Am pus pe Agora Christi o serie de linkuri spre documente sau articole cu privire la predarea creationismului in scolile europene. Discutia se va incinge serios in Romania, prin bunavointa strajerilor de la Humanism.ro.

Am postat un scurt articol despre religiozitatea la romani pe Agora Christi.

Intre 8-10 octombrie a.c. vor avea loc la Baile Felix lucrarile colocviului “Dumitru Cornilescu”, organizat anual de Radu Gheorghita, Emil Bartos si Aurel Burtic. Tema intilnirii din acest an va fi “Studiul Apocalipsei: Perspective Exegetice, Doctrinare si Homiletice”. Vor conferentia Radu Gheorghita, Beniamin Faragau si Emil Bartos, cu urmatoarele titluri:
Radu Gheorghita, “Studiul Apocalipsei: Perspective Exegetice” (Abordarea Apocalipsei din perspectiva teologiei exegetice, cu accent pe plasarea cărţii în cadrul literar, istoric şi teologic, cele trei coordonate indispensabile exegezei biblice)

Beniamin Faragau, “Studiul Apocalipsei: Perspective Exegetice” (Abordarea Apocalipsei din perspectiva teologiei exegetico-biblice, prin scoaterea în evidenţă a dimensiunii teologice, în mod special a modului în care Ioan face apel la Scriptura Iudaică)

Emil Bartos, “Studiul Apocalipsei: Perspective Doctrinare” (Abordarea Apocalipsei din perspectiva teologiei istorico-dogmatice, urmărind câteva doctrine Creştine importante care îşi găsesc rădăcinile sau formularea cea mai ampla în Apocalipsa. Teme precum „Viaţa după Moarte”, „Judecata de Apoi”, „Raiul şi Iadul” vor fi analizate din perspectiva istorico-dogmatică)

R. Gheorghita, B. Faragau, E. Bartos, “Studiul Apocalipsei: Perspective Homiletice”

Participarea la conferinta se face doar pe baza de invitatie, datorita numarului limitat de locuri.

Cu mare intirziere fac si eu reclama la programul de master (Studii interculturale si religioase) in cadrul caruia predau. Iata anuntul aici:

Master in Studii Interculturale si Religioase

The late Gillian Rose is a philosopher and social theorist whose books, The Broken Middle, Hegel Contra Sociology, Mourning Becomes the Law, and, to a smaller extent, Love’s Work provided some inspiration to my critique of post-structuralism scattered throughout parts of my doctoral work. Rose is a fascinating read. She did what few dared: critique poststructuralism at a time when most everyone that read French was head over heels with it. She was a Jewish thinker too, but a few years before her untimely death she converted to Christianity. That made her even more interesting for me. One major drawback, however, was her impossibly cryptic prose. Derrida was easy compared to her. Foucault came close, although she was not quite as bad as Deleuze. I had planned to write an introduction to her philosophy and theology, but that project was just impossible to carry out from Romania.

At any rate, I was pleasantly surprised to find the latest issue of The Heythrop Journal in the mailbox today, and even more pleasantly surprised to see a piece on Gillian Rose (Vincent Lloyd, ‘On the Use of Gillian Rose’, HeyJ 48/5, Sept 2007). I got to it right away. It talked about how Tony Gorman and Graham Ward get her completely wrong, while Rowan Williams comes closest, but remains incomplete. I won’t get into the details here, but there was something that caught my attention: I almost choked with disbelief.

Speaking about Graham Ward’s drawing on Rose in his Christ and Culture, Lloyd writes that Ward’s description of ‘the broken middle’ does not sound like the Rose’s middle, but it does sound more like the description of sacred space in Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography. He then goes on to notice that Ward does not mention this book in Christ and Culture, although he does mention it in Cities of God. This is a feminist understanding of social space which plays right into the hands of Ward’s argument.

And here comes the bomb:

The problem, however, is that in 1997 the brilliant philosopher Gillian Rose was not immersing herself in the arts community of Edinburgh. Rather, she was, as we say in Middle America, pushing up daisies. Was this a posthumous article? No. To solve the riddle: Gertrude Stein notwithstanding, there are two Roses who not only share a first and a last name but share overlapping interests in post-structuralist theory, architecture, and urban planning. Or, rather there were two Roses: extant Rose presently teaches at Open University; deceased Rose remains deceased. (702)

How could this happen? Lloyd vouches that ‘this observation is not meant to be maliciously directed at Professor War: this slippage between the two Roses could quite possibly be unconscious and is at any rate certainly understandable.’

OK, let’s pause here. Even I knew that Feminism and Geography does not belong to the Gillian Rose who also wrote Love’s Work. Anyone who does research on an author is (or should be) quite knowledgeable about the primary sources. There aren’t that many anyway.

Secondly, Prof. Ward does not include Feminism and Geography in the bibliography of Christ and Culture and, while Lloyd may be right that his description of sacred space is more similar to the feminist geographer, it is an unsubstantiated conjecture that Ward wasn’t aware of the difference.

At any rate, to imply that someone of the stature of Prof. Ward [by the way, I didn't study under him] did not know the difference - based on so little - is quite cavalier.

As I am progressing through Heim’s Saved From Sacrifice, I realise that sometimes initial impressions are mistaken. Heim, apparently, does not intend the association of Jesus’ sacrifice with human scapegoating practices to reveal the meaning of atonement, but, as he puts it, “We are focusing on how the cross (which is a part of Christ’s work) bears on our practice of sacrificial scapegoating (which is part of our broken human condition).” (9) So what we do in scapegoating is not the whole story of the human predicament. In fact, Heim isolates three components of this predicament: sin (estrangement from God), evil (estrangement from fellow human beings) and death (from nature). So I have to revise my initial impression and and commend Heim on taking a more modest option.

He must also be commended on other counts: although it is quite obvious that he has a problem with penal substitution, he does admit that “Raw material for this interpretation is already present in the New Testament and doctrinal formulation of it begins in early Christianity.” (5). That’s a welcome change of note from the usual rubbish about the doctrine starting with Calvin or Anselm, not to mention it’s total absence from the Scriptural witness. Sacrificial (if not necessarily penal) language is there in the NT. Thus, “What is needed is an interpretive path through the problematic texts and not around them, a theological vision that does not depend on excluding all atonement themes but provides the most convincing account of their true significance.” What this means is that Heim’s project will have to stand under th judgment of exegetical adequacy.

Of course, if it were only exegetical adequacy that Heim would be concerned with, perhaps this book would not have been written. Having already noticed that the doctrine of atonement is regarded by some as “a dark brew of self-abnegation, violence and abuse”, a “masochistic idealization of suffering”, he goes on to list the various indictments brought against the doctrine. I will simply list them (he doesn’t accept all of them):

1. It’s language of sacrifice is empty, literally unintelligible.

2. It links Christian salvation with the demonization of Jews

3. It is ignorant parochialism (in not paying attention to comparative religion) and betrays spiritual immaturity

4. It is impugning the moral character of God

5. It has toxic psychological and social effects

Having listed these, much to his credit, Heim does go on to stress that “countless lives have been liberated and transformed by that [same] message.” 29. The cross seems to lead, on the one hand, to one set of experiences which contribute to the so-called crisis of atonement theory. On the other hand, it seems to have a liberating power that cannot be denied. Hence the dilemma, and I should quote Heim at length:

If nothing else, the atonement is a puzzle. The existing views seem to require a very large ad hoc component. That is, atonement theology is a profoundly destructive ideology that becomes for many the vehicle of life-changing grace and healt. Or it is a precious revealed truth that frequently and inexplicably sows violence and dysfunction in its wake. (33)

What is Heim’s solution? I don’t know yet, but they key move is to retain sacrificial imagery and argue that Jesus’ death exposes the scapegoating mentality which is at the root of so much human evil. More later…

How does one reinterpret what the atonement means today? Should one? One of my recent favorites, John Edwin Smith, an American pragmatist and Jonathan Edwards scholar, had this to say:

“When confronted with an item of faith, we want first to know what it means; and second, we want to know to what extent it is exhibited in and intelligibly related to our experience. To fail to ask these questions posed by the precariousness of our existence and the undeniable challenge to faith presented by the thought patterns of our secular world is to fall back on some form of authoritarianism. It is to suppose that the content of faith, which indeed we have only and always in earthen vessels, is to be preserved by bare repetition (i.e. by reciting a creed or citing biblical passages in response to questions ) without criticism and without reinterpretation. The quest for analogues of faith is at the same time a quest initiated by living faith for the means of overcoming doubt by attaining a sense that our faith is grounded in the structure of what there is, and is therefore more than self-indulgence or wishful thinking.” (The Analogy of Experience, p. 31).

Granted, to speak about ‘our faith being grounded in the structure of what there is’ does not sound all that pragmatist. Maybe that’s because we have read pragmatism through Rorty (and even Dewey through Rorty) too much, something which Smith himself (bitterly?) deplores. What is right about the above is that unless our faith is intelligibly related to human experience, that is, unless we understand it by appropriating it, by seeing what inferential links it bears with the rest of our web of beliefs and practices, it remains an unintelligible faith, for others as well as for ourselves.

So the question is: are we not making experience the norm? My own feeling about John E. Smith’s own thinking about atonement is that sometimes, despite cautioning against this, he makes this mistake. But what criteria, what norms and guidelines should we use as we try to reinterpret faith, so as to make it intelligible?

One of the most pressing problems about atonement theory today is precisely that traditional formulations - and by this I do not simply mean post-scriptural theories, but models embedded in Scripture itself - are not only removed from contemporary human experience, but are plainly repugnant to it. To speak about a violent God seems to contradict common social intuitions about a supreme being of unlimited benevolence. Thus the question: as we seek to relate our understanding of the faith about what Christ did for us, how far should we go towards accommodating some of the regnant social intuitions?

S. Mark Heim’s Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, to which I want to devote a number of posts, presupposes that we have to go quite far indeed. The assumption that violence is implicitly something bad (which Boersma brilliantly unpacks), moreover, that it is the bad thing from which we have to be rescued, goes unchallenged. Thus it becomes a presupposition that in working out a doctrine of atonement, all notions of a God who condones violence and uses it to take away our sins by punishing his son must be abandoned.

But the cross does remain important for Heim. Yet not as a part of a divine mechanism. What is common in these attempts to expunge all violence from God’s purposes is the removal of the cross and sacrifice from an eternal logic, or, better, eternal plan. Even Boersma does that to some extent. For him, as I pointed out in another post, violence is part of God’s plan because God’s plan is historically constrained. Heim goes even further than Boersma. Sacrifice as a means to remove the penalty of sin is not part of God’s plan, even as constrained by this-worldly limitations. Then why did Christ die?

“Christ sheds his own blood to end that way of trying to mend our divisions” (xi). By ‘that way’, Heim means our way of dealing with conflict: scapegoating. Indeed, he makes it seem (from the preface at least) that violence is the problem that we need rescuing from: our own way of fighting violence with further violence. No wonder, then, that he should take exception to the classic penal substitution view which, arguably, redeems, sacralizes, legitimizes, glorifies and even celebrates violence.

But how? He summarizes his thesis: “Jesus’ death isn’t necessary because God has to have innocent blood to solve the guilt equation. Redemptive violence is our equation. Jesus didn’t volunteer to get into God’s justice machine. God volunteered to get into ours.” (xi) How does this save us? “[B]ecause is death exemplifies specific kind of sin we are all implicated in and we all need saving from, and acts to overcome it.” (xi)

My immediate question after reading this was: doesn’t that limit the atonement (or his work on the cross, however we might understand it) to the undoing of that particular sin, namely our proclivity for scapegoating?

Contemporary theories of atonement have to have an answer to the following questions.

1. Why did Christ have to die? John E. Smith’s working out of the atonement fails to answer this satisfactorily. Christ came to initiate the Beloved community. But it is not clear from his argument (maybe I’ll be more specific some other time) why he had to die to accomplish this? His whole ministry was already an instance of unconditional love.

2. How is Christ’s death saving? For Heim, it exposes violence. It makes it more difficult to hide the victims. It would be interesting to compare this with the feminist case. Feminists like Brock Nakashima and Parker argue that it’s precisely Jesus’ wiling acceptance of suffering that glorifies suffering, thus encouraging victims to suffer in silence and tell no tales to the police (about abusive husbands for example).

3. How does a theory of atonement draw together all aspects of Christ’s ministry: life, death and resurrection? In most theories of atonement, including penal substitution, resurrection plays no part (if anyone knows better, please let me know!)

4. A question that I am not sure needs to be answered by atonement theory as such, but which many think it must, is this: how does this particular understanding of what Christ did for us on the cross effectively change us? Must atonement theories merge with salvation theories? Must they include a subjective element, or can they simply describe what has been accomplished extra nos in Christ?

5. Finally, a question about contemporary experience. Isn’t the preaching of the cross supposed to be folly? A stumbling block? Aren’t all these contemporary reworkings of the doctrine simply attempts to make it more digestible? Perhaps, as postliberals counsel, we should read human experience in light of the cross, rather than the cross in light of human experience. Of course, this is putting it too simplistically: can we really expect to understand the cross in the first place without making some sort of connection with human experience? I guess it’s a question of degree and the hermeneutical spiral.

I hope to be able to follow up with more discussion of Heim’s book, as I read through it.

In Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, Hans Boersma puts forward a convincing argument about the relationship between atonement and violence. It’s one of the most refreshing books I’ve read lately, given that it mixes a strong commitment to Evangelical views of Scripture with a sensitivity to the complex problems raised by postmodern thinkers.

The metaphor that guides his inquiry into the various other metaphors for atonement is hospitality, as that which Jesus’ outstretched arms on the cross signifies. From the beginning – and developing throughout history – God’s purpose has been that of restoring broken fellowship with humanity.

One of the features of the argument to which I warmed was its thoroughly historicized character. Boersma shows an awareness of the historical embodiment of God’s actions which goes against what he identifies as the ahistorical tendencies in late Calvinism, with it’s focus on the eternal decrees of God.

This also aligns Boersma with N. T. Wright and the New Perspective (both on Paul and on Judaism). In order to understand the work of Christ on the cross, it must not be viewed exclusively in light of some eternal logic (i.e. sin requires punishment), but as having a place in the historical development of a plan, of a salvation history. The jury is still out about the New Perspective, as far as I’m concerned (but it’s really not my field), but what does make good sense to me is the historical realism promoted by Boersma.

The very same realism provides him with the gist of his argument on violence. After first distinguishing violence from immorality – there is violence which is justified (his argument about this in the first chapter is well worth a look, although I suspect an exaggerated reliance on an utilitarian logic of means justifying ends) – Boersma then goes on to argue that given the present creaturely existence with its inherent determinations and limitations hospitality cannot exist without violence. Contra Derrida’s notion of a ‘utopian understanding of hospitality structured around a messianicity that rejects any conditionality, any determinacy, and any horizon of expectation’ (49), Boersma argues that hospitality must include a minimal violence in order to be hospitable at all – given current conditions. ‘To insist on “pure hospitality” in an impure world would mean to give it over to the forces of inhospitality and violence.’ (93). How so? A community of unconditional hospitality and utter non-violence would be unable to forge the sort of relationships which are God’s ultimate purpose. Some have to be excluded from such a community (heretics, false prophets etc.) Boersma can argue this because he has widened violence (beyond Denny Weaver’s and Walter Wink’s concept of purely physical violence) to include non-physical violence. Jesus himself exhibits both physical (his cleansing of the Temple) and non-physical (his berating attitude to the Pharisees) violence.

But this means that the violence with which God is indeed complicit (we cannot simply dismiss those OT parts) cannot be justified by some eternal logic – that would make violence itself eternal – but only eschatologically! Now this is not a case of ‘I couldn’t figure it out, so I’ll just pass it to eschatology’. But there is a problem – and I am not sure Boersma addresses it: how can we envisage an eschatology of pure and non-violent hospitality together with an eternally existing hell? God’s acts of exclusion and violence are real enough. They are designed and intended with the purpose of restoring relationship. Boersma puts it emphatically: ‘God is love, not wrath!’ (49) His wrath unfolds (sometimes after long delays) when his love is frustrated – and acts to restore that love. But it is central to Boersma’s argument that violence and wrath are related to the creaturely limitations, which God himself assumes – in order to work with humanity. What justifies divine violence is that it is part of a plan, a plan to restore unconditioned and non-violent hospitality. That will only be achieved perfectly in the eschaton. So the Christian faith in a non-violent eschatology shows that violence is only temporary and not ontological. And here’s the rub: if we want to keep this logic untainted, we have to remove all traces of violence from eschatology (since then they would not be serving any ulterior purpose and would thus appear unjustifiable). Thus, the logic of Boersma’s position requires that hell not be an eternal reality – or else violence is something inescapable rather than a necessary means to a glorious end.

Anyway, that’s my take on it so far. But I haven’t thought it through all the way – that’s the whole idea of putting it on a blog rather than in a published paper.