Were Father's Manors Best?

The following exchange took place between myself and two other DBU professors on Facebook. With both professors' permission, I'm posting it here. It began with a quotation by James K.A. Smith in my status line. What do you think, is capitalism incompatible with Christianity?

"Construing our relationship to the world as one of 'consumption' is to take a good, creational reality of dependence and the need for acquisition in a direction that runs against the grain of God's universe. In sum, consumption i...s a way of relating to the resources of the world that runs counter to shalom."--James K. A. Smith

Professor Hatcher: Absolutely. What is the opposite of shalom? That's what we have.

Doctor Collins: So, what does this say about capitalism?

Hatcher: Is capitalism the opposite of shalom? I don't see the hand of God in capitalism. Eden was agrarian.

Collins: It seems to me that capitalism is based on consumption, so whatever Smith says about consumption, I think should apply to capitalism, too. I agree with you Elaine. Whether capitalism is the opposite of shalom or not, it leads in that opposite direction.

Mitchell: Capitalism is such a big, magic word, that can be scary for some and miracle-working for others. I think there is much positive to be said about free markets, the production of goods, and the creativity that goes into investing capital. However, I'm fully in agreement that in the extreme consumerist version we live in, it's hard not to kiss the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

Hatcher: I can't even imagine how a godly, Christ-like capitalist system would operate.

Mitchell: However, I certainly don't think socialist systems have proved themselves capable of producing long-term prosperity for a people. They tend to devolve into either utopian projects and/or totalitarian collectives. What capitalism offers at its best is the ability to people to use their creativity and drive in work and production of goods. Is radical consumption the natural end of all capitalism or only the kind we've developed in the West?

Hatcher: I certainly don't consider socialist systems a viable solution! The end result is much worse than our "radical consumerism." Due to the fallen nature of humankind, radical consumption is probably the natural end of all capitalism. We just can't seem to do anything right on a large scale although individuals might practice a godly form of ... Read more capitalism on a local scale. But I don't know of any society where either capitalism or socialism has ended well for all. I say back to the land! Maybe manorialism with benevolent landlords?

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 5

So was Berlin right to charge Christian hope for the end of history with closet determinism? Are the theist claims of an all-provident God, a known future, and human freedom finally in the last analysis compatible?

For some Christian thinkers the key was to focus on the very question of final things. After all, what might a Christian eschatology have to offer? The biblical pattern of a good creation, a human fall into rebellion and subsequent decay, a redemptive history of covenants with Israel, culminating in the atoning work of Christ and Church, and leading up to a final consummation suggests a directional pattern and outcome to human history. Josef Pieper, while sharing the view that Christians cannot know the future, insisted nonetheless that human beings have a quality of "being-directed-toward-the-End," in which the chaotic events of history become understandable. Not every theologian or philosopher of history agreed.

For Karl Löwith, the promised future is a radical inbreaking into history and at the same time, a future hope not yet seen. The violence and contingency of history has no real discernable direction precisely because the future cannot be inferred from the past; it is a divine, mysterious promise not a human, rational pattern . Eric C. Rust and Carl Michalson concurred. For Rust, outside God's revelation in Christ, "history is generally a realm of meaningless chaos and frustration," while for Michalson, there can be no significant history since Jesus: "Christ is not the eschatological event because he will enter history at some moment of time but because when he appears in history, history comes to an end in its old form and the last, the eschatological age begins."

A divine destiny, some insisted, did not translate into a discernable pattern for human history in general. Jean Daniélou, however, would have us synthesize this eschatological double story. While there can be no progress beyond Christ who is "the culminating and final innovation" of history, yet to separate out secular and sacred history is to declare Christ as less than Lord of history. The Christian mission, he insisted, is not simply "to teach the word to individuals of all countries; it is to evangelize the civilizations . . . so that Christianity may find its appropriate and authentic expression in the idiom of every racial community."

The promised apocalypse, for Pieper, is both the end of history and the promise of a new eternal state which strictly speaking lies beyond time. Only in a willing commitment to martyrdom can the Christian truly understand the legitimacy of human action in history, not as a gnostic who denies the value of creation, but as one who "contains both affirmation of creation and readiness for blood-testimony; only the man who combines in himself this affirmation and this readiness will retain the possibility of historical activity." Martyrdom denies the cultural relativism of historicism. It is a commitment to the future. Eschatology, he felt, does not remove the call to human freedom and to responsible action.

To summarize, the debate about history, in trying to address questions of civilization and Christian culture, had to consider

1. how much one could say about the inner workings of history, as well as the moral nature of its events;
   
2. needed to answer the claims of the historicist persuasion on a number of levels;
3. had to consider questions of freedom and determinism and of idealism and materialism, especially the question whether some aspect of historical normativity still allowed for human free choice;
4. had to explore what a spiritual realm might say to human freedom;
   
5. had to ask what biblical eschatology had to say to the shape of history.
   

In particular, they needed to consider whether the eschatological promise of the gospel had anything to say to the national and cultural concerns of the average historian. For all its pledges of Christian faith, this was not a conversation with an easy consensus, nor I suspect should it have been, for they were seeking to hold together a number of tensions, as well as answer destructive claims from a number of directions. In my next post I will consider what this debate, then, has to teach us, as well as explore briefly how it relates to Christian personalism.

Can There Be a Christian Culture? -- Part 1

Over the next week, I will summarize and explore an intellectual debate that took place among a number of theologians, philosophers, social critics, and political leaders in Europe and the United States. I am particularly interested to ask what their concerns might teach us about current Christian reflection on culture, relativism, and the meaning of human existence.

"Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization."

These famous penultimate words were spoken by Winston Churchill before the House of Commons on June 18, 1940. Delivered the day after France surrendered to Nazi invaders, Churchill's speech was intended to steel British resolve, yet perhaps not surprisingly, in retrospect it also raised important questions about the nature of Western civilization itself.In his 1947 Gifford lectures, the theologian Emil Brunner observed, "All Europe uttered a sigh of relief when those words were spoken."

That they were spoken as words of comfort and of determination suggests that a consensus, however fuzzy, still existed among many in Europe. For Brunner, however, Churchill's words raised a rather sticky question: can there be a Christian civilization, and if there can, does it follow that the Occidental world could in any sense still be considered Christian?

These were questions that many twentieth-century historians, philosophers, cultural critics, and theologians struggled with, and between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, a huge number of lectures, essays, articles, and books were generated on the issue of Christian civilization and history. For some, such as philosopher John MacMurray, European civilization could not understand itself or its success and failure without remembering that its origins were in Christian culture: “To understand Christianity is to understand the crisis of civilization in which we are involved." The twentieth century’s violence and loss of meaning were traceable to the incoherence of the West, he contended.

Historian Christopher Dawson, too, felt in 1949 that the relationship between Western and Christian culture had to be delimited. He held that every society at its heart was based on a religious vision. What distinguished the West was its long-term instability; the Christian consensus had always been a dance between temporal and eternal impulses, and this imbalance had led to its productivity and power. such moments of vital fusion between a living religion and a living culture are the creative events in history, in comparison with which all external achievements in the political and economic orders are transitory and insignificant.”

Poet and cultural critic T.S. Eliot was also convinced that a people's religion and their culture were intertwined, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people." Culture is "a "lived religion," though no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. By incarnation, Eliot meant neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification but something more like two elements existing in tandem with one another. One cannot finally understood a civilization without having a sense of the religious vision that historically informed it, no matter how faded and shabby it has become. Yet Eliot was not claiming that Europe was somehow nor or had ever been a perfect place. Europe has always been more or less Christian, never totally so.

Theologian John Baillie, following Eliot, believed that what made the past Western civilization Christian was its common belief and opinion, and what made it vaguely one in 1945 was the continued presence of some Christian influence. Baillie, a Presbyterian, compared this to infant baptism, observing that a society with Christian influence need not be wholly full of Christians. He concluded that this was the best one might expect in a fallen world; there can be no final utopia on earth: "no pax Britannica no less than the pax romana, and Christendom no less than Babylon and Troy." Perhaps the days were simply limited in which such a Christian world could continue.

Brunner agreed, but like MacMurray, held that the crisis of the West was already quite far gone, “in some parts . . . more than shaken, in fact shattered and even annihilated.” There was not much of a Christian civilization left to hold on to. Yet even this crisis, Brunner thought, attested to the power of the gospel traditions that they could have such dynamic, long-standing impact “even where life has been only superficially touched by them, or where they are present in very diluted and impure manifestations.”

Notice that to make such claims required a sense of history, as to where the West had been and where Christianity had been with it, as well as some intimations as to where it was going. That these reflections occurred around the global cataclysm of World War II is quite understandable. Much that had seemed solid and stable was now in flux and troubled. Nonetheless, they explore the first question worth considering: could European culture (and the U.S. by extension) have ever been considered a "Christian" culture? And if so, what would that imply?

The Communio Sanctorum and Diversity in Education-- Part 1

In his work, Models of the Church, Avery Dulles draws our attention to seven ecclesiological possibilities:

1) institution;
2) mystical communion;
3) sacrament;
4) herald;
5) servant;
6) eschatology;
7) community of disciples.

Each of these, as an aspect of the Church's identity, also speaks to the nature of Christian education. As Dulles notes, a model of the Church as simply an institution can lead to passivity, legalism, and obstruction of the people's relationship with God, as well as of growth in theology and of charismata (43-44), yet it also expresses the nature of something being instituted, having legitimacy, regularity, and staying power. The institutions of the Church, such as its schools, carry both the dangers and strengths of this reality.

To speak of the Church as the herald of the gospel is to see how the preached Word calls us to account and gives us a message for others, while to note that the Church is a servant is to reinforce the call to social justice, sacrifice, and hospitality. Both of these aspects remind us that the end of Christian education is not just removing ignorance, it is also overcoming idolatry. It is conversion, transformation, metanoia. We pursue a cross-shaped pursuit of education without pneumatological power. The Christian university should also, then, see itself as an eschatological sign of what God intends for the cosmos. We can never be satisfied with business as usual. Our (perhaps inevitable) failures should grieve us.

I will address the notion of education as sacramental and as discipleship in later posts, for the moment I would like to address the Christian university as communion. Dulles point out that theologically the imagery of the Body of Christ tends to draw attention to the mystical divine life present in the Church, while the imagery of the people of God tends to be more sociological and earth-centered. Both are out of balance without the other.

As the Apostles Creed confesses, " Credo in . . .sanctorum communionem." ("I believe in the communion of saints.") A true evangelical--and Baptist, for that matter--catholicity embraces an evangelical recovery of the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, and this calls for a sense both of our mystical connection to all the saints and an identity as God's people set aside for his purposes in this world. We should remind ourselves that the communio sanctorum is marked by koinonia fellowship and by covenant faithfulness. As the Epistle to the Hebrews cautions us,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us . . . you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb 11:1, 18-24)

We need in our particular branch of Baptist education a recovery of divine authority that resides in all Christian traditions and their peoples. We need to see its holiness. Such authority should extend beyond, but not be untethered from the ecumenical councils and creeds. Instead, it should grow as a tradition is meant to grow, pursuing the same telos as the sources, the well springs, of the Apostolic Faith.

This is not a denial that our "rule of faith" (the regula fidei) needs to arise primarily and originally from the scriptures, but it is an acceptance of the Spirit's presence in Church history. A Christian academic culture covenants with the larger, historic Body of Christ in all our manifestations. Certainly Anabaptist challenges to Christendom were in part about a recovery of the primitive church (i.e. the true church, the unspoiled church). This is a pursuit that in some of its forms many would suggest is not only impossible, but finally unbiblical. Instead, as I argued last month, thick ecumenism is not a denial of our differences; it requires the teaching of them. So not only should we study the texts of various Christian traditions past and present, we should invite their representatives to lecture and teach on campus.

The Image of God in Education--Part 3

Nothing about this pedagogical model should demand that we treat all cultural creations and patterns as equally important or valuable. We are in a fallen world, now.

The Zeitgeist may be demonic.

Instead of the politics of recognition and equal identity and dignity, we need a Christian polity of learning that knows how to balance our non-negotiables with the embedded lessons in the wider world. It is the nature of convictions that some beliefs and practices are more long-lived than others. Some are more central to a tradition; some have greater explanatory power. Furthermore, some are so central, so justified, that we have strong expectation and thick confidence in their endurance as the hypergoods (to use Charles Taylor's term) that shape and reorient other goods, evaluating them and defining them. Reorientation and revaluation are in the nature of education. A hypergood can literally take something once considered a mark of excellence and make it a vice or a temptation.

In turn, some beliefs may be fundamentally destructive in their centrality. A Christian view of culture and of education sees an element in all cultures that is self-blinding to the truth, that is subject to the fallen powers, and that invests itself in false promises. However, cultural depravity and cultural vice neither suggests an imperial project that settles on only one all inclusive pedagogy as "civilized" nor a hard relativism which leaves it unexposed to critique from the outside. We can’t expect to learn one method of critique and learning and then apply it across the board to all global and disciplinary subjects or even to every particular historical moment. I would contend this is as true of the natural sciences as is it the social sciences and humanities.

But neither does this mean that every textual or pedagogical encounter carries equal weight or equal fecundity. This is why a certain preference for the Christian tradition is incumbent in Christian education. Wisdom is to take in the multiplicity of good counsel with its refracting diversity, especially when this diverse counsel comes from others along the same broad axis of understanding. The church's experience of diversity is like canonical diversity. It is not a hodge-podge of alterity and relativity, but an interacting set of close practices that complement and course correct each other over time guided by the gift of the Spirit. Our pedagogy is to search for the same--it must take in the diversity of the Christian church and the cultural embeddedness of its global existence, all the while recognizing incompleteness and need for mutual help in pursing the truth together.

Thick Ecumenism--A Better Model Than Mere Christianity

What kind of confessional model should shape the Christianity in question at a Christian college? My students often appeal to a broadly defined general Christian belief, something not unlike C.S. Lewis' notion of "mere Christianity." Yet I would contend that there are reasons why this general belief system is not enough. Consider the idea of "thick ecumenism."

Thick ecumenism begins with something like a thin consensus of common confession, a "mere Christianity," but it cannot stay there because the central doctrines of the faith intersect and branch out in their numerous implications for all of life. Instead, ecumenism promotes a conversation among the Christian traditions, searching for points of commonality and difference, but not as a simple exercise in comparative theology, liturgy, or spirituality. In other words, we are teaching and confessing our faith within certain traditions of the Christian faith. I teach at a Baptist school; my friend teaches at a Presbyterian one. We certainly share much in common, but there are differences, and these differences are interwoven with our basic beliefs. What I believe about church and dissent interacts with my understanding of salvation and God and sin, as does his beliefs. Yet we dialogue in hope. The hope is that our conversation will mutually illumine all involved and that this illumination will offer a continued course correction in doctrinal development and polity.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer in his work The Drama of Doctrine employs the dramatic image of table fellowship in which the varying interpretative traditions and practices come with their noisy conversation to sup together, not just for a rowdy table-pounding boasting match, nor for a polite "no offense intended" high tea, but for a true family meal. Vanhoozer points out that this family diversity has its very legitimacy in the "Pentecostal plurality" of scripture's own canonical diversity. We sup together that we might become stronger together. We are about more than sampling each other's dishes in smorgasbord gluttony; we are learning to "taste" better by cultivating together a culinary delight in all that is true and beautiful (272-278)

While such a gourmet practice in the academy certainly gives pride of place to Christian tradition, it also contains an inclusive search out beyond that tradition. Thick ecumenism must teach the larger global conversation, one in which in its Christian strands also move out to encompass the ideological contexts where the faith struggles to exist as martyr and as witness. However, we should keep in mind that this pedagogical multiplicity is also not a simple confirmation of diversity for diversity's sake, a multi-cultural and global sampling that really privileges Western notions of individual identity as the trump card of libertarian values, what Stanley Fish has derisively labeled "boutique multiculturalism." Neither is it a blind relativism that refuses to evaluate the actions and ethics of the other.

Instead, ecumenism longs to fulfill the promise of Pentecost, that by speaking in many tongues the gospel reverses the curse of Babel. Thick ecumenism suggests not only a method by which to explore diversity but also a larger purpose that can guide pedagogical decision-making, admittedly one with a lot of hard work in listening and learning.

More Americans are Pro-Life

This post discusses the latest Gallup Poll result that indicates 51% of all Americans are now pro-life. The author makes the interesting point that this will actually hurt the Republican Party.

So, this story is interesting in that it reports the polling results while providing a compelling example of media "logic" to analyze.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/erbe/2009/05/15/growing-anti-abortion-ranks-will-keep-republicans-marginalized/comments/

Chruch Dogs

OK guys, I am not making this stuff up. You cannot imagine articles this crazy!!! Jeff Martin recently released an article in USA Today about churches which have encouraged dog owners to bring their pets to church: “Church Services put Paws in the Pews.” One parishioner exclaims:

"I hadn't been to church in many, many years, and this gave me a reason to come back with my friend.”

Martin writes, On this night in Omaha, a recent Thursday in March, Balestri is preaching to the largest crowd to attend the weekly "Paws and Prayers" service since it began in December. There are 57 people, and an estimated 50 dogs. . . . Parishioners request prayers for homeless animals and homeless people. One man requests prayers for a deceased pet who "went over the rainbow." There are prayer requests for people, as well. When the offering plate is passed, people place their gifts inside and take squares of cheese for the dogs. "You feel good when you leave," says Pam Weiss, with Baxter, a Pomeranian mix.

Any thoughts on what this article reflects regarding the nature of church attendance?

Contemporary Reflections on Death Have Been Cremated

The New York Times’ Gabrielle Glasser wrote an article last month entitled, “The Funeral: Your Last Chance to Be a Big Spender.” In this article, Glasser noted various ways that the funeral business has adapted to the changing desires of society, in particular the desire for people “to have what they want.” Thus, the industry has made special caskets for “bikers” so that they can be pulled by a Harley rather than a traditional hearse; or gardeners can select a variety of wildflowers to be included in their funeral plans.

Glasser also noted the number of changes that are resulting from the rising costs of funerals. She writes:

The death industry is facing something of an existential crisis. Cremation, which can reduce costs by half or more, is a strong trend. (The average cost of a funeral and traditional burial is about $8,000.) Families are increasingly abandoning traditional religious funerals, which are typically organized by funeral directors, in favor of secular ceremonies they may arrange themselves. Natural burials, which avoid embalming and concrete burial vaults, are more commonly considered than they once were, while a minority of families are bypassing funeral homes altogether to take care of their dead themselves.

The rise of cremation in the past forty years has been astounding, with cremation now accounting for more than 38 percent of all burials, in comparison to just 26 percent in 2000. Jerry Sullivan, a second generation funeral director remarks, “And if you care a little bit less about ceremony, and are ready to allow your body to go up in smoke, then all of the trappings of traditional funerals matter less as well — like fancy caskets.”

As a Christian, I believe that the church must give greater reflection to the moral issues surrounding death and how we handle our dead. Is burial nothing more than the disposal of a person’s housing—with the real person (i.e., soul) having already “departed to be with the Lord?” If it is, then certainly better reasons must be given for cremation than “it cuts funeral costs in half” or one is prepared to “go up in smoke.”

To be sure, the Vatican’s decision in 1963 to lift its ban on cremation has led to more individuals choosing this route. But is there something more that has sparked an even greater surge in the choice of cremation. In his article “Grave Signs,” Russell Moore draws attention to how Abraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave at Mamre and how those closest to Jesus sought to prepare his body for burial after the crucifixion. The point he so powerfully makes is that the people of God deal with their dead in a way that not only honors them, but also in a way that historically has been drastically different than the pagan world. Indeed, Stephen Prothero’s Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America emphatically demonstrates how the practice of cremation practically disappeared in areas where the church spread, finding continued practice only among those who rejected a future resurrection of the body.

Consequently, questions remain: Can Christians morally choose cremation? Or an even greater question, will Christians even ask the question?

Christianity and Western Culture

In the following T. S. Eliot makes a fascinating claim about the relationship between Europe (perhaps the West) and Christianity. Would you grant any validity to what he holds?

Yet there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture…. The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples each of which has its distinct culture, is religion. Please do not, at this point, make a mistake in anticipating my meaning. This is not a religious talk, and I am not setting out to convert anybody. I am simply stating a fact. I am not so much concerned with the communion of Christian believers today; I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it.

[. . .] It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently—been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have reproduced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes."
--Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)