To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is. Our politicians run on our desires by convincing us that utopia is possible here and they alone can provide it." (65) I do also like his emphasis that this mourning leads to a hope to see elements of the Kingdom of God come to be, its liberation unto justice. And that this involves telling truth. As Luther said, A theologian calls a thing what it is. "Peacemaking is a sign of God's inbreaking kingdom. . . . Through our efforts to bring peace, we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent. . . . Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God's kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish." (Ibid.)

I am caught by this: "For Zecharaiah and Elizabeth, the miracle child is John. For the African American Christian, the miracle is the Black Church born of truly miraculous circumstances and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing America to accept a truer and fuller gospel" (84). This fuller gospel is one that, while grounded in respectful and canonically comprehensive exegesis, includes the necessary hermeneutic to place those exegetic results in dialogue with today. Preaching is a public gift of the Black Church.

McCaulley reads with the end in mind. His work is eschatological. He understands the Christian vision of the future--the liberated, risen church--as one that embraces difference: difference of skin, of language, of culture. "These distinct people, cultures, and languages are eschatological everlasting. At the end, we do not find the elimination of difference. Instead the very diversity of cultures is a manifestation of God's glory. . . . Our distinctive cultures represent the means by which we give honor to God. He is honoered through the diversity of tongues singing the same song." (118) Liberation does not lead to the removal of color, thinking of people who claim to not see color. That approach to difference is well-meant, perhaps, but incorrect. "The gospel does not cancel ethnic identities.(113)"

So when McCaully approaches scripture, he considers it in its historical-grammatical context and he considers it eschatologically.[2] In the Easter light, as von Balthasar said. So, he weds the careful tools of the evangelicals with the social energy of the progressives.

Laws of restraint suggest an eschatological purpose

McCaully discusses a way of reading Biblical ethics that I found very helpful. Referencing Jesus's teaching on divorce, McCaully observes that Jesus brings ethics back to creational intent. Let's call this the creational ethic. But, Jesus acknowledges that the law does exist to restrain error. Paul does the same when he says the law is the paidagogos. The law makes pastoral sense of difficult situations. Let's call this pastoral consideration.

Applying this to the slavery question in America. The Bible's teaching around slavery is pastoral consideration. Its teachings limit the worst aspects of slavery. And, as they do their work, they erase the foundation that supports the sinful institution itself. They do this because the creational intent--the deeper ethic--is liberation-unto-freedom. God made all human beings to be his imago in the world. So the limiting effort of the law serves a temporary purpose guided by the deeper and eventually overcoming liberation of eschatological reality, in this case, a free people worshiping God's messiah together.

Scars suffered in the present do not prevent eschatological participation

Finally, there is McCaulley's discussion of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Christ is our reconciler, our liberator to shalom in the Kingdom of God. One would not have thought a eunuch could ever be liberated. Weren't his public wounds permanent? He was not only a a Gentile, but he was permanently impure by the nature of his injury. As McCulley reminds his reader: eunuch's were despised. The man suffered the injustice of castration from the community at large, and "in a culture with strictly defined gender roles, he would be seen as aberrant" (110). But the eunuch is in fact liberated. He "found hope in the shamed Messiah whose resurrection lifts those with imposed indignities to places of honor." And "The eunuch [was always] an image bearer [of God]. Christ showed the eunuch who he truly was." McCaully's point is that blackness, like castration, does not prevent Jesus's liberating act from fully delivering black men and women to wholeness, dignity, and value in the Kingdom of God, to "God's eschatological vision for the reconciliation of all things in his Son." Christ's redemption is a liberating act for all people who for whatever reason suffer indignity and shame. Christ has made a place for them all in the kingdom.

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[1] I hope one sees the divine mission underneath this mention of liberation.
[2] cf Theology Along Three Axes

Six ways the Bible contributes to philosophical ethics

Ethical philosopher Dr. Arthur F. Holmes suggests six contributions the Bible makes to philosophical ethics.

1. It gives a theological basis for our [Christian] moral obligation, in terms of our obligation to the will of God, the creator and lawgiver.
2. It gives an account of the relation of morality to God's purposes in creation, our perversion of those purposes through sin and our restoration to righteous living by the grace of God.
3. It teaches us the principles of justice and love which describe God's character and should also characterize us.
4. It reveals the moral law of God, declaring duties in many areas of human life. This is summarized in the Ten Commandments and spelled out by precept and example throughout Scripture.
5. It demonstrates that from love for God and gratitude for his mercies come the motivation and dynamic for moral living.
6. It depicts the ideals and promise of the kingdom of God that Christ came to establish, first in our hearts and lives and eventually throughout the entire world.

Holmes goes on to say that studying philosophical ethics is right for people informed by the Bible because a framework is needed for evaluating and applying its principles that arise and are applied in different times and places. "We can learn to distinguish universal and unchanging principles that transcend cultural and historical differences from case applications in culturaly variable situations." Ethics can lift itself out of "case applications" and construct a useful framework that brings consistency to today's decision making. This too allows for dialogue across the cultures of our time.

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Arthur F. Holmes. Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions. Contours of Christian Philosophy. ed. Stephen Evans. 2nd ed. InterVarsity Press. 2007. pp. 16-17.

Chuck Alley of "The Living Church" writes a short description of love

"There is not anything self-serving about God's love. God's love is not an emotion--a good or warm feeling that God has when he thinks of us--because God's love is not emotional but rational. Love is the essence of God. The supreme illustration of God's love as an enacted love is found in John 3:16 . . . . We learn that God's love was manifested in his giving for the good of everyone, regardless of whether they chose to receive the gift. . . . The love of God was revealed to us through his actions. Those actions are taken for our good and without any expectation of return. Love at its heart is an act of grace. It is not dependent upon the worthiness of its target, but simply the need of those on whom it is lavished. In addition, the quality of love is not measured by its effect upon the recipient, but rather on the intent of the lover. Love is not expressed, however, as a kind thought or good feeling toward another. It is an action taken for the best of the neighbor. If we want to love, then we must act. If we wait until we 'feel' love before putting love into action, then it is unlikely we will ever get around to loving. The rational nature of love is revealed by the fact that if we continue to act in love toward other people, we will ultimately find ourselves feeling love for them. Thus, it is not impossible for us to love our enemies or those who persecute us. In fact, love has nothing to do with liking someone. To love is to practice doing what is best for the other person--without any expectation of personal return." (Feb. 16, 2025 p. 40)

Seamus, and me, and evil makes three

So, Seumas Macdonald. He has a newsletter (which are all the rage these days), and in it, he is reading along with James K. A. Smith's On the Road with Saint Augustine. Seamus's April 24 edition quotes Smith quoting Camus and then switches to his own thoughts.

After his talk at the monastery, a priest who was an ex-revolutionary stood during a time of discussion and confronted Camus: “I have found grace, and you, Mr. Camus, I’m telling you in all modesty that you have not.” Olivier Todd, his biographer, recounts: “Camus’s only response was to smile. . . . But he said a little later, ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem of evil, and I am not getting past it.’” pp. 178-179

The question of evil is an intractable one. Where does it come from? Why is there evil? Great questions to ask, but devilishly impossible to answer. And I have two comforts in this. Firstly, I do think Christianity provides a satisfactory means for wrestling with this question. Secondly, I think we ought to suspicious of any system of thought that wraps it all up in a nice rational package, ties a bow on top, and says, "there, makes sense, doesn't it?"

----------

I like Seumas's insight that if we could really solve evil, then it would not be evil at all. As Smith writes, "To make sense of [evil], to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify the cause would mean that it has a place in the world. But then it isn’t evil. Evil is what ought not to be, the disorder of creation, the violation we protest."

This very much reminds me of what I have posted before about what "creation" means. Perhaps these nodes: the incarnation, creation, evil, are the places this drapery of life hangs down from but to which no human beings may climb (save one).

Indeed, speaking as a Christian man, I think that the Bible sets up that problem and does not answer it. Why? Because its answer comes at the end of the story. One knows one is at the end of the story when that question is answered. And one knows who the hero has been all along because only the hero can answer it. Having said this, it puts atheists and self-appointed skeptics to shame because, thinking they have skewered God’s character on a pole, they are simply repeating where we are in the story and claiming they have discovered some secret. It is no secret. It is the plot.

List of Reasons for an Old Earth

Here we go and in no particular order.

1. Evidences of natural time esp. geological and astronomical
2. Fitness of natural selection to explain and predict biological changes
3. Evidence of ancient life / fossil evidence
4. Paucity of the challenges
5. The false-friend of ID (really an attempt to resurrect the Argument from Deisgn or the Teleological Argument. These are not explanatory; we see what we want to see. 
6. The "brain weight" including contemporaries like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne as well as ancients like Augustine
7. Hermeneutics properly practiced: thinking correctly about how to read ancient documents especially according to time and genre
8. The "very good" of God / God as trustworthy
9. The goodness of matter / natural law and its necessity for confessing the incarnation, the benefit of Jesus's sacrifice, and obtaining a real hope for eschatological deliverance
10. The danger of replacing the theology of the cross with a theology of glory
11. The importance of the Book of Nature
12. Animals need to hope as well
13. The danger that bad thinking poses for the health and growth of the church.

Objections that a friend of mine raised: Radiometric dating -- when does it start? Tampering. Mt. St. Helen's rocks. Slow formation of sediment trees. Logs in Mt St. Helens. Ken Ham and his group-basis for evaluations.

Excerpts from "Matigari ma Njirungi" (The Language of Languages)

I ran across a beautiful book in a bookstore in Lexington, KY last summer. It was published by the University of Chicago and titled The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation. It is a collection of lectures by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o. His insights leapt from the page that afternoon. Here are a few that spoke to me.

This excerpt is about translation as the emancipating antidote to heirarchies of domination.

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"If we think of culture as the eyes through which a people see the world, the implications of a people being denied their language and having to use the language of [a] dominating power becomes clear. The aim and the result are to make the dominated people look at themselves and their place in the world through the eyes of the dominant social forces. That's why language control has always been at the center of imperial, cultural, and psychological conquests. . . . The language of conquest becomes the language of being. A people so subjected may even come to see their own language as that of non-being. Therefore, for such peoples, language emancipation is a necessary component of psychological emancipation. For, in reality there is no language which is inherently more of a language than any other language; all languages, big and small, are equal in their potentialities.

"If you know all the languages of the world and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, and add all other languages to it, that is empowerment.

"In reality it is impossible for any person to know all the languages in their own country, let alone in the world. This is where the art of translation comes in. Translation makes dialogue between languages and cultures and different histories easier and more enriching. I would like to see translation elevated to center stage in relations between languages and cultures. . . . Linguistic emancipation anywhere is central to the emancipation of the mind everywhere (60-61)."

"Hierarchy as a conception of being is more clearly reflected in the relationship between languages. . . . All languages in the world, big and small, have a lot to contribute to the enrichment of our common human culture. . . . Languages and cultures can and should relate in terms of network, not heierarchy. And a network is really a system of give-and-take between equals. Translation is central to this entire system. . . . So I'd like to end by rephrasing Aime Césaire's maxim that cultural contact is the oxygen of civilization with a statement to the effect that language contact through translation is the real oxygen of civilization (70)."

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This excerpt is about language as the cultivation and humanization of nature.

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"Humans translate the language and the laws of nature into those of nurture. Humans are of nature, like plants, animals, air, say ecology, and yet they stand outside it, as it were, act on it and reproduce themselves and give rise to processes which are clearly not identical with the nature of which they are a part. And yet, what humans have achieved is an extension of the various aspects of nature. The most wonderful technological tools are an extension of the human hand. The farthest-seeing telescope is an extention of the eye as are the speediest vehicles--rockets and spaceships for instance--extentions of the leg, the act of walking. And computers--don't they try to imitate the human brian? So the translation of the language of nature into their own tongues has enabled humans to create their nurture out of nature. The nurtural world of the human is an endless reproduction of what obtains in the natural nature and even the word 'cultivate' gives rise to the concept of culture as a social practice. Agriculture and social culture have a common root in the notion of cultivating nature, itself a process of translation from one environment to another.

"In short, the humanization of nature is itself a process of translation and bespeaks of the centrality of translation in the make-up of our human community. Aristotle said that poetry was more universal than history since history dealt with the particulars while poetry dealt with what could be. But there is a way in which we can say that the subject of translation is the universals contained in the particulars of nature and social experience (35)."

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And now the theology:

As I read the above, I cannot help but think of the major places in the Bible where language matters: the Tower of Babel, the miracle at Pentecost, and the image of the church as a numberless multitude of tribes and languages from John's Apocalypse. The first comes from the ancient world. The last comes from the world to be. And the harvest festival is our world today. I want to apply Ngugi wa Thiong'o's meditations to each and see what comes out.

Language and the World that Was

The Dissolution of the Seminaries

Between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII dissolved all monasteries, convents, priories, and other religious institutions--about fifteen thousand of them across England and Wales. The act unemployed one out of every fifty persons in the population, not to mention gutting the nation's centers of education (literacy and the arts) and charity (especially healthcare and the support of the poor). What had stood for centuries was pulled down in four years. I am tempted to think of it as a disaster--and especially where libraries were lost. But to peoples long fed up with the hoarded riches and power of the ecclesiastical estates, they had it coming. As Roman Catholic historian David Knowles said, "There were far too many religious houses in existence in view of the widespread decline of the fervent monastic vocation, and that . . . the monks possessed too much of wealth and of the sources of production both for their own well-being and for the material good of the economy." When I look at the news coming out of the seminaries and churches of the West, I wonder if what is going on today is a lot like dissolution. And I wonder, did we have it coming too?

Find more statistics at Statista

This graph has a tale to tell: the number of people who are members of a church is declining against a rising number of people who aren't members.[1] The loss of a tithing populace affects churches' abilities to support full-time clergy, which changes how the pastoral ministry is done. And that changes seminary enrollment and the seminary system. Fifty seven percent of schools in the Association for Theological Schools (ATS) report declining enrollment. And for those who do enroll, online work and shorter educational times are in demand. People do not want to take on educational debt and especially when they cannot expect to be supported in full-time in ministry. Therefore, the gold-standard three-year Master of Divinity degree is being replaced by one- or two-year Master of Arts degrees. Seminaries are intentionally dissolving themselves of expensive-to-maintain housing, dormitories, and land and embracing online education. I hardly know what to call it, but I can say that the quiet library stacks, the late-night stress in book-crowded carols, and the mental hum of people literally becoming scholars: all that is going. Maybe we did have it coming.

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[1] In their book The Great Dechurching (Zondervan Academic, 2023) authors Michael Graham and Jim Davis say that America is seeing in real time “the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history,” with some 40 million people—1 in 6 Americans—having stopped going to church in the past thirty years. “That’s a lot of people who have changed their rhythms and habits,” Graham said. The losses in church going are greater in number than the people who came to faith during the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and all the Billy Graham crusades combined.

[2] For a bit of extra credit, watch this lecture about the dissolution of the monasteries by Massolit. The name of the lecturer is unlisted.

The BDAG Flâneur: Setting Out

A flâneur \FLAN-uhr\ is an urban stroller, lounger, saunterer, or loafer. The word initially carried the idea of wasting time. But with the rise of especially Parisian urban life, it skipped a step. A flâneur wandered through crowds and streets with a detached but aesthetically attuned observation.[1] Honoré de Balzac described flânerie \FLAN-er-ee\, the verbal form, as "the gastronomy of the eye." Victor Fournel, in Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), said there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape like "a mobile and passionate photograph" ("un daguerréotype mobile et passioné") of urban experience.

BDAG, unlike a flâneur, cannot walk or observe. It is a book--a lexicon. It is the standard lexicon for scholars interested in the literature of the New Testament. Its full title is A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. It is based in the work of Walter Bauer, but its present revised edition is edited by Frederick William Danker. Put the initials of the two names together and you get BDAG.

If you are a student or scholar in Biblical studies or in the history of Christianity or Second Temple Judaism, you save your pennies to buy this one-thousand-page tome. And you are encouraged to use it. But, at least in my case, I forget to do so. The entries are dense, and I don't have it in electronic form so I have to be with it to use it--no click and it appears a la Logos. Yet, BDAG has been on my mind of late, and I have hit upon an idea.

What if I adopted the relaxed-yet-observant curiosity of the flâneur and go strolling among its pages? Entries would be like stands in a marketplace and shops along a boulevard. What curiosities and sidewalk insights are hidden among its citations? Time, then, to don my shoes, coat, and hat and walk out of doors and into the streets.

*** ***

Α, α, τό first letter of the Gk. alphabet alpha Even at this, the very first entry, there are goods to be had. Already we discover letters used as numbers: α' = 1. β' = 2. Perhaps there was no separate system of counting, though mathematics was already well established in the world. The earliest mathematician is Thales of Miletus in fifth century BCE. But math itself goes much further back into time, to the Babylonians and Sumerians. And before them, to the hunter gatherers of the ancient world as evidence by the marks along the Ishango bone.

Civilizations which use letters as numbers, such as the pre-modern Hebrews, limited themselves greatly, as such systems are not given to advanced arithmatic. What such a scheme is good for, however, is gematria where words mean numbers and numbers words. Gematria is a hot bed for kabbalistic mysticism. It is, therefore, no surprise to discover that alpha and omega signify the beginning and the end and everything in between. "The two came to designate the universe and every kind of divine and superhuman power." The alphabet became a secret bag of spells, a master incantation. To know the true name of anything is to know its secrets and its power, and isn't the alphabet the very storehouse of all true names. It is a metaphysical loom joining life, breath, and sound into a technology of infinite combination.

The last gift of this entry is the first Christian use of alpha in the Sartor Square: a five-line palindrome, rendered in Latin, of five words:

When the five-letter Latin words are read in line order horizontally or vertically or backwards or forwards or bottom to top or top to bottom, they mean, The sower, Arepo, holds or works the wheels with care. Another translation is: He who works the plow sows the seed.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have found Sartor squares all over Europe. The earliest example is from the house of Publius Paquius Proculus at Pompeii. And many have been found in overtly Christian locations. The square is found engraved on the facade of the door in the 752 CE Abbey of St.Peter Ad Oratorium near Capestrano, Italy. It is copied in an 822 Carolingian Bible. And in the 1100s, it was inscribed on the masonry of the Church of St. Laurent near Ardeche, France and in the Keep of the Castle of Loches, France. Locations like these had scholars believing that it was a kind of secret symbol for the Christian community, as its letters can be arranged to spell out Pater Noster. But scholars today believe the square comes from earlier in history and was assumed into Christian praxis. There is nothing distinctively Christian in the anagram itself after all. People have arranged its letters to form many other things, including prayers to Satan and formulas for exorcism.

Ἀβαδδών, ὀ The name of the ruling angel in hell. The relevant material is from Revelation 9.11 "ἔχουσιν ἐπ’ αὐτῶν βασιλέα τὸν ἄγγελον τῆς ἀβύσσου· ὄνομα αὐτῷ Ἑβραϊστὶ Ἀβαδδών καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἑλληνικῇ ὄνομα ἔχει Ἀπολλύων." Abbadon is from the Hebrew, as it says, and Apollyon, the Greek, a derivation, says BDAG, from Apollo, source of plagues. One question I have is about the reference to Psalm 87:11. This presents a mystery to me, as Psalm 87 only has seven verses. Now, the Douay-Rheims (1899) has nineteen verses. So, there must be some kind of text critical thing going on. Yet, Calvin and Matthew Henry only comment on seven, and even Google does not know.

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[1] Lots of stealing from Wikipedia going on in this paragraph.

A quick-and-dirty bibliography on Satan

"The Satan of popular imagination, God’s cosmic archenemy and the source of evil, has a long and complex history. Although scholars typically locate this history within the context of ancient Jewish and Christian imaginations, these origins are complicated by a number of factors. Among these are the various uses of the Hebrew noun satan to describe both earthly and cosmic figures and the multiple aliases referring to God’s cosmic opponent in Jewish and Christian literature, including Belial or Beliar, Mastema, Beelzebul, Lucifer, and the Devil, and others. The roots of the character Satan are typically discussed in relation to the Hebrew Bible, although the image of the cosmic opponent emerges most clearly within the writings of early Judaism, in the literature of the Second Temple period (c. 515 BCE–70 CE). Many scholars associate the emergence of this figure with ancient Near Eastern influence on early Judaism. Others highlight it as a response to the problem of evil; Satan and his retinue effectively distance God from acts difficult to reconcile with beliefs about God’s nature. Still others locate the emergence of Satan and satan figures within the context of social movements, arguing that the character of Satan serves as a tool for constructing communal identity and defining opposition.

"Satan, or the Devil or Beelzebul, as a cosmic opponent also plays an important role within the literature of the emerging Christian movement, especially the New Testament texts. In the Gospels the cosmic battle between God and Satan imagined in early Judaism is interpreted in relation to Jesus, whose defeat of Satan is evidenced through exorcism, healing, and resurrection. Although some interpreters contend that the depiction of Jesus as exorcist reflects the historical Jesus’ understanding of his ministry as the eschatological defeat of Satan, others maintain that Jesus’ conflict with Satan should be viewed in terms of his opposition to the Roman Empire. The question of whether or to what extent references to Satan and evil powers should be read as describing political, social, and other human forces permeates scholarship on Paul and Revelation as well.

"Scholarship on Satan appears in a variety of forms, including wide-ranging treatments of the character of Satan across literary and historical contexts; exegetical examinations of specific texts using the terms satan, Belial, and so on; and discussions of Satan in relation to demons, the problem of evil, serpent imagery, and other elements. Many of the latter are intertwined explicitly with theological concerns and questions." ~ from the Oxford Bibliography

Old Testament Biblical Theology

John Walton on Baker Book House blog: view of the accuser in Job.

John Walton on the “Exegetically Speaking” podcast discussing Isaiah 14 and the fall of Satan.

Michael Heiser. Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness. Lexham Press. 2020.

• An interview w Heiser on the Apologetics Canada podcast
• A JETS review of the book
• Heiser is probably the author of this short article on Bible names for Satan on the Lexham Press blog as well as this one

Archie T. Wright. Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers. Fortress Press. 2022.

• Transcript of Heiser’s interview with Archie Wright
• Audio podcast interview with "New Books in Biblical Studies" June 28, 2002 episode 91
• Presentation on June 27, 2020, as part of a Virtual Conference on the NT in Archaeology and Ancient Judaism
• Enoch Seminar video discussion/review on Dr. Wright's book. Feb 9, 2023.

Ryan E. Stokes. The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy. Eerdman's. 2019.

• Review in Reading Religion
• "The Weird Christian Podcast" interview

Dr. Miriam Brand on the origin of sin and evil in the Second Temple period

John Day writes on the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Its Background for The Bible and Interpretation

Political Theology
Adam Kotsko. The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press. 2016.

• An interview with Kotsko
• An academic review of this book

Bibliographies
“Satan” in Oxford Bibliographies

A scholar’s bibliography of the subject in the literature of the last few decades

Comment on AI and Theology

The entry "What CHATGPT Reveals about the Collapse of Political/Corporate Support for Humanities/Higher Education" on the blog CrookedTimber.org caught my eye. The changes every field is going through as algorithms become more and more capable is fascinating, and I was reading the various comments. Then I came across this one from Alex SL:

I am a scientist, but I do not to reject the humanities (or, as we would have said back in Germany, the social sciences) as empty nonsense. I believe they generate knowledge, and knowledge worth having.

However, there is clearly a bit of an issue in the way they are taught. I started getting that impression already in what would here be called high school, when it seemed that language teachers forced us to over-analyse novels and plays in a way that seemed rather implausible. But the real eye-opener was the big plagiarism scandal around German politicians in 2011, when it occurred to me that such a scandal would simply not be possible in the natural sciences full stop.

These were by training all historians, economists, political scientists, etc, whose dissertation process consisted entirely of reading thirty books and then writing the thirty-first on the exact same topic. They took the short-cut of copying and pasting some text from their sources and then cosmetically changing a few words, and that was plagiarism. But if they had rearranged sentences more thoroughly, they would have fairly obtained their degrees, and there would not have been any scandal; and, crucially, the amount of new knowledge generated would have been exactly the same, i.e., zilch, nada, zero.

In science, however, a graduate student would have been expected to generate new data. The problem to watch out for is not plagiarism, but manipulation of data to make them more “interesting”.

To me, that points to the solution. What chatGPT cannot do, what no mind will ever be able to do without going out into the lab or into the field and run its own surveys, digs, and experiments, is generate new insights that aren’t in its training set. Surely that is a thing that is still possible to achieve in economics, archaeology, social sciences, anthropology, linguistics, etc.? And if a field cannot have that hope, then one would really have to have a conversation about whether it is something worth teaching. (Whispering: “theology”.)

Sollereder 3: The Philosophical Context

In this fundamental chapter of God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering, Bethany Sollereder reviews the state of contemporary theodicy particularly as it addresses non-human suffering. She excludes arguments focused only on human suffering or theologies that evade the question altogether, meaning they argue that animals do not suffer or they reduce the power or goodness of God or they retreat into inscrutable agnosticism. What remains are contemporary theodicies that generally adopt arguments that make evil necessary to produce the kind of goods in creation which God desires. Such arguments are constructed from strategic options that can be grouped into three categories of good-harm analyses (GHA):

• Property-consequence GHAs: a consequence of the existence of a good, as a property of a particular being or system, is the possibility that possession of this good leads to it causing harms.
• Developmental GHAs: the good is a goal which can only develop through a process which includes the possibility (or necessity) of harm. [These can be further divided into instrumental or by-product varieties of developmental GHAs.]
• Constitutive GHAs: The existence of a good is inherently, constitutively inseperable from the experience of harm or suffering.

Property-consequence GHAs

The main idea of this strategy is nomic regularity or the law-abiding nature of the universe. The goods of such a system include rationality and predictability, including the ability to make meaningful choices. Sure, if you are clumsy or unlucky, a rock will fall on your foot or a forest fire will kill dozens of birds in their nests. But a cosmic order also provides for natural systems that support and produce life and for moral and practical goodness.

Sollereder is not buying it, though. Can those goods not be achieved in a manner that avoids suffering? Is listing such goods a way of avoiding listing their cost in uncountable deaths? The math so often is done without considering animal life. And consideration is made for groups but not for individuals (or between individuals: what about the suffering of this individual over that one?) Harms occur along an imbalance that cannot be righted. Nevertheless, Sollereder chooses a way forward. “I will [argue] later," she says, "that nomic regularity gives non-human animals the chance to develop skills and abilities, to ‘selve’ and form themselves in ways that would be unavailable to them without nomic regularity, even if the present order does cause suffering” (49).

More to come . . .

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Previous articles in this series

1. Leaving the Courtroom
2. The Bible and the Fall

Mimesis: a short definition

Mimesis \muh-MEE-sis\ (n.) Gk. μιμησις (imitation) from μιμεισθαι (to imitate) + μἰμος (an actor): In the history of aesthetic philosophy or artistic theory, mimesis is the human attempt to imitate or reproduce reality. Rather than obscure knowledge, mimesis allows aspects of the outer and inner world to be better observed and understood. Mimesis is an important theme in the work of René Girard. It is also a theme in the writings of Maximus the Confessor and Dionysius the Areopagite. Aesthetic philosophers such as Theodore Adorno and William Benjamin praised language as the chief mimetic instrument. By it better than any other media, human beings appropriate, interrogate, and re-interpret themselves vis-a-vis others and their worlds. Similarly, Gerard wrote, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.” We have instinctual responses to help us choose the objects that meet our most basic needs—when we’re hungry, we seek food; when we’re cold, we want warmth. But there is an entire universe of desires for which we have no instinctual basis for choosing one object or another. For these objects of desire, Girard saw that the most important factor in determining what we want are the desires of other people, or what he called our “models of desire.” Fr. Stephen Freeman, blogging about Gerard's thoughts on mimetic desire, argued that the fundamental engine of mimesis is shame. To avoid shame, human beings imitate one another and blend in. Imitation feels safe. But, he continues, imitation can also be fueld by a desire to connect with others.

Communion itself carries within it a desire to be “like” the other, to experience union in as complete a manner as possible. However, healthy communion does not entail the loss of identity or being swallowed by (or swallowing) the other. The ultimate model for communion is found in the Holy Trinity. We are able to confess that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, but we continue to confess that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, etc. Perfect communion can say, “If you have seen me you have seen the Father,” and, “I only do those things that I see the Father doing.” And yet, the Son is not the Father.

"I find little use for a deity who lets me decide my fate."

I read the following excerpt from the book Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Eerdman's 2016) by Dale C. Allison, Jr., Richard J. Dearborn professor of New Testament studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, on the blog "Eclectic Orthodoxy." As a young man, Dr. Allison almost died in a car accident. From living in that momento mori for several decades, he wrote this little book of honesty at 185 pages. It captures something of where my soul is right now. Here is the excerpt:

***

"But what about the now popular conceptualization of hell as radical freedom, as God letting us choose what we want, including a godless existence? It’s problematic, although it makes for effective apologetics. For if we hate hell, then learn that it’s simply the unavoidable consequence of individual liberty and self-actualization —things we prize so highly—then perhaps hell computes after all. We can think of our freedom to reject God as on a par with all those other freedoms that we can’t do without—academic freedom and economic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association, and so on.

"Yet when human freedom is front and center, God moves to the wings. In the modern myth, our names are on the marquee, and our destiny is up to us. What we make of ourselves here determines what we are to become there.

"Should we, however, desire starring roles and such Pelagian freedom? Although not an old-fashioned Calvinist, I think it’s obvious that all of us are broken creatures, that we’re selfish and self-deluded, and that we constantly abuse our freedom, which is so often illusory. Because of this, I find little use for a deity who lets me decide my fate. I don’t want to be my own God. Nor do I want the Supreme Being to respect my alleged autonomy no matter what, just as I don’t want the police to respect the autonomy of the despondent guy threatening to jump off the top of the high-rise. I rather desire, for myself and for everyone else, rescue. Our decisions need to be undone, not confirmed. We need to be saved despite ourselves. Even if we’re allowed, in our freedom, to kindle the fires of hell and to forge its chains, isn’t it God’s part to break our chains and put out the fire?

"If the libertarian hell doesn’t give God enough to do, it’s also, perhaps, simplistic in its binary logic. It posits that people move either toward God and so toward heaven or away from God and so toward hell. But, as the Scarecrow says to Dorothy, “People do go both ways.”

"Human beings aren’t unidirectional vectors but bundles of contradictions. Saints are sinners; sinners are saints. Everyone is Jekyll; everyone is Hyde. And everyone is in between. We advance toward God one moment and sound retreat the next, and most of the time we’re stuck in the middle.

We’re confused and divided in ourselves, or rather fragmented. Our wills, our desires, our faith are always veering off course. We don’t just fail to do the good that we will; we just as often fail to do the bad that we will. Who travels the straight and narrow, whether up or down? The modern hell, however, posits that, in the world to come, we keep moving in the direction we’re already headed. Our momentum, so to speak, carries us up to heaven or down to hell. Yet what if, like me, you keep moving in circles?"

Sollereder 2: The Bible and The Fall

Bethany Sollereder is trying to make sense of God's goodness as creator in the light of natural selection. In the previous chapter, she explained her overall goal and defined some terms. In this chapter, she wants to dismantal cultural readings of the curse language in Genesis three. Why? Because such language has been used to support a cosmic or ontological fall. If such readings can be be upended, nature can be treated as unfallen. That would clear the way for a theodicy that includes natural selection.

I want to argue against the reading that finds a justification for the theology of a cosmic fall . . . [so that] apart from human sin and its direct effects, the world remains God's "very good" creation. . . . [And therefore] the realities of death and suffering are not unambiguously condemned as irreconcilable with God's goodness. (13)

What is meant by fall?

What do Christians mean when they talk about a fall?[1] Turns out, several things. Sollereder groups them into event-based fall theories, such as a human or satanic fall, and mysterious fallenness theories, such as the cosmic fall. Event-based theories are relational; sin enters the word through willful disobedience. The cosmic fall is not a direct but indirect result; it is a punishment for disobedience. Because of it, the cosmos suffers natural evils. Dividing the types of fall into groups is necessary to peel off and, hopefully, disprove the cosmic fall while leaving the human and satanic falls intact.[2] "If it can be shown that the non-human creation is considered uncorrupted at any point in real history by [scripture], the primordial fall theories [read: mysterious fallenness] will face a serious challenge" (14).

Before advancing further, let me reproduce her description of the human and satanic falls in order to highlight their antimony to the thick community of shalom called flourishing in the previous chapter.

The human fall, sometimes called the "relational fall," refers to the event that marks the entrance of sin into the world through human action. The effect of the human fall is the severing of harmonious relationship between human persons and God, between one person and other people, and between humans and the non-human creation. However, apart from the direct result of human sinful action in the world, such as pollution or exploitation of natural resources, the human fall does not independently affect the wider cosmos . . . In the same way, the satanic fall refers to the event of some of the heavenly host deciding to rebel against God and becoming fallen angels. The satanic fall was primordial, meaning that it was in effect from the very origin of physical creation. (Ibid)

Does the Curse of Genesis 3 Require a Cosmic Fall?

The Curse on Childbearing. Sollereder begins her examination of Genesis 3:14-19 by choosing one particular curse, the curse on childbearing. The idea is to show not only that tradition has read it incorrectly, but that a fresh examination yields better data. The traditional way of reading the curse on childbearing is that, because of Eve's sin, the act of childbirth would now be painful due to an actual physiological change. What may have been painful before is now severe. But we know today, she says, that the pain of childbirth is the result of physics, not an alteration to the poorer of a once-better design. Nevertheless, an examination of the Hebrew suggets a better reading than has been available in English translations. Nowhere else do the two words used refer to the pain of childbirth; there are other words for that. The kind of pain these words convey is emotional. Children born now will enter a world of difficulty, uncertainty, and, yes, pain. "Genesis 3 makes no claims at all about the origins of physical labor pains, but only of the sorrow-filled world into which children are born" (25). In this one part of the curse, (a) no physiological/ontological change is required and (b) the pain of the curse is disvalue created by social alienation and violence, not natural evil. And there is also hope: hope that birth and life will go on, fulfilling the creation mandate, and hope that sin itself will one day be dealt with as well.

The Curse on the Ground Sollereder also addresses the curse of the ground. "And to the man [God] said, 'Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, "You shall not eat of it," cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life" (Gen. 3.17). The Hebrew here in God's address to Adam is paralleled in God's later address to Noah in Genesis 5.29. Noah is prophecied to bring a relief of this curse for humankind. And, after the flood, when Noah is offering a thanksgiving sacrifice to God, God says, "I will never again curse the ground because of humans." God is not here talking about the flood, but about the curse on the land. Adam's curse and Noah's relief form an inclusio. What Adam wrought, Noah relieved.

The removal of the curse [on the ground] means that nature is fully alive once again, fully green and vibrant. Now there is no fallen creation, no dark side to nature because of human sin. Nature is free of the curse, liberated to become lush, green and plentiful."[3]

Sollereder's case is made that there is no cosmic or ontological fall in the curse texts of Genesis. There remains now only to address Paul's interpretation of the status of the ground in Romans chapter eight.

Romans 8

Romans 8.18-23 is often cited as a prooftext that joins the event-based fall of human beings and a cosmic or ontological fall of nature.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time (τὰ παθήματα τοῦ νῦν καιροῦ) are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility (τῇ ματαιότητι), not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor (πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν), and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

I have never heard this passage interpreted formally or casually where it did not cement a human and natural fall; this text exists and therefore nature is fallen and yet-unredeemed--an eschatological passage. Sollereder references a marginal (though Richard Bauckham and Gordon Moo are fans) reading of the text where συστενάζει and συνωδίνει, rather than being read together in a hendiadys, "groaning in labor," should be read separately, "groaning" and "trevailing." The tradition appealed to by this change is a Biblical motif of the earth going into mourning, a mourning based on suffering at the hands of sinful human beings. "The world is made subject (by God) to matoites, to a frustrated state where the world displays the 'ineffeciveness of that which fails to attain its goal.'"[4] Nature can suffer without a fall because human beings are fallen. In parallel, nature flourishes when human beings flourish. Paul's statement does not necessitate a cursed creation, only one continually traumatized and victimized.

God and Nature's Violence

There is another argument going on in this chapter about God and violence. Examining the primordial state before creation in Genesis 1, Sollereder interacts with the Chaoskampf tradition about whether Yahweh was in combat with or ruled over original chaos or the flood or Tiamat or satanic forces etc.[5] The argument is close, and her interlocutors come, oddly, not from ANE people but from Openness theologians, e.g. Gregory Boyd of God at War. In the argument is the entire point of the book: God can be good and natural selection be what it is. So although it does not take up majority of the chapter, it is no less an important part of the overall argument. Here's where she winds up:

Chaos has [not] in any way inhibited God's creative endeavor. Instead, . . . even the waters and the darkness form a necessary part of creation. The (literally) dark and dangerous elements of creation were left precisely because they were good and useful--fit for the purposes of God's very good creation" (17).

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Previous Posts in this Series: Sollereder 1: Leaving the Courtroom

[1] Sollereder does not like this term "fall" because it presupposes a height to fall from, an Augustinian fall from moral perfection.

[2]] "The view that the fall of Satan had no effect on the goodness of the world was held by most Christian thinkers during the Patristic period" (37n8).

[3] Norman Habel, The Birth, the Curse and the Greening of the Earth: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1-11 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), 111.

[4] Quoting C. E. B. Cranfield.

[5] p. 39n53: The refusal to see chaos in the creation narratives is not . . . a recent phenomenon: it was characteristic of the Patristics (Clement and Hippolytus), and many post-enlightenment writers as well (Herder). [Rebecca] Watson [Chaos Uncreated (Walter de Gryter, 2005) also adds that "the association of the supposed 'Chaoskampf' theme with creation seems not to be original or central in the Hebrew Bible." (379).

Theology along Three Axes

Theology is stretched across a frame of three sides. Let me illustrate, using election:

1. Theological ideas consist coordinately along three axes: a horizontal (neighbor, X, abscissa), a vertical (God, Y, ordinate), and a Z-axis (eschatology, Z, applicate).
2. The doctrine of creation gives pride of place to the vertical axis.
3. Soteriology, because it is a branch of theology, exists along these three coordinates.
4. Y: with the Reformed tradition, I assert the mystery of divine election under the lordship of the Spirit and the inability of human beings to savingly believe of themselves.
5. X: There is no salvation without ethics / faith without works is dead. A person's "heart, soul, mind, and strength" is necessary for saving faith to exist.
6. Z: The salvation of individuals and of all things may begin in history but it always on the move to its apotheosis in the next age. Jesus's liberating act results in a dim-but-restored, imaging priesthood today that will be John's image of the worshipping church triumphant tomorrow.

faith is a creaturely knowing

I am just finishing C. Stephen Evans Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith (IVP, 1985) and, in a concluding chapter about faith and religious pluralism, I discovered something worth putting down. Evans is exploring how people believe. Hegel-like, he demarcates two opposing poles which he calls fideism and foundationalism, and then he bisects them with a solution which I call hermeneutical knowing. I have dealt with all of these topics before in this blog, but there is something clear about the way Evans puts it out there. I want to get down his definitions.

foundationalism. Earlier in the book, Evans called this option neutralism, which he said is a desire to be objective in everything--a desire that critiques religious faith, saying religion lacks objectivity. It is too involved. Foundationalists want every stone to be so certain as to be unassailable. This, they say, is reasonable, and faith, because it gets involved, is unreasonable. Evans says foundationalism can take various forms. What all of them share is a deep avoidance of risk.

In [foundationalism's] empiricist form it demands that we rely solely on objective facts in determining our beliefs (Descartes). In its rationalist form it asks that we begin with basic premises which are self-evident to reason. In all its forms foundationalism is an attempt to eliminate subjectivity--and risk--from the knowing process. . . . It is a "quest for certainty" . . . [and] not merely certainty but objective certainty in which the individual makes no risky commitments.

The foundationalist can only engage in critical thinking if he feels it is impartial and unbiased. This is a high bar that, when it is critically examined, cannot support its own committments. Nevertheless, I like what he says a bit later about people liking foundationalism because it keeps out supersition and nonsense. And, frankly, that is me. Recall a two-post series I did some years ago decrying the weakening of science's grip on the public square for the crazy that might force its way in. But I see now that this was reactionary. A weakened foundationalist grip doesn't mean the way is open to blind belief (in anything and everything). I hadn't thought about hermeneutical knowing. But, first, fideism.

fideism. Fideism puts the all-or-nothing not in reason, like the foundationalist, but in belief itself. Only the believer can see the truth. Fideism makes faith a precondition of knowledge. Therefore, the believer herself cannot engage reason or argument to defend or evangelize for her faith because there is no common ground between outsider and insider.

The attitude of the fideist resembles . . . the attitude of some orthodox Marxists, who dismiss the criticisms of Marxism made by non-Marxist economists, political scientists, and philosophers. The Marxist reasons that these people are committed to the economic status quo and that their criticism are therefore merely an idological smokescreen which hides economic self-interest. If a Marxist holds to this position universally in a rigid a priori manner, he eliminates any true dialog between Marxists and non-Marxists. The orthodox Marxist loses the benefit of criticism which might enable him to improve his theories. He shuts himself up in a sterile "world of the committed" and thereby loses the chance to show non-Marxists that Marxism really does provide a superior framework for interpreting political and economic events. In the long run his party-line theories . . . are accepted only by those who find it expedient to do so, and by those who know no alternatives. (19,20)

Evans goes on to talk about how this hobbles any ability to negotiate between religious options. And he says that the fideist overestimates dogmatically the impact of unbelief. Because, to the fideist, reason is so twisted by unbelief, at least where religion and morals are concerned, there is no reason for an unbeliever to evaluate a religious claim. It must be believed first and only then may it be evaluated. (But what if God wanted people to think critically about religious and moral questions?)

hermeneutical knowing. Evans says that there is a lot of space between fideism and foundationalism, space where reasonable judgments can and do come into play. Historians, for example, cannot retreat to either pole but must make their case based on careful observation and critical methodology. Qualified interpretation (such a peer review) provide an answer to my fear of the crazies, and it opens the door for moral and religious argument and to the evaluation of dogma and experiences claimed by religions and ideologies. Key to this, says Evans, is the willingness of faith to be self-critical. An interpretive judgment is reasonable when it can survive the process of critical testing. He suggests a basic criteria (169):

1. Logical consistency. Does the system of beliefs contradict itself?
2. Coherence. This is more than bare logical consistency, which is simply the absence of contradiction. Coherence is positive harmony, a fitting-together of beliefs into a coherent whole.
3. Factual adequacy. Does the belief system account for all the facts?
4. Intellectual fertility. Does a belief system give rise to new discoveries and insights, suggest new illuminating patterns, call one's attention to unnoticed dimensions of experience?

There is, then, a cumulative case, a building up of evidence born of the hermeneutical spiral, which achieves evaluative reasonableness. And as for the charge that because religions require full committment they usurp themselves, Evans points out that many things also do that: a program of exercise, a commitment to AAA or a model of therapy, a marriage vow. All of these require wholehearted commitment from the outset to achieve success. (I'm left to wonder where Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum "faith seeking understanding, fits into all of this.)

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• All That From a Book Review!
• Putting the Doctrine of Revelation under Pneumatology
• More Thinking About Purity Circles and Hermeneutics' Constant Bickering
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Lambeth's new model isn't pretty, but it's right

The Fifteenth Lambeth Conference ended at Canterbury Cathedral just a few days ago from this writing. There was much to celebrate about the conference. Even having the conference is worth celebrating! Deep disagreements over human sexual identity and practice have torn at the unity of the Anglican Communion for years. And even now, delegates from several conservative African diocese did not attend. This conference tried very hard to bracket that disagreement. There is a lot for the worldwide church to do. And, to a large degree, the many delegates were able to do that. But not wholly. The sore points of division cannot just be ignored. To his credit, Archbishop of Canterbury, the most reverend and right honored Justin Welby, understood this. And, in three addresses to the delegates, he admitted frankly that the communion was not whole. In his remarks on the Lambeth Call for Human Dignity, Welby said,

For the large majority of the Anglican Communion the traditional understanding of marriage is something that is understood, accepted and without question, not only by Bishops but their entire Church, and the societies in which they live. For them, to question this teaching is unthinkable, and in many countries would make the church a victim of derision, contempt and even attack. For many churches to change traditional teaching challenges their very existence.

For a minority, we can say almost the same. They have not arrived lightly at their ideas that traditional teaching needs to change. They are not careless about scripture. They do not reject Christ. But they have come to a different view on sexuality after long prayer, deep study and reflection on understandings of human nature. For them, to question this different teaching is unthinkable, and in many countries is making the church a victim of derision, contempt and even attack. For these churches not to change traditional teaching challenges their very existence.

So let us not treat each other lightly or carelessly. We are deeply divided. That will not end soon. We are called by Christ himself both to truth and unity.

Dr. Ian Paul, writing on not only Welby's remarks and on the state of discussion throughout the conference sees emerging two different models of unity. And it is these models that I want to highlight in this post. The first model of unity is the historic understanding of the Anglican communion, with its high degree of communion, a thick community, and its historic pattern of faith. This communion Catholicism talked about "living 'in communion with autonomy and accountability'" and being "enabled to be conformed together to the mind of Christ" as churches "bound together 'not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference' and of the other instruments of Communion." This was understood to entail a commitment on the part of each member church of the Communion "to have regard for the common good of the Communion in the exercise of its authority" (3.2.1) and "to act with diligence, care and caution in respect of any action which may provoke controversy, which by its intensity, substance or extent could threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission." Welby's remarks, however, have turned the communion toward another definition of unity called autonomous inclusivism.

In autonomous inclusivism each Province of the Anglican Communion is autonomous and called to live interdependently. It seeks "faithfulness to God in richly diverse cultures, distinct human experiences, and deep disagreements." Quoting Dr. Paul at length here:

The opening declaration [began] with the astonishing statement that "We believe in God who is both three and one, who holds difference and unity in the heart of God’s being, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit" and then connects this to ecclesiology by claiming "Our differences embodied in the Anglican Communion both challenge and deepen our experience of God in the other. As we join in God’s mission of reconciliation through Jesus and in the power of the Spirit, our differences are celebrated and redeemed, as we are made whole in the body of Christ. In that diverse whole, we more fully reflect the image of God". The theological statement represents a serious, arguably heretical, error in relation to the doctrine of God while the ecclesiological application of this seems to make difference and diversity central without drawing any distinction between types of difference, particularly the difference between truth and error. This may help explain the new "Many . . . Other" and "walking together . . . despite our deep disagreement” wordings in the Human Dignity call in relation to sexuality.

This call, if accepted by the Lambeth Conference presided over by Archbishop Justin six years later, effectively says "those who depart from Communion teaching will face no consequences". In fact, it goes further and effectively states "the consequence of their 'unilateral actions on a matter of doctrine without Catholic unity' is that they render the Communion as a whole lacking a teaching and they require all churches in the Communion to recognise a plurality of views which everyone has to accept within Communion life". It is, I think impossible to see this as anything other than a shift from "communion Catholicism" to "autonomous inclusivism".

The one defence of the new draft call that has some weight is that it is at least speaking honestly about our realities. The problem is that it does so in a paradigm diametrically opposed to that which the Communion has developed and worked with until now.

So, there you have it, the dissolving of communion Catholicism into an autonomous inclusivism. I wonder, as I think about this, whether I am looking at a judgment of my developing ideas around St. Augustine's church. Am I looking at the weakness of a church built apart from circle drawing? And does communion Catholicism equate to a giant circle? Can a church be a hospital for the sick, or does it have to require idealogical sameness?

Just today I read an article by Joe Carter, a senior writer for the Gospel Coalition entitled "You can't love Jesus and Condone Immorality." In it he says, "The way God accepts us is 'just as I am, despite who I am, intending to change who I am.'" And he concludes, "We all have a choice to make: we can either choose to obey [Jesus] or admit we don't truly love him." It sure sounds like love, right?

I guess I'm starting to see a process, perhaps a lifelong process, where Joe Carter sees a single event. I guess I'm starting to wonder if the thickness of the communion Catholicism model--and who doesn't feel the safety and togetherness of such a model?--is really just an agreement to lie in the appropriate places. As Ian Paul said about the Archbishop's autonomous inclusivism model: "it is at least speaking honestly." What does honest unity look like? Does Joe Carter's bouncer-at-the-church-door policy produce honesty? I think Carter's is an over-realized expectation. It is circle drawing. And what is needed is eschatological hope providing a common horizon point, a Celestial City, toward which we all move. Such hope has no purchase with power-unto-conformity but only for weakness and prayer and the bitter miracle of the cross of Jesus.

Stephen Evans on the Thomistic Doctrine of Analogy

The following is listed straight off from pp. 154-156 of C. Stephen Evans. Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith. Contours of Christian Theology. Downers Grove: Ill. Intervarsity Press. 1985. I'm copying it here because it adds data to my questions about the problem of religious language. It talks about analogy, which is the accepted solution. See previous posts on this topic:

• Erich Przywara, Analogical Deliverer
• A Note from Class: Can We Say Anything About God?
• A Note from Class: Pilgrimage to Parnassus
• A Note from Class: We Are Made in God's Image
• Karl Jaspers on Creation

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According to [Thomas] Aquinas, when we speak about God we inevitably must use language originally developed for finite creatures. Such language cannot be used to apply to God precisly in its original sense.

When we speak about God, we do not speak univocally, which is to use the same term in precisely the same sense; nor do we speak equivocally, which is to use the same term in two unrelated senses, as when one uses the term race to refer to an athletic contest on one occasion and an ethnically related group of human beings on another. Rather, talk about God is analogical, which is to use the same term in a similar or related sense.[1] One might, for example, call both a dog and a person faithful. In this case there is a resemblance between a faithful person and a faithful dog; the termis not being used equivocally. Nevertheless, faithfulness in a person is not identical with faithfulness in a dog.

Aquinas defines two major types of analogy. The analogy of attribution uses a term originally employed for one thing for a second thing because of a causal relation between the two things. Thus, one calls a certain geographical location "healthy" because it causes the people who live there to be healthy, and one calls a rosy complexion "healthy" because it is the effect of a healthy body. Religious people use terms like "living" and "loving" to refer to God because he is the cause of life and love in his creation.

The other type of analogy is the analogy of proportionality. Here a term is employed to refer to something proportionately to the kind of reality the thing possesses. A dog is brave in the way dogs can be brave, in proportion to its reality as a dog. A human being's bravery is proportionately richer because her nature is richer. God is loving, holy, and powerful, but he possesses all these qualities in proportion to his infinite nature; human love, holiness, and power resemble but fall short of these qualities in God.

The analogy theory is often criticized on the grounds that one must be able to reformulate an analogy in literal, univocal language for the analogy to be meaningful. Unless we know precisely how God's love resembles human love, so the argument goes, we do not really know what it means to say God is loving. But to know how God's love resembles human love, we must know what that love is like and be able to describe it univocally.

Whether this objection is sound is controversial. But it seems to me that all this objection really establishes, if one is inclined to accept it, is that it must be possible in principle to replace analogous language with univocal language, not that this replacement must be actually carried out for analogous language to have meaning. If an analogy is valid, then a person who has sufficient knowledge and has a language sufficiently rich should be able to describe the analogous relationship in a direct fashion. However, it is surely too strong to claim that analogous language is meaningless unless it can be "cashed in" with univocal language. If that were the case, what need would we have for analogous language? Analogies would be proper in that case only where they were unnecessary. Surely the uses of analogy, metaphor, and other nonunivocal discourse in poetry, and even scientific model-building, show that such language is useful and meaningful, even where we are not yet able to dispense with such language, and perhaps even if we are not able to do this at all.

The objection may also presuppose an overly wooden view of "literal" language, and an overly sharp dichotomy between such language and the language of analogy. Many ordinary, literal terms began their careers as metaphors. It is hard to see how language could creatively develop and new concepts be originated if a nonliteral usage were always meaningless until it could be replaced by a more literal statement.

It is true that Aquinas's analogy theory implies that we lack a clear and precise understanding of God and his characteristics. We only know God as the being who resembles though surpasses what we humans know as "love," "power," "holiness" and so on. However, it is quite in keeping with ordinary religious belief to claim that God is in some way essentially mysterious. Our knowledge of God is not supposed to be theoretically and scientifically precise; it has an essentially practical purpose. It may be sufficient for human beings if they have enough of an understanding of God to know how to relate to him properly. If it turns out that humans, in this life at least, lack any knowledge of God's essence, as Aquinas claims, this will not faze the believer, so long as she has enough of an idea of God to know how to worship and serve him properly.

[1] Aquinas's theory is developed in part 1 question 13 of the Summa Theologica.

Sollereder 1: Leaving the Courtroom

A few posts ago, I said that epicenter for questions about theodicy has moved from human to animal suffering. In future posts, I will be working through the theodicy of Bethany A. Sollereder, who is a lecturer in science and religion at the University of Edinburgh. I am going to blog through her fascinating book God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (Routledge 2019). I heard an interview with Dr. Sollereder on the excellent theology podcast "OnScript" in 2021, and her arguments caught my imagination. She made some profound Christological statements that excited me. I wanted to know more!

The big idea here is: "I want to argue that evolution is the process by which God has created the world, and that the violence and suffering inherent in the process can be both contextualised and redeemed in light of the creative suffering of God" (2). There is a lot to unpack. But, first, she must do some intellectual floor clearing.

Chapter 1: Leaving the courtroom

Sollereder is an experimental theologian. Though she does a lot of careful exegesis, she is not trying to do Biblical theology or construct a systematic. She operates at the line of dialogue between theology and science. Nevertheless, her instincts are evangelical. Her motivation is the fundamental fact that since life began living things suffer violence. God made the world with natural selection in it and called it good. So how can this be true? And waving it away with the fall, as theology has been wont to do, simply will not do.

Traditional theology once drew a familiar map. It stated that God created a perfect and peaceable world. Then humans . . . ruined the whole scene . . . and now we live in a profoundly broken world characterised by the previously unknown elements of violence, death, and suffering. But using the fall as an explanation is . . . no longer a plausible way forward. Evolutionary evidence suggests that the world was only free from death and competition when it was also free from life. The complexity, interrelatedness, and beauty of life are directly related to the ever-present violence, death, and extinction of numberless creatures. . . . A new theological map is needed. (4)

As Dr. Gordon Heugenberger, my Old Testament professor in seminary, used to say, Animal death had to exist in the garden or Adam wouldn't have understood what God meant when he said, "On the day you eat of it, you will surely die." Heugenberger's point, ignoring the genre problem, is analogous to Sollereder's. The Bible assumes this evolutionary world and all that goes with it. How, then, can God call it good?

So, step one: the doctrine of the fall is problematic. Sollereder argues that the Bible does not require it: "The biblical witness does not require the assumption that disvalues such as suffering and death entered the world due to human or Satanic sin," (8). A fall also requires some kind of point of original perfection. And, where the natural world is concerned, no amount of geology or physics can discover one. And finally, the term itself is not always clear. She will go on in later chapters to differentiate and examine the arguments for a cosmological (or mysterious) fall, a Satanic fall, and a human fall.

Now step two: natural evil needs to go. Theology has taught that fallenness unleashed sin upon the world, producing moral and natural evil. But, setting moral evil aside, natural evil is a highly anthropocentric concept lacking evidentiary sophistication. Sollereder easily overturns it and, in its absence, suggests new vocabulary: harm and disvalue. Harm is suffering caused by natural things: tornadoes, flash flooding, ice storms, etc. That's the sort of thing Calvin said was produced by sin: but tornadoes are produced by weather. Calvin was thinking like a medieval man. Disvalue is the suffering produced by the violence of living things living. It has its origin not in some kind of supernatural evil but in the way that natural selection and the results of human fallenness (Sollereder believes in a human fall) combine to damage the cosmos, even though, she says, the natural world remains unfallen.

On the positive side, disvalue is antinomous to two other terms: flourishing and selving. Flourishing, she says, means the overall well-being of an individual creature, which would include a 360-degree relational goodness analogous to the Hebrew shalom.

A flourishing creature is in proper relationship to other members of its own species, to environmental conditions, to God, and to the stage of life it is in. This relational component might lead to some counterintuitive results, such as after a full life and in light of the new creation, a creature's best flourishing at a particular moment may be to die. (8)

Selving is subjective; it is concerned with the individual. Selving is a creature acting as itself in fulfillment of its God-given course. Here she follows the work of Christopher Southgate who said, "When a living creature 'selves' . . . it is conforming to the pattern offered by the divine Logos."[1] Sollereder is careful to avoid eugenic undertones here saying individual creatures have a common characteristic but also may innovate. "It would be better to speak of the gift of community and genetic inheritance that creatures are born into which confer regular ways of being rather than a sense of Platonic 'pattern' to which creatures are meant to conform" (Ibid.) I suspect these two terms, flourishing and selving, will play an important role as her argument moves forward.

These states--disvalue, harm, flourishing and selving--each operate at every level at which living things exist. And there is a kind of order to them. The basic id-like desires that go along with natural selection, aggression and self-interest are like raw materials. And the disvalue and harm which are their result exhibit behaviors which result from a kind of moral immaturity. Above that is a higher rung of altruistic level of self-giving which can itself be transcended via divine action into love itself. Love is, she says, "a particular divine act in the person that transmutes the basic evolutionary desires into the desires of divine love." "Love is a transformation of the spectrum of desires entirely" (6).

But how, then, does she understand love? Love is "non-controlling, particular, vulnerable to suffering, and responsive to the needs of the beloved." And, as in so much theology, freedom plays its part, for love requires radical freedom and divine interaction.

Traditional accounts of freewill have been heavily anthropocentric . . . I attempt to work out what freedom for the non-human world entails in light of the two desires of love: the desire for the good of the beloved and the desire for union with the beloved. God's love leaves room for creatures to develop towards their own good, the good of the ecosystem they participate in, and in the ultimate history of the world.

A final aside. Sollereder has positioned these two systems of transcending love and natural selection together in a way. First, there is the mechanism of natural selection, where fitness creates an ability to step above or transcend. Natural selection produces disvalue, but it also produces selving, as individuals can improve on their genetic and socially conditioned model of behavior. Second, there is a definition of love built from desire and freedom. Love is a result of developmental leaps from lower to higher, from self-interest to selflessness. Love seems to set the board on which natural selection plays. Or, is love more fundamental? I am not sure.

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[1] Christopher Southgate. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 16. Note also: Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming -- Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993) and Daryl Domning and Monika Hellwig. Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in Light of Evolution. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).

Note this interesting footnote about Southgate's understanding of selving: "[Selving] allows a unique view of fallenness: a creature is fallen when it does not embrace the divine invitation to transcendence and therefore remains what it is. In this notion of fallenness, it is potential that is lost rather than acquired characteristics" (12n29).