Creation Sunday

The ELCA and other churches have adopted the tradition of observing the Sunday closest to Earth Day as “Creation Sunday” (or Care of Creation Sunday).

To some this no doubt seems like another in a long line of mainline capitulations to political correctness. The reality, though, is that care for God’s creation should be a central component of Christian faith.

You can read the ELCA’s social statement on the environment, which is actually pretty good as this kind of document goes, here.

After setting forth the theological vision of creation, sin, and redemption, the statement asks church members to commit themselves to a series of principles:

- participation: recognizing the right of all people and all creatures to have their interests taken into consideration;

- solidarity: acknowledging our interdependence with all other people and the rest of creation;

- sufficiency: giving priority to meeting the basic needs of all human beings and other creatures;

- sustainability: providing an adequate standard of living for present generations without compromising the well-being of future ones.

The statement further asks Lutherans to commit to upholding these principles as individuals and congregations, in personal lifestyle changes and in advocacy in the private and public spheres.

The anthropocentric orientation of much traditional theology and religious practice needs to be replaced by a properly theocentric orientation that roots the human community firmly in the soil of the created world. And the gospel, far from being a privatized message of individual deliverance from the world, is a message of freedom from anxious self-seeking that turns us back toward the needs of the world around us.

Friday Metal: Day after Earth Day edition

Gojira, “Embrace the World”

I sit on a rock
Cannot be touched by struggle & confusion
I reclaim my space inside my structure
Look at this point
All is about nothing, everything comes near
The remotest parts of the world

By silence
We can dissolve disruptive vibrations
I have to try
Gaia’s alive for good
Under my feet the forest
Over me the largest
It’s roundness I feel
Lifelong misery
How do we get to Avalon?
There is a bridge beyond
Indestructible the earth is a temple

I cannot see what is wrong and
All gods are one

I close my eyes
I’m all around, I feel so present
Embracing it’s vastness I hold
Facing the world
I become a part of it
I’m not alone anymore

I embrace the world

McLaren and the mainline

A while ago I posted about the controversy over Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. I noted that it seemed McLaren and his critics were recapitulating a battle waged over a century ago between Christian modernists and fundamentalists.

This review of McLaren’s book in the Christian Century seems to confirm that hunch:

The central thesis, to which McLaren returns frequently to indicate its wide implications, is that Christian faith was terminally skewed when it was distilled through the Greco-Roman (imperial) worldview. This worldview resulted in a version of Christianity that was at once triumphalistic and reductive—a Christianity that was mainly about what happens after death. McLaren argues that the central message of Jesus, the kingdom of God and the life it entails, was lost or overlooked. There is important truth in this argument, perhaps especially for the world of American evangelicals, among whom it does sometimes seem that a version of Paul has eclipsed Jesus. I am less sure that it is helpful for the Protestant mainline and liberal Christianity.

I can imagine that some of the young evangelical students I have taught as an adjunct professor at Seattle Pacific University (a Free Methodist school) would experience McLaren as enormously helpful and freeing. He would enable many to disentangle their faith from a limited Republican political agenda and rethink theology and scripture in ways that might feel like water for a parched soul. McLaren offers some fine biblical interpretation in relation to his ten questions.

But when the audience is, as I suspect it often will be, mainline or self-described progressive Christians, I’m less sure that McLaren’s message is the thing that’s needed. The tendency in mainline or progressive circles has long been to say that the problem is outdated, outmoded Christianity. The project has been to redo theology, revise language and creed, update imagery and practice, all with the idea that if we can just make Christianity fit into our present world, all will be well. In a fair number of churches this revisionist project has gone on for so long that there simply isn’t much left to revise—or to sustain the dwindling numbers of the faithful. Where this updating project has so long prevailed, a slightly altered version of Shakespeare’s line from Julius Caesar may be apt: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our paradigms, it is in ourselves, that we are sinners.

To be sure, there is always a need to engage and question received faith and tradition, to sort out the precious from the expendable, but as McLaren develops his quest for a new kind of Christianity, I worry that it is too much about our quest and not enough about God’s.

This seems right to me, and the author of the review, Anthony Robinson, adds some further words of wisdom:

The result may be yet another movement that promises that if only we jettison old ways of thinking and believing, which are the source of all our problems, we shall enter into a new time of liberation and meaning. I tend to think that the challenge is not so much to distance ourselves from the past as it is to discover what in our past and inheritance remains of enduring value and has the capacity to transform and renew the church for the world in our time. Yes, we do desperately need to find new ways of being and doing church, ways that are less about church as an institution existing for its own sake and more about church as community, relationship, spiritual practice and service. This may entail less emphasis on our quest and more on God’s quest for us.

I’ve noticed more churches making a point of welcoming people “wherever they are in their faith journey.” While this spirit of hosptiality is a good one, I worry that what such churches may be inviting people to is nothing more than an open-ended process of exploration. Surely Christian communities ought to have a more concrete and specific identity than that.

Property and justice

My earlier post wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive critique of libertarianism, but one interesting issue that came up in the comment thread was the justice of initial property acquisition.

Libertarianism, at least in its natural-rights form, says that holdings in property are just if they are the result of just initial acquisition and voluntary exchange. So, if someone justly acquires some property, and that property is transferred by means of voluntarily entered-into contracts, then the resulting pattern of distribution is just.

One problem that vexes this account is how property can be justly acquired in the first place. The main tradition, going back at least to John Locke, is that one acquires a right to some piece of property when one removes some resource (e.g., a portion of land) from the “state of nature.” One does this by “mixing” one’s labor with it. Determining what adequately counts as “mixing” in this scenario is notoriously difficult, and, it should be noted, Locke held that such initial acquisition is only just if one leaves “as much and as good” for others (the so-called Lockean proviso).

But beyond this question, we might also ask whether it’s correct to say that natural resources start out unowned in the first place. Why suppose that the earth belongs to no one and that, therefore, anyone may remove resources from the common pool and take them as their own private property? Does everything start out unowned, without anyone else having claims upon it? At the very least, this assumption requires defense, since it’s not obviously true.

An equally plausible assumption might be this: every person (or maybe even every living, or at least sentient, creature) has a prima facie claim on an adequate portion of the earth’s resources to enable it to live a good life according to its capabilities. In other words, the earth is held in common by all living creatures to support their needs.

The plausibility of this assumption can, I think, be buttressed by considering the alternatives: if no one has such a claim, then how can anyone be expected to survive and flourish? Alternatively, if only some have such a claim, then there must be some morally relevant difference between those who have this claim and those who don’t. But what could this be?

The assumption that all sentient creatures have a prima facie claim to some portion of the earth’s goods is, at least, not obviously false, and it strikes me as having equal or greater plausibility as the assumption that material resources start out as unowned and open to unlimited private appropriation.

Even, however, if there is a theoretically possible immaculate conception of private property along the lines proposed by natural-rights libertarians, once we turn to the real world, we’re faced with the fact that very little of the existing pattern of property distribution is traceable to a pure origin. As philosopher Peter Vallentyne, a “left”-libertarian puts it:

According to libertarianism, the justice of the current distribution of legal rights over resources depends on what the past was like. Given that the history of the world is full of systematic violence (genocide, invasion, murder, assault, theft, etc.), we can be sure that the current distribution of legal rights over resources did not come about justly and that adequate reparations have not been made. At the same time, however, we have little knowledge of the specific rights violations that took place in the past (e.g., we have little knowledge of all but the most egregious rights violations that took place more than one hundred years ago). Thus, we have little knowledge of what justice today requires.

To treat the current distribution as a just baseline, then, would require ignoring the very principles of justice that natural-rights libertarians want to uphold in the first place. At the very least, this calls into question the usefulness of this ideology in providing clear-cut answers to problems facing us in the real world. By contrast, the alternative proposed above: that everyone has a prima facie claim on adequate resources, could provide concrete guidance in assessing the justice of currently existing arrangements.

Emancipation Day

D.C. observes April 16th as Emancipation Day. From Wikipedia:

On that day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act for the release of certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia. The Act freed about 3,100 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia nine months before President Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act represents the only example of compensation by the federal government to former owners of emancipated slaves.

Friday Metal: Peter Steele, RIP

I was never a big Type O Negative fan, but was sad to hear about the death of frontman Peter Steele this week. Here’s “Black No. 1″:

Rights, liberties, and taxation

A point that I’ve tried to make before, but which may bear repeating since it’s Tax Day: the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, or liberty, is largely illusory–or at least not that important. Libertarians sometimes use this distinction to differentiate their position from “welfare” liberals. In the libertarian utopia, rights are guarantees against interference (negative) rather than claims on resources (positive). But this distinction starts to break down once you look closely at it.

As John Stuart Mill pointed out long ago, a right is essentially a person’s justified claim on society to protect her in the enjoyment of some good. Mill points out that personal security from physical harm or aggression is one of, if not the most, important of such rights since, without it, we can’t do much else. But note that this right, which some might clasify as “negative,” is, in fact, a claim on some portion of society’s resources. It takes resources (money, time, labor) to protect people’s security. Similar points could be made about access to courts, the protection of personal property, etc. So, a “negative” right is no less a claim on resources than a “positive” right.

So it turns out that the distinction between positive and negative rights is not an especially important one in determining the proper scope of government action. A better criteria might be the importance of the interest protected. Following Mill, we could say that physical safety from harm is one of the most important interests that should be protected by socially provided rights. But equally important–or nearly so–are our interests in having sufficient food, shelter, clothing, health care, educational opportunities, etc. If it’s legitimate to tax people to provide security, protect property rights, and ensure access to courts, why would it be illegitimate to tax for the provision of these other goods?

Friday Metal: Barren Earth, “Curse of the Red River”

“Supergroup” may be stretching it a bit for some, considering the band members are drawn from relatively obscure European death metal bands, but Barren Earth’s full-length debut is very good. Here’s the title track:

Red Toryism revisited

Philosopher and political gadfly John Gray has what seems to be a balanced take on Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism,” which has been making waves in politico-theological circles. Blond is an acolyte of John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy and an advisor to British Tory leader David Cameron who proposes a program of economic “relocalization” combined with political decentralization and social conservatism as an alternative to liberal permissiveness and capitalist excess. This vision harks back to the neo-medievalist “distributism” of Chesterton and Belloc and, to some minds, represents a third way beyond liberalism and conservatism.

While granting that Blond is onto something in fingering capitalism and liberalism as responsible, at least in part, for diminshed social cohesion, Gray is skeptical that a “Red Tory” alternative is either feasible or desirable:

Ours may be a post-secular society (I think so myself) but that is very different from reverting to any version of Christian orthodoxy. Britain today is home to a plurality of religious traditions, ranging from varieties of theism through to the many strands of Hinduism and the godless spirituality of Buddhism. There are also many kinds of agnosticism and scepticism, some indistinguishable from undogmatic versions of faith.

This rich and interesting diversity is one reason why Blond’s project of reinstating a more unitary culture is so deeply problematic. Today there is no possibility of reaching society-wide agreement on ultimate questions. Happily such agreement is not necessary, nor even desirable. No government can roll back modernity, and none should try. We may be in a mess. But the pluralist society that Britain has become is more hospitable to the good life than the imagined order of an earlier age, which in the end is just one more stifling utopia.

If anything, Gray’s strictures apply even moreso to the U.S., which has no tradition of an established church and, if anything, less cultural and religious uniformity than Britain. Moreover, it’s hard to see who on the American Right would be the constituency for this anomolous combination of high-church piety, cultural conservatism, and quasi-left-wing economics.

(I previously wrote about Red Toryism here.)

McLaren’s “heresy”

I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, but the dust-up in some evangelical circles about his new book A New Kind of Christianity is interesting for what it reveals about the presuppositions of at least significant swaths of American evangelicalism. Nothing McLaren says, at least going by the summary offered in the story linked above, will seem shocking to anyone with a passing familiarity with contemporary theology, whether Catholic, Protestant, or whatever. Indeed, a lot of it has gone from being shocking “heresy” to taken-for-granted truism. For instance:

• The Bible is not inerrant and does not offer precise scientific information on the age of the world, the development of life, etc.
• The Bible reflects changing, sometimes inconsistent, views of the nature and character of God.
• Jesus’s ministry was not limited to a determination to die as a sacrifice for sin, but included a positive social vision.
• Non-Christians are not destined for hell.

I think it’s safe to say that these points would be regarded as uncontroversial by nearly all mainstream theology, at least outside the more conservative precincts of evangelicalism. That doesn’t, by itself, prove that they’re correct, of course, but there comes a time to move on from arguments that were largely settled at the dawn of the 20th century. If anything, it seems odd that McLaren is presenting these conclusions as new and daring, since much of it seems to recapitulate 19th- and 20th-century liberal theology. (I say that with the caveat that I haven’t read his book!)

I’ve complained about the fundamentalist hangover before, and it’s depressing how we can continually get sucked back into fundamentalism’s orbit. This is true even in mainline churches, where fundamentalism seems to be the big Other that we’re constantly defining ourselves over against. My personal view is that, rather than continually re-fighting the modernist-fundamentalist debate, we need a theology that moves beyond it, without discarding tradition or the genuine insights of liberal theology.