Calvin on the Atonement and God’s wrath

One of the problems with penal substitutionary theories of the Atonement, at least as sometimes presented, is that, on the one hand, they present God the Father as being unable to be reconciled to humanity until his wrath is spent, but on the other hand, the Bible is very clear that the work of Christ is initiated and carried out by God the Father and the Son, not the Son acting on the Father as it were.

John Calvin, who is often regarded as one of the fathers of this understanding of the Atonement writes (in my heavily abridged version of the Institutes):

Before we go any further, we must try to see how God, who goes before us in mercy, was our enemy until he was reconciled to us by Christ. But how could he have given us that unique seal of his love — the gift of his only begotten Son — if he had not already freely embraced us in his favour? (p. 129)

What Calvin goes on to say seems to me to be that God has to make us understand how horrible our sin is, and that part of the reason why Jesus has to be crucified is to show this. “If it was not stated clearly that divine wrath and vengeance and eternal death hang over us, we would be less aware of our condemnation without the mercy of God, and less likely to value the blessings of salvation” (p. 129).

But what’s not clear to me is whether Calvin is saying that God is truly merciful but has to “put on a show” of being wrathful in order to impress upon us the awfulness of our sins. Or is he actually saying that Jesus’ death propitiates God’s wrath, objectively speaking? This seems to be implied by what he says later about the “guilt which made us liable to punishment was transferred to the head of the Son of God” (p. 131), but if so, then it seems to me that he hasn’t really addressed the apparent contradiction of God being our enemy but also acting to reconcile himself to us (and it’s interesting that Calvin says that God is was reconciled to us (p. 129), whereas Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Is this significant?).

It could well be that I’m just missing enough of the text that the argument isn’t spelled out more explicitly. Any Calvin-philes out there want to clear this up? Is the wrath for Calvin our perception which God alters by offering his Son, or does the Son objectively “satifsy” the wrath? Or both?

Theologians, take heed!

The medieval philosophy and theology blog Scholasticus has posted a fantastic quote from philosopher Peter Van Inwagen:

One advantage philosophers bring to theology is that they know too much about philosophy to be overly impressed by the fact that a particular philosopher has said this or that. Philosophers of the present day know what Thomas Aquinas and Professor Bultmann did not know: that no philosopher is an authority. Philosophers know that if you want to pronounce on, say, the project of natural theology, you cannot simply appeal to what Kant has established about natural theology. You cannot do this for the very good reason that Kant has established nothing about natural theology. Kant has only offered arguments, and the cogency of these arguments can be (and is daily) disputed.

That’s from Van Inwagen’s collection of essays God, Knowledge & Mystery, a real gem that I picked up several years back for a song at Half Price Books in Indianapolis, if I recall correctly.

When I was in graduate school I took a class on “postmodern concepts of God.” It was good in that I read stuff that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise (Levinas, Marion), but I was continually irritated by the literary deconstructionist types who would appeal to Heidegger or Derrida or whoever as authorities for dismissing large swaths of the philosophical tradition. It just doesn’t work that way!

There’s a real problem at work here too. Theologians obviously want to make use of philosophical work but don’t necessarily have the time, training, or inclination to work through all the arguments and counterarguments. I’ve noticed, for instance, that Wittgenstein looms large in a lot of contemporary theology, often functioning in a similar appeal to authority kind of way (”As Wittgenstein has shown us…” etc.).

After all, argument has to stop at some point since you can’t justify every premise in your reasoning - as Aristotle has shown us! - but philosophers and others are understandably unimpressed by theology that takes controversial philosophical claims as given.

Friday metal - unapologetic hair metal edition

Hair metal has become synonymous with late-80s excess and VH1 ironic nostalgia specials. Many people consider the advent of grunge as something akin to divine providence due to its role in sweeping the radio clean of the scourge of hair (a.k.a. glam) metal.

Now, I’d be the last one to deny that there were some talentless overexposed glam bands. But there were also some genuinely talented bands that wrote some pretty good rock songs. (And, let’s not forget: grunge itself quickly become overexposed to the point of self-parody; it didn’t help that every record company was frantically signing second-, third-, and fourth-rate flannel-clad Nirvana and Pearl Jam sound-alikes.) Every genre of music has some original talent. Even the much reviled boy band and pop tart craze of the early 00’s produced some genuinely talented artists like Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.

So, here’s a little sampling of some good glam metal:

First, Mötley Crüe, an early track, “Live Wire.” This is raw, punk-tinged rock played by guys who happen to look a lot like girs (except for the unfortunately homely Mick Mars). Also: Nikki Sixx gets set on fire in this video. Diagnosis? Awesome.

Poison, “Talk Dirty to Me” - I once saw an interview with Poison where they were asked about jumping on the hair metal bandwagon. Their response? “We built the wheels on that f—— wagon!” (Paraphrased from memory). But look: these guys just wrote some darn catchy songs, of which this is a premier example.

Skid Row - “Monkey Business.” These guys kind of straddled the line between hair metal and just plain metal. In fact, I once saw Sebastian Bach (post-SR) open for Anthrax and Pantera. On the other hand, they were not above a little power ballad action. But definitely a cut above many of their competitors.

Gn’R - “Sweet Child O’ Mine” - it’s debatable if they should even be considered glam metal - they definitely had glam influences, but also punk, blues, and straight-up rock. In some ways they were the death rattle of glam metal - overlapping with the grunge era. And they injected some much-needed sleaziness and meanness into a genre that had become too bubble gum (compare, e.g. Winger). Appetite for Destruction (released 20 years ago!!) still holds up. Will Chinese Democracy ever see the light of day? Axl only knows.

Fryblog

My wife and I have recently been watching the DVDs of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, the hilarious British sketch comedy show with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (now playing a misanthropic doctor on House, M.D.). They also, of course, did the Jeeves and Wooster series based on P.G. Wodehouse’s books.

Today the Young Fogey points us to Stephen Fry’s new blog.

Here’s one of my favorite sketches from A Bit of…

Wolterstorff on religion, liberty, and democracy

The other day I was browsing my iTunes library and came across this talk by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff on religious grounds for political liberty and democracy that I had apparently downloaded and then promptly forgot about. So I finally listened to it and it’s quite good. One of the points that Wolterstorff makes which, I think, bears repeating, is that “neo-traditionalist” critiques of liberalism (he specifically calls out MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank) often seem to be aiming at a certain theory of liberalism (e.g. Rawls’) and not life as it is actually lived in liberal democratic socieities. Wolterstorff argues that they consequently miss the mark a lot of the time and that a justification for liberal democracy can be given that isn’t committed to a theory like Rawls’.

It’s a bit long, but also free.

Bernard and the Reformers

Interesting post (via Brandon) on Bernard of Clairvaux’s influence on Luther. See also this post on Bernard and Calvin at the same site.

A critical but substantive faith

William Placher reviews Hitchens’ God Is Not Great at the Christian Century. He’s surprisingly appreciative, though he doesn’t shy from criticism (”The second frustration of reading this book [in addition to the factual errors], at least for a theologian, is that its author seems not to have read any modern theology, or even to know that it exists.”)

Placher ends with a call for religious “moderates” (for lack of a better term) to make their presence felt:

Many Americans today are scared of religion. Radical Islamic terrorists threaten the safety of major cities. George W. Bush assures us that God has led him to his Iraq policy. The local schools, under pressure, avoid teaching evolution. The Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles is selling off property to pay victims of priestly sexual abuse. One trembles to think that many people get their picture of faith from the “Christian channels” on television. No wonder religion has, in many quarters, a bad reputation.

I think many of us—I do not mean just trained theologians, but ordinary folks in churches, mosques and synagogues as well—have found ways to be religious without being either stupid or homicidal. We are, as the cover of the Christian Century puts it, “thinking critically, living faithfully.” Not enough of our nonreligious neighbors know enough about what we believe. We need to speak up.

Repeatedly Hitchens cites some horrible thing that some religious folks did or said and then notes that mainstream religious leaders did not criticize it. Although I do not always trust his claims, I suspect that in this case he is at least partly right. Too many of us have been too reluctant to denounce religious lunatics, and because of our reluctance we risk arousing the suspicion that we are partly on their side.

Hitchens ends his book with an appeal to his readers to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars, . . . to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.” Shouldn’t one of the lessons of this book have been that comfortable intellectuals should be more careful of using words like fight? Fundamentalists of one sort or another, after all, urge their followers to fight the evils of secularism and atheism. As the battle lines are drawn between the two extremes, it seems to me that folks like those who read the Christian Century need to put aside our obsessively good manners and shout, “Hey! Those aren’t the only alternatives! We’re here too!”

I think that mainliners often have an easier time articulating what they don’t believe (we’re not like those fundamentalists!) than what they do. We’re supposed to be “living the questions” as they say. But if Placher is right - and I think he is - this isn’t enough. There needs to be an attractive alternative to the extremes of fundamentalism and strident atheism that is committed to the classic center of Christian faith. Without that the church becomes little more than a weird kind of social club (the Kiwanis with crosses as I believe Chris put it recently), or a cut-rate social service organization.

The strangeness of the Bible

I really liked this review article in Books & Culture of a new book about the Bible and sex. So often we treat the Bible as little more than window-dressing for our preconceived moral or political agendas that we often lose sight at the sheer weirdness of the text. The Bible rarely provides ready-made moral exemplars and tidy solutions. And maybe that’s the way it should be. After all: the Bible’s not about us, at least not directly. It’s about God. So it’s not surprising that we should find some of it rather bewildering. (And this isn’t confined to the Old Testament either as far as I’m concerned; there are plenty of parts of the Gospels that just leave me baffled.)

September reading notes

Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying.

Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said.

Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant insights, I don’t think his Girardian analysis does justice to the entirety of the biblical witness. I also feel like he has an allergy to metaphysics and is forced to account for everything Christ does for us in sheerly psychological terms, which seems reductionistic to me.

Picked up a copy of Gerhard Forde’s Justification by Faith - A Matter of Death and Life for a quarter at a church yard sale. This is vintage Forde - pithy, direct and committed above all to the Reformation insight of justification by faith. Forde stresses the language of death and resurrection as a necessary complement to the more forensic “legal” language we often use to talk about justification. I also read Carl Braaten’s Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls wherein Braaten makes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) robust defense of justification by faith alone. I say surprisingly because of what appeared to me to be his move to a more “catholic” position in recent years. Taken together these two books provide a good picture of what commitment to the principles of the Reformation can look like in the contemporary theological and ecumenical scene.

Right now I’m working on Reza Aslan’s No god but God, which is both a history of Islam and an argument for a more pluralistic understanding of Islam. Extremely informative and well-written, though at times one does get the feeling that Aslan is whitewashing a bit. He essentially shrugs off Muhammad’s military conquests with “that’s the way things were done then” and gives a rather idyllic picture of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islamic rule. Still, a very interesting book and I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with his argument for why Islamic militants have Islam wrong.

Simple music, simple faith?

I came across this in yesterday’s NY Times: Does Simple Music Form Simple Faith?

I’m not really sure what to make of it, but I thought I’d pass it along. Essentially, the author asks if beautiful complex music (and other art) can actually be a hindrance to faith:

The church has reason to fear great beauty, hence the effort to rescue our attention, through plainspoken and deliberately flat-footed modern texts, from the mesmerizing graces of the Latin Mass or the splendid poetry of the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer. I am one small example, having spent the Sunday mornings of my youth in the Episcopal Church allowing Thomas Cranmer’s magical imagery and liquid liturgical responses to roll off my tongue without a thought to God at all.

It’s not always easy to distinguish the aesthetic and religious impulses, and I’ve met a fair number of Christians who identify refined spirituality with good taste. So, I wonder if he’s not on to something here.