Universalism and the gospel

“Although an earthly mother may possibly allow her child to perish, our heavenly Mother Jesus can never allow us who are his children to perish.” –Julian of Norwich

I don’t know much about Rob Bell. It seems he’s kind of a big deal in the emerging/emergent church movement (or “conversation” as some folks prefer to refer to it). Bell has kicked up a bit of dust with his forthcoming book Love Wins, which reputedly defends a form of universal salvation. This has already led to Bell being denounced by, among others, ultra-Calvinist preacher John Piper. Bell has been accused of teaching “false doctrine” and preaching “a different gospel.” He’s been the object of much anathematizing on Twitter, along with the usual Christian passive-aggressive behavior (“I’m praying for Rob Bell”). All this over a month before the book is even published!

Now I obviously can’t comment on Bell’s specific arguments, but there’s a reason that universalism is a persistent minority report throughout Christian history. It’s because that’s the direction the logic of the gospel seems to point. After all, the distinctive message of Christianity is that God is a God of boundless grace who loved us “while we were yet sinners” and descended to the darkest depths of the human condition to unite us to Godself. God is portrayed as a loving father who rushes out to embrace his prodigal children before they have even made their repentance. This is, to put it mildly, hard to reconcile with the view that God will sentence some (in some theologies most) human beings to everlasting punishment and suffering. It requires a certain cognitive dissonance to believe both that God loves me without any merit on my part and that God may well condemn me to unending torment.

Christian theology has generally tried to hold onto both horns of this dilemma in one of two ways: either it makes God’s love conditional upon something we do, even if that something is “believing in Jesus”; or, it makes God’s love capricious, with one’s salvation or damnation entirely a matter of the inscrutable divine will (as in the odious doctrine of double predestination). The first approach always teeters on being a form of works-righteousness, while the second has a hard time maintaining that God genuinely loves us. In both cases, the lesson is that we can’t depend solely on God’s grace for our salvation.

Not everyone will be convinced by this argument (I’m not even sure I am).* But, at the very least, if hell is central to the “good news” you’re preaching, you’re probably doing it wrong.
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*It should be noted that universalism doesn’t necessarily rule out some form of penultimate judgment or punishment.

What’s a radical?

Since I’m reading his book, I’ve been reading up a little on Howard Zinn (who died last year). This is from Bob Herbert’s column right after Zinn’s death:

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?

Incidentally, Herbert himself has become one of the few national columnists I make a point of reading. Today’s column on the ongoing economic hardships facing working people in the U.S. is a good one. It’s had to think of another major columnist who focuses consistently on people at or near the bottom of the economic ladder.

History with a preferential option for the poor

I probably should’ve read this years ago, maybe as an angry 19-year-old (though, come to think of it, I wasn’t really that angry when I was 19), but I recently started Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. So far I’m pretty impressed: I was expecting a political harangue, but what Zinn’s doing is subtler than that. He’s trying to tell the story of America from the perspective of those who were often on the losing end of things: the Indians, African slaves, white indentured servants, the working poor, etc. Zinn freely admits that his history is selective, but as he points out, all history is selective, whether it’s told from the point of view of the elite or the masses. In the standard narrative of American history, the costs inflicted on the marginalized and dispossessed are, at best, treated as anomalies or simply part of the price we pay for the long, glorious march of progress. The way the traditional story is told tends to mask deep conflicts of interests, virtually identifying the history of the nation with the “winners” (i.e., the political and economic elite). Zinn argues that it’s worth looking more closely at the other side of the story and considering whether what we assume to be “progress” really is. Given how much influence traditional assumptions about American history continue to wield in contemporary politics, Zinn’s work strikes me as a still-needed corrective.

(I realize this will all sound painfully obvious to many.)

Friday Links

–Why unions are essential for the future of liberalism.

–Maryland is very close to legalizing same-sex marriage.

–Indiana is very close to passing a draconian, Arizona-style immigration law.

–International aid groups appeal to Congress to restore funding for humanitarian aid.

–A slideshow and discussion on the question “Is meat green?”

–How much would a government shutdown cost?

–Why tech writers should stay away from politics.

–An interview with Tom De Haven, author of the novel It’s Superman! and, more recently, Our Hero: Superman on Earth.

–A review of two books on American Tories/loyalists at the time of the Revolution.

–Why the Obama administration changed its mind about the Defense of Marriage Act.

–Twenty questions for Over the Rhine.

Friday Metal: Soilwork, “Let This River Flow”

From their most recent album The Panic Broadcast. This is pretty close to being a ballad by metal standards.

Vegetarians, vegans, and the varieties of reform

Via Critical Animal, here’s an article looking at whether animal welfare reforms (e.g., banning battery cages or veal crates) reduce meat consumption. Some animal-rights activists, notably those associated with or sympathetic to Gary Francione’s “abolitionist” approach, have argued that such reforms only encourage people to eat more meat, because they make people feel better about consuming animal products. But according to this article, the data point in the other direction.

As scu notes, however, this doesn’t refute all of the abolitionist’s arguments. One that they make is that people who reduce or give up eating meat will compensate by eating more dairy or eggs, resulting in little or no net reduction in animal suffering. In the abolitionist view, mere vegetarianism is not even a step in the right direction, much less an acceptable alternative to full-blown veganism.

I obviously have no data to back this up, but the argument that people who give up meat for ethical reasons will compensate by substituting eggs and dairy strikes me as implausible on its face. As an ovo-lacto vegetarian myself, I have some experience to draw on here, and I can confidently say that, far from increasing my intake of eggs and dairy, I’ve significantly reduced it–to the point where probably about two-thirds of my meals are vegan. And this makes sense when you think about it: dairy and eggs are not, in general, substitutes for meat. It’s not like instead of eating a steak you’re going to eat a big slab of cheese or even an omelet in most cases. When I gave up meat, the alternatives I generally substituted were veggies, legumes, nuts, and in some cases prepared meat substitutes like veggie burgers.

This doesn’t show, of course, that the abolitionists are wrong in upholding veganism as the non-negotiable moral baseline (they may or may not be) or that their approach is less effective than an incrementalist reform approach. But I’d like to see more evidence for the specific claim that giving up meat increases consumption of other animal products.

The heart and soul of liberalism

I highly recommend this Kevin Drum article from the latest issue of Mother Jones on the decline of unions and what it means for the prospects of liberalism in the U.S. Drum points out that organized labor’s waning influence coincided with skyrocketing economic inequality and contends that this has important lessons for liberalism’s long-term efforts to create a more equitable society. (The article is accompanied by some jaw-dropping charts showing just how unequal we’ve become as a society.)

He goes on to argue that a big part of the reason for this widening income-and-wealth gap is the diminishing influence of unions. Throughout most of the 20th century, unions were the main institutional force agitating for policies that broadly benefit the working- and middle-classes, but as they lost their clout, the Democratic Party turned to the only other available source for funding and political support: big business. The result, since about the 1970s, has been two political parties catering to the interests of corporate America with little or no countervailing influence on behalf of working people. Without some such organized force, the prospects for economic egalitarianism–which Drum calls “the heart and soul of liberalism”–are dim.

I’m not sure there’s a lot here that hasn’t been said elsewhere–for instance, in Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal. But Drum’s article provides a clear and compelling overview of one of the most important issues facing liberalism–and the U.S.–in the 21st century.

Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to justice

I mentioned a while back that I was reading Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice. To re-cap briefly: Nussbaum criticizes social contract theories of justice for their inability to deal with three cases: duties to the disabled, to foreigners, and to nonhuman animals.

As a supplement (or replacement–it’s not entirely clear to me), she recommends her “capabilities approach.” Instead of arriving at principles of justice by way of a hypothetical contract entered into for mutual advantage, the capabilities approach identifies certain key capabilities that are essential for each member of a minimally just society to have. These relate to functions that, according to this view, are essential for any flourishing life.

The capabilities Nussbaum lists are:

1. Life
2. Bodily health
3. Bodily integrity
4. Senses, imagination, and thought
5. Emotions
6. Practical reason
7. Affiliation
8. Relationship with other species
9. Play
10. Control over one’s environment (both political and material)

These capabilities don’t define the good life in a comprehensive way; rather, they’re supposed to be necessary conditions for a variety of lifestyles. Nussbaum’s view is a “liberal” one in the same way that Rawls’s is: the account of justice is “political not metaphysical.” That is, adherents of a variety of conceptions of the good life could, in theory, agree to this list of capabilities as a minimum set of entitlements that a just society should guarantee to each of its members. (Following Rawls, she refers to this as an “overlapping consensus.”)

Nussbaum’s view is also liberal in a second sense. It leaves the decision of whether or not to exercise these capabilities up to the individual. For example, it’s not up to the state in a just society to ensure that people are living healthy lives, but it does have a responsibility for ensuring their access to the capability for living healthy lives (by, for example, establishing a system of public health care that guarantees universal coverage).

In Nussbaum’s account, this list of capabilities is an elaboration of a certain intuitive idea of human dignity and what is required to flourish as a human being. These evaluative underpinnings determine what capabilities are proper for justice to secure. There are capabilities that humans have–for cruelty or sadism, for instance–that are not necessary for a flourishing life.

This is a point where I’m unsure how Nussbaum’s theory works. If the capabilities depend on a prior idea of “human flourishing”–one that excludes some capabilities and not others–where does the idea of flourishing itself come from? Nussbaum is clear that flourishing can’t simply be read off from nature, as it were. Humans have many capabilities that they shouldn’t necessarily exercise. But Nussbaum doesn’t provide–at least in this work–a worked-out account of just what flourishing consists in and how we determine that.

I think what Nussbaum would say is that all she needs for her approach to work as an account of political justice is for the capabilities to be derivable from or consistent with various accounts of flourishing that are entailed by different views of the good life found in a pluralistic society. For instance, a Christian and a secularist may disagree profoundly about the nature of the good for human beings, but still be able to agree on Nussbaum’s capabilities list as necessary for the realization of both of their visions.

As she writes:

Insofar as a highly general idea of human flourishing and its possibilities does figure in the approach, it is not a single idea of flourishing, as in Aristotle’s on normative theory, but rather an idea of a space for diverse possibilities of flourishing. The claim that is made by the use of this single list, then, is not that there is a single type of flourishing for the human being, but, rather, that these capabilities can be agreed by reasonable citizens to be important prerequisites of reasonable conceptions of human flourishing, in connection with the political conception of the person as a political animal, both needy and dignified; and thus these are good bases for an idea of basic political entitlements in a just society. (p. 182)

This is appealing, but “reasonable” seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this paragraph. How do we determine which conceptions of human flourishing are reasonable? Are they just whatever ones support the capabilities on Nussbuam’s list? But that seems to be arguing in a circle. Otherwise, we need some substantive notion of “reasonableness” that rules out some conceptions of flourishing as beyond the pale. This would seem to amount to a kind of “meta-account” of human flourishing that includes a variety of more specific conceptions within it. But how can we determine what that is?

I confess I don’t have a clear or fully informed understanding of the theory. So take this for what it’s worth as a kind of first impression.

Can we ever get away from the sprawl?

This is from a recent Arcade Fire performance on SNL. It’s “Sprawl II,” one of my favorite songs from their album The Suburbs (which just won the Grammy for best album). I know it’s trendy to like these guys, but what can I say? It’s a good album.

(Also–how many freakin’ members does this band have??)

Solidarity, not resentment

This article from Alternet on 12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin is chock-full of good information, but I’d like to focus in is this bit at the end, which gets at a key issue:

The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: “How come that guy’s getting what I don’t have?” It’s the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: “What’s keeping me from getting what that guy has?” At least part of the answer is the Right’s decades-long assault on private sector workers’ ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin.

I think that’s an important point. Some people seem to find the idea of teachers and other public workers having decent, middle-class salaries and good benefits a kind of affront. But that’s what we should want for everybody! The fact that such a small percentage of Americans now belong to unions is one reason for this attitude. Instead of unions being seen as “us” they’re perceived as just another special interest. No doubt the unions themselves are partly to blame for this, but more influential, I’d argue, is the notion that we should all just throw ourselves at the mercy of the free market and trust that individual pluck and talent will lead to economic success, despite all evidence to the contrary. This is the conservative-Reaganite gospel in a nutshell that’s been used as a justification for weakening unions, cutting taxes and regulation, and blowing holes in the social safety net for over 30 years. (Not coincidentally, pitting segments of the working- and middle-classes against one another ultimately redounds to the benefit of the wealthy.)

Another example of this phenomenon is highlighted here by the Slacktivist (via Jeremy). Apparently the budget priorities favored by evangelical Christians in America are cutting spending on foreign aid, unemployment benefits, and environmental protection. Again, the underlying idea seems to be that some “others” are getting some good stuff they don’t deserve and the only way we preserver our own well-being is by taking away it from them. Never mind that none of these three areas are major drivers of the U.S. budget. Foreign aid in particular is laughably small, especially if we’re talking about genuine humanitarian aid, as opposed to the military aid we give to countries like Egypt, Israel, and Colombia.

All of this highlights why the value of solidarity is so important for the Left (and, I’d add, Christian social thought). It explicitly denies that it’s each man for himself. On the contrary, solidarity means we’re all in this together. If it stands for nothing else, the Left stands for the belief that social improvement through collective action is possible and that our interests are inextricably bound together. If instead people see themselves as isolated atoms and society as a zero-sum game, progress becomes virtually impossible.

ADDED 2/22: Michael Lind makes the point well in today’s column:

In the divide-and-rule politics of the American right, public employees have for the moment replaced “welfare queens” and illegal immigrants as symbols of parasites who exploit working-class taxpayers. Never mind that the deregulation of finance and global trade imbalances caused the economic crisis and the subsequent cratering of revenues for state governments, not public sector unions. Never mind that it is illogical to assert that fairness requires not the upgrading of private sector worker rights and benefits until they are as decent as those of public sector employees, but the reduction of everyone’s rights and benefits to a miserable lowest common denominator. Resentment has its own logic, captured by a medieval Viking proverb: “One oak gains what is peeled from another.” In times of crisis, populations often prefer scapegoats to explanations, and the right is ready to provide a scapegoat in the form of public sector unions.