Life

Sorry for the relative lack of substantive posting lately. We’re moving in just over a week (we just bought a house–our first) and our daughter just turned one, so things have been busy, as you might imagine. I spent part of today packing and part of it enjoying the absolutely perfect spring weather with my family at one of the nearby parks.

If nothing else, having a child forces you to live in your head less, which is probably good for overall well-being, but maybe not so conducive to blogging.

Friday links

–On Christianity, the Holocaust, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

–Recent posts on what’s apparently now being referred to as the “new universalism” from James K.A. Smith, Halden Doerge, and David Congdon.

–Does having a monarchy lead to greater equality?

–Redeeming the “L word.”

–Appreciating both N.T. Wright’s and Marcus Borg’s views of the Resurrection.

–Why liberals should embrace classical (small-r) republicanism.

–Love and service are more fundamental than “rigorous theology.”

–Was the Civil War a “tragedy“? (More here and here.)

–Hiding the truth about factory farms.

–Kate Middleton for the win.

ADDED LATER: What’s going on with the Canadian election?

Friday Metal: While Heaven Wept, “Vessel”

The binding of Isaac and the binding of God

I’m reading a wonderful book by Duke Divinity School professor Ellen F. Davis called Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. It’s a series of loosely connected essays and meditations on various OT books and stories, what she calls an “unsystematic introduction.” Davis’s purpose, she says, is to provide an alternative to the way Christians usually approach the OT. Conservative Christians may read it primarily as a moral rulebook or a set of prophecies of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, while liberal Christians, if they read it at all, tend to view the OT as morally and spiritually primitive, fully superseded by the New Testament. In contrast to either of these approaches, Davis commends a “spiritually engaged” reading of the OT, focusing on “what the Old Testament tells us about intimate life with God” (p. 2).

As her title suggests, a common theme running throughout the book is that the God of the Bible is unique among ancient deities in that he is deeply concerned and involved with the plight of humanity. “God’s life is bound up inextricably with ours” (p. 1). As she says a little later, “the fundamental article of biblical religion [is] that God’s life, God’s glory, even God’s well-being, are indissolubly linked with our lives. For Christians, the sublime expression of that indissoluble linkage between God’s glory and frail human life is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ” (p. 19). God actually takes a risk in entering into a covenant with creation–the success of this covenant depends in part upon the free response of human beings.

Which brings us to the story of the Binding of Isaac, which Davis rightly calls one of the most terrifying stories in the Bible. She notes that modern “enlightened” Christians are deeply uncomfortable with this story, and she identifies two strategies they use to get around it. One is to simply reject it as an expression of an archaic, sub-Christian conception of God. (Davis says she heard one preacher emphatically declare that “I do not worship the God of Abraham”!) The second strategy is to see the story of the aborted sacrifice of Isaac as a symbolic representation of ancient Israel’s leap beyond the widespread practice of infant sacrifice and its transition to “ethical religion.”

But, Davis says, neither of these approaches take the Bible and this story with full seriousness. She proposes a closer reading to see what’s really going on here. What this story is about, she argues, is God and God’s plan for blessing to creation. “Genesis is primarily a book about God, and secondarily about human beings encountering God” (p. 58). Davis notes that previously in Genesis we’ve seen God’s plans for humanity go awry time and again: first in the garden of Eden, then in humanity’s descent into violence culminating in the flood, and finally in the Tower of Babel incident. God’s new strategy in the remainder of Genesis (and the whole Bible for that matter) is to bless all of humanity by creating a covenant with a particular people. “At this point, God gives up on trying to work a blessing directly upon all humankind. From now on, God will work through one man, one family, one people, in order to reach all people” (60).

For this to work, however, God has to find out what kind of man he’s dealing with in Abraham. That’s the purpose of God’s test in asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. After seeing that Abraham is willing to go through with it, “God knows something now that God did not know before. Genesis offers little support for a doctrine of divine omniscience, if by that we mean that God knows everything we are going to do before we do it” (p. 58).

God’s new strategy is hardly surefire. We should not be surprised if adopting it makes God anxious, for now everything depends on the faithfulness of this one man Abraham. God, having been badly and repeatedly burned by human sin throughout the first chapters of Genesis yet still passionately desirous of working blessing in the world, now chooses to become totally vulnerable on the point of this one man’s faithfulness. It is, to say the least, a counter-intuitive solution to a problem. (p. 60)

One reason this story appears so early in the Bible, Davis thinks, is that it teaches us something fundamental about Israel’s “complex witness” to God.

The Binding of Isaac shows us a God who is vulnerable, terribly and terrifyingly so, in the context of covenant relationship. We are more comfortable using the “omni” words–omnipotent, omniscient–to describe God. Yet if we properly understand the dynamics of covenant relationship, then we are confronted with a God who is vulnerable. For, as both Testaments maintain, the covenant with God is fundamentally an unbreakable bond of love (hesed). And ordinary experience teaches that love and vulnerability are inextricably linked; we are most vulnerable to emotional pain when the well-being and the faithfulness of those we love are at stake. And as we have seen, the Bible shows that the faithfulness of even the best of God’s covenant partners is always up for grabs. So it follows that God’s vulnerability in love is an essential element of covenant relationship. (p. 62)

This is one reason that the Binding of Isaac resonates so strongly with the story of Jesus’ Passion (which brings us to today):

It is in Christ hanging on the cross that we see, for once in history, the two sides of this story fully joined in one person. In Jesus Christ we see a son of Abraham sparing nothing, totally faithful in covenant relationship with God. At the same time, we see in Jesus God’s total faithfulness, expressed now as excruciating vulnerability, even to death on a cross. These two images–Abraham binding Isaac, Christ nailed on a cross–are the supporting structures for the long convoluted story of sin and salvation. When reason fails, as it does at least one Friday each year, then we must listen to the stories with our hearts. (pp. 63-4)

What’s a Christian to do with capitalism?

This post from Ned Resnikoff highlights some interesting data about Americans’ views on the compatibility of capitalism and “Christian values.” As he notes, the number of people who see them as incompatible goes up when the sample is restricted to self-identified Christians.

I don’t think Christianity is necessarily anti-capitalist per se. Presumably a Christian should support whatever economic system best promotes human well-being. There’s a case to be made that some form of capitalism is the best candidate for this, at least given the available options.

But there are also some deep-seated Christian principles that tell against a full-throated embrace of capitalism. I’d put them under two broad headings:

(1) Christianity is against excessive wealth accumulation.
(2) Christianity is against the market as the ultimate arbiter of value.

The first point seems nearly incontrovertible to me based on a close reading of the gospels and a general familiarity with the history of Christian thought on these matters. Certainly the accumulation of wealth has rarely been upheld as a virute for Christians. I think this has partly to do with the idea that Christians should depend on God rather than wealth (you can’t serve two masters) and partly with our obligation to share from our excess with those in need. It’s certainly hard to argue that the disparities in wealth and the excess exhibited at the top of the income scale in contemporary America reflect sound Christian values.

What I mean by the second point is that Christianity sees all human beings (and indeed all living creatures, I’d argue) as having a certain intrinsic value, which is derived from their creation by God. A consequence of this is that all people are entitled, simply by virtue of exisiting, to the prerequisites of a meaningful life, such as adequate food, shelter, health care, education, etc. A thoroughgoing “market society” in which goods were distributed strictly according to the ability to pay would be flatly inconsistent with this Christian principle.

If this is right, the practical upshot is that Christians should support an economic system that limits great disparities in wealth and ensures that people’s basic value is respected independent of their “market value.” In my view, the evidence suggest that some kind of regulated capitalism with a generous social safety net and provision of high-quality public services is the best currently available system for doing this. There are multiple models here–North American, European, Asian–but all of them depart in significant ways from the laissez-faire ideal beloved of American right-wingers. (It’s worth noting that conservative Christian support for laissez-faire capitalism in the U.S. is both a historical and geographic anomaly.)

It’s possible that some as-yet-untried alternative to regulated capitalism would perform better according to these principles. And the search for such an alternative may become more pressing as we continue run up against limits to nonrenewable resources and the environmental consequences of ever-increasing material consumption. These circumstances are likely going to require us to come up with new economic arrangements that might look very different from capitalism as we know it. But if we are entering into an era that requires us to radically alter our patterns of production and consumption, it’s even more important that Christians (and other people of good will) work to ensure that any new economic arrangements respect every person’s God-given value and dignity.

UPDATE January 15, 2012: If I were writing this post now, I think I would change the first principle I cite to something like “Christianity regards all property and wealth as held in trust.” I think this gets more to the heart of the matter. Everything that is ultimately belongs to God and we only hold it in trust, as stewards. For Christianity there is no such thing as truly “private” property, and our possession of anything is inherently qualified to some extent by the claims of the well-being of others.

Similarly, while I would still affirm the second principle, it might be better stated positively, e.g. “Christianity regards all people as having intrinsic value as creatures of God.” This clearly implies that the market is not the ultimate arbiter of value, but better expresses why that is.

Mission creep watch

This is shaping up to be quite the splendid little war:

European nations stepped up efforts Wednesday to aid Libyan rebels, with France pledging to intensify airstrikes against the forces of Moammar Gaddafi, and Italy joining the French and British in announcing plans to help train and organize the rebel fighters.

[...]

The Obama administration has said it will not send ground forces into Libya, and senior U.S. military officials said they have received no instructions to plan such an effort. But the administration has not ruled out what State Department spokesman Mark Toner described Tuesday as stepped-up “non-lethal assistance.” Toner also said that the possibility of arming the rebels has “not been taken off the table.”

Remember when this was nothing more than a no-fly zone established to prevent a massacre of civilians?

A budget plan that really is brave

Thought it didn’t receive much coverage, the Congressional Progressive Caucus released its own budget plan last week. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the plan would reduce the debt and actually result in a budget surplus in ten years. It would pull this off by, among other things, raising taxes on the rich, lifting the Social Security cap, creating a public health insurance option, allowing the government to negotiate prices for the drugs it pays for through the Medicare drug program (Part D), and significantly reducing “defense” spending by scaling back our military commitments, including our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, say what you will about this plan, unlike House budget chairman Paul Ryan’s plan, it actually is brave in the sense that it stands up for less powerful members of society and stands up to some of the most powerful ones. Which of course means it has no chance of being enacted. At the very least, though, wouldn’t a serious debate about the budget include something like this as one of the options to be considered?

ADDED LATER: Economist and author of The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs argues, in an article clearly laying out what’s at stake in the budget debate, that the Congressional Caucus proposal is more realistic than either the Ryan or the Obama plan.

Friday Links

–What Makes Life Good? An excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s new book.

–Johann Hari makes the case against the British monarchy.

–How progressive are taxes in the U.S.?

–Ten teachings on Judaism and the environment.

–Marilyn of Left At the Altar reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals.

–A very interesting New Yorker article on the love-hate relationship between fantasy author George R.R. Martin and some of his fans.

–The fantasy of survivalism.

–Intellectual disability and theological anthropology.

–Do we need “Passion/Palm Sunday?” Seems like this comes up every year, and I’m not sure there’s a good solution.

–Mark Bittman on the cost of “lifestyle” diseases.

ADDED LATER: On Dutch efforts to ban traditional Jewish and Islamic practices of animal slaughter.

ADDED EVEN LATER: The spiritual benefits of headbanging, riffing (pun intended) on this Atlantic piece: How Heavy Metal Is Keeping Us Sane. (Thanks, bls!)

ONE MORE: It sounds like the movie version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is every bit as bad as you’d expect.

Friday Metal: The Absence, “Enemy Unbound”

Making the world safe for CAFOs

The NewYork Times gives some coverage today of the ongoing efforts in Iowa, Florida, and now Minnesota to make it impossible for activists to reveal animal abuse in factory farms to the public. I continue to be kind of shocked by how brazen the industry’s attempts to shield itself from public scrutiny are. And that legislators are all too happy to go along with it. This about sums it up:

The legislation has been strongly backed by Republicans but has also won some Democrats. John P. Kibbie, Democrat of Emmetsburg [Iowa] and president of the State Senate, who has been working on an amended bill expected to be released this week, said he supported the legislation to “make producers feel more comfortable.”

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want them to feel uncomfortable.